As part of the Open Data Day 2022 small grants program, the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) supported 14 events. 2 organisations received small grants under the Tracking public money flows category to host open data events and activities: Center for Studies University, Society and Science from Brasil, and Digital Openers AB from Sweden.

Category: Tracking public money flows

Here are some highlights of the Tracking public money flow events supported by Open Data Day 2022.

  1. Center for Studies University, Society and Science/UNIFESP (Brasil)

On 30 August 2022, the Center for Studies University, Society and Science organised the  “Open Data and Public Budget: Tools for Democracy” event. 38 participants joined the in-person event and 250 people followed the broadcast on Youtube. The event was attended by Pedro Arantes, who was pro-rector of planning, Maria Angélica Minhoto, former pro-rector of graduation and Soraya Smile, former dean of UNIDESP, Nelson Amaral, President of FINEDUCA – National Association for Research in Education Financing, and Alexsandro Cardoso Carvalho, Co-manager of UNIDESP’s Office of Strategic Data.  All five presenters of the event are researchers linked to SoU Ciência.

In addition to the discussion on the functioning of the federal budget and the difficulties of analysing these data, the set of Brazilian budget data available in OLAP cubes and allowing consultation by researchers and other interested parties were also presented.

  1. Digital Openers AB (Sweden)

Digital Openers AB organised an event on 30 August 2022 to present methods using Freedom of Information and involve participants in using the data for the upcoming Swedish election. During the event, we presented our method using Freedom of Information to get budget information from municipalities. We then shared the results and talked about how the participants could investigate budgets themselves. The event was held just a few weeks before the upcoming Swedish election, so during the event, we discussed various ideas on how budget data could be an exciting new part of democracy and politics.

The participants were offered refreshments and food after the presentation. We continued to look into and compare budgets during the mingling part of the event. We thought the discussions after the event was super valuable for our continued work with a “transparency chain”, where we could link budget data, spending data, and municipal plans together. There were around 15 participants in person at the event space “Goto10.se”. The presentation was also live-streamed on YouTube, and at least another 5 joined during the event.

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Open Data Day is an annual celebration of open data all over the world, where we gather to reach out to new people and build new solutions to issues in our communities using open data.

For the 2022 edition of Open Data Day, Open Knowledge Foundation supported 14 events with small grants. Please find the details of all grant winners here.