Launching Spending Stories: How much is it really?

Spending Stories is a new way to put spending figures in their proper perspective. Developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation and Journalism++ with funding from the Knight Foundation, Spending Stories is an app that helps citizens and journalists understand and compare amounts in stories from the news. When we hear that the UK’s school meals […]

Data Expedition: Investigate the Extractive Industries of Nigeria

UPDATE: there is now a dedicated page for the Nigeria Extractives Data Expedition here Who operates the often poisonous wells in the Niger Delta? How does the money flow between the contractors running the oil fields and the government? Join us for an online Data Expedition to Investigate the Extractive Industries of Nigeria, December 7, […]

Investigate the Garment Factories: new Data Expedition

In May, the School of Data community got together in a Data Expedition to respond to the Rana Plaza catastrophe. They built a crowdsourced database on garment factories and used it to expose the bad safety standards and non-transparency that contributed to the disaster. Now we are taking the garment factory investigation to the next […]

City Spending Party around the world

Last weekend more than a hundred budget nerds and engaged citizens gathered at 20 spending data parties to open up city spending and budgets. From Lagos to Kathmandu groups dived into budget data across the OpenSpending community as part of this first global City Spending Data Party from July 19 to July 21. The spending parties helped […]

Data Expedition story: Why garment retailers need to do more in Bangladesh

This post is cross-posted from the School of Data blog On May 25-26 almost 50 participants from several teams set out on a data expedition to map the garment factories. This is a report from the team comprised of Roy Keyes, Naomi Colvin, Sybern, Bhanupriya Rao and Daniela Mattern. The team used a crowdsourced database […]

Data Expedition: Mapping the garment factories

The horrific factory collapse at Rana Plaza in Dhaka has brought the business practices of global garment brands, as well their thousands of suppliers, into the spotlight. At School of Data we noted that corrupt and missing data were part of the story. Data on building permits in Bangladesh is largely unavailable due to lack of state […]

Data Party: Tracking Europe’s Failed Banks

This blog is cross-posted from the OKFN’s Open Economics blog. This fall marked the five year anniversary of the collapse of UK-based Northern Rock in 2007. Since then an unknown number of European banks have collapsed under the weight over plummeting housing markets, financial mismanagement and other reasons. But how many European banks did actually […]