OpenSpending is one of the longest running projects both at Open Knowledge Foundation and within the open data ecosystem in its entirety. Starting life in 2009 as Where Does my Money Go?, OpenSpending has played a vital role in the publication of open budget and spending data by governments world over. Over the past […]
Publishing Budget and Spending Open Data
This blog was written by Lorena Rivero del Paso (GIFT) and Oscar Montiel (Open Knowledge Foundation) and was originally posted on the GIFT blog. Increasingly, we see examples where lack of transparency and accountability from governments affects trust. Being able to follow public money flows is an important step to recover trust and aim towards […]
Announcing the Fiscal Data Helpdesk
Having data for budgets and spending can allow us to track public money flows in our communities. It can give us insights into how governments plan and focus on programmes, public works, and services. So the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), along with Open Knowledge International (OKI), have been working on new tools to […]
How to publish budget and spending data openly
At the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT) and Open Knowledge International (OKI) we believe that governments’ budget and spending data should be made available to all, so that anyone can see how their tax money is spent,what priorities their governments make, and governments can be held accountable. Increasingly governments make their budget data already […]
Introducing Version 1 of the Fiscal Data Package specification
The Fiscal Data Package is a lightweight and user-oriented format for publishing and consuming fiscal data. Fiscal Data Packages are made of simple and universal components, are extremely flexible, can be produced from ordinary spreadsheet software and used in any environment. This specification started about five years ago with a first version (then known as […]
OpenSpending platform update
Introduction OpenSpending is a free, open and global platform to search, visualise, and analyse fiscal data in the public sphere. This week, we soft launched an updated technical platform, with a newly designed landing page. Until now dubbed “OpenSpending Next”, this is a completely new iteration on the previous version of OpenSpending, which has been […]
csv,conf,v3
The third manifestation of everyone’s favorite community conference about data—csv,conf,v3—happened earlier this May in Portland, Oregon. The conference brought together data makers/doers/hackers from various backgrounds to share knowledge and stories about data in a relaxed, convivial, alpaca-friendly (see below) environment. Several Open Knowledge International staff working across our Frictionless Data, OpenSpending, and Open Data for […]
Making European Subsidy Data Open
One month after releasing subsidystories.eu a joint project of Open Knowledge Germany and Open Knowledge International, we have some great news to share. Due to the extensive outreach of our platform and the data quality report we published, new datasets have been directly sent to us by several administrations. We have recently added new data […]
New site SubsidyStories.eu shows where nearly 300bn of EU subsidies go across Europe
Open Knowledge Germany and Open Knowledge International launched SubsidyStories.eu: a database containing all recipients of EU Structural Funds, accounting for 292,9 Billion Euros of EU Subsidies. The European Union allocates 44 % of its total 7-year budget through the European Structural Funds. Who received these funds – accounting for 347 Billion Euro from 2007 – […]
Open Data by default: Lorca City Council is using OpenSpending to increase transparency and promote urban mobility.
Castillo de Lorca. Torre Alfonsina (Public Domain) Lorca, a city located in the South of Spain with currently 92,000 inhabitants, launched its open data initiative on January 9th 2014. Initially it offered 23 datasets containing transport, mobility, statistical and economic information. From the very beginning, OpenSpending was the tool selected by Lorca City Council because of its […]
Open State Foundation Netherlands wins OGP 2016 award for work to advance fiscal transparency through OpenSpending
Open State Foundation is a non-profit based in the Netherlands, working on digital transparency by opening up public information as open data and making it accessible for re-use. Last December, the organization received one of the seven Open Government Partnership 2016 Awards for its work on OpenSpending at the OGP Global Summit in Paris, France. The awards […]
Brazil’s Public Spending project is looking for leaders in various regions of Brazil to increase participation in the budgeting process.
On the 11th of January, OK Brazil launched its new Public Spending website. The website is part of a wider campaign to search, recruit and support new leaders that wish to work with transparency, mainly public spending, in Brazilian municipalities and is using OKI’s OpenSpending technical architecture. The support will be provided to mentors specializing in […]
Network update from OK Japan: Corporate transparency and taxpayers’ money ahead of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics
This blog post is part of our on-going Network series featuring updates from chapters across the Open Knowledge Network and was written by the Open Knowledge Japan team. The OK Japan chapter has been active in the open data space in activities such as the promotion of open data use and policy discussions. Since we formed the team […]
How to ‘unlock’ the value of fiscal data for civil society: experiences from the OpenSpending community
OpenSpending is one of Open Knowledge International’s current projects. It is a free and open platform for citizens looking to track and analyse public fiscal information globally. Over the years, we have learned about numerous examples of fiscal data uses from the OpenSpending community. Also, we learned that obtaining fiscal data can be the most […]
Making sense of government spending: Open Knowledge Finland use OpenSpending to collaborate with Finnish Government
Tampere, Finland (public domain) This piece is written by Jaakko Korhonen and Joonas Pesonen of Open Knowledge Finland At the end of October a team using OpenSpending tools held a pitch for high-ranking Finnish Government officials in “Hack the Budget 2016,” a competition organised by Open Knowledge Finland (OKFFI) and the Finnish Ministry of Finance. […]
Openbudgets.eu launches collection of fiscal transparency tools for journalists and civil society organisations.
Berlin, November 21, 2016 – Today, the beta version of OpenBudgets is officially released to the public. The Horizon 2020-funded project seeks to advance transparency and accountability in the fiscal domain by providing journalists, CSOs, NGOs, citizens and public administrations with state-of-the-art tools needed to effectively process and analyze financial data. For the beta version, […]
Municipal Money: Making municipal budgets more accessible
Code for South Africa just launched https://municipalmoney.gov.za/, a New Municipal Money project for South Africa, in partnership with the National Treasury. This is a step forward in collaboration with government. Code for South Africa’s goal is to empower citizens to hold their municipal officials to account. The focus of the portal is on municipal financial […]
What is the Open Fiscal Data Package?
This post looks at the Open Fiscal Data Package – an open standard for publishing fiscal data developed by Open Knowledge International, GIFT and the World Bank. In September of 2016, Mexico became the first country to officially endorse the OFDP, by publishing Federal Budget data in open formats using OpenSpending tools. OpenSpending is one of […]
Turning data into action: what we learned from conducting social audits on public housing communities in Malaysia
The Sinar Project in Malaysia is exploring ways of making critical information public and accessible to Malaysian citizens. The project is supported by the Open Data for Development (OD4D) programme and has been run in collaboration with OpenSpending at Open Knowledge International. In our previous blog post, we provided an overview of the Sinar Project’s work opening budget data […]
Why civil society organisations are using OpenSpending to share fiscal data with the public
OpenSpending is one of Open Knowledge International’s current projects. It is a free and open platform for citizens looking to track and analyse public fiscal information globally. While the OpenSpending team was busy revamping the platform over the last year we have been fortunate to have a community of users actively involved in testing the […]
OpenSpending collaborates with Mexico’s Ministry of Finance to standardise and visualise government budget data
On September 8, 2016, Mexico became the first country to formally adopt the Open Fiscal Data Package, an international open data standard promoted by the Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT), in collaboration with Open Knowledge International and the World Bank, with the support of Omidyar Network. This collaboration is a pioneering step for […]
Sinar Project in Malaysia works to open budget data at all levels of government
“Open Spending Data in Constrained Environments” is a project being lead by Sinar Project in Malaysia aimed exploring ways to of making critical information public and accessible to Malaysian citizens. The project is supported by the Open Data for Development programme and has been run in collaboration with Open Knowledge International & OpenSpending In Malaysia, […]
OpenSpending Next – Now available as Alpha version
We’re happy to announce that a new, improved version of OpenSpending is now being launched as an Alpha Version. OpenSpending Next provides a set of tools enabling users to visualise, analyse and publish budget and spending data – all based on the open Fiscal Data Package standard. OpenSpending Next is designed, developed and maintained by […]
Just Released: “Where Does Europe’s Money Go? A Guide to EU Budget Data Sources”
The EU has committed to spending €959 988 million between 2014 and 2020. This money is disbursed through over 80 funds and programmes that are managed by over 100 different authorities. Where does this money come from? How is it allocated? And how is it spent? Today we are delighted to announce the release of […]
Presenting public finance just got easier
This blog post is cross-posted from the CKAN blog. CKAN 2.3 is out! The world-famous data handling software suite which powers data.gov, data.gov.uk and numerous other open data portals across the world has been significantly upgraded. How can this version open up new opportunities for existing and coming deployments? Read on. One of the new […]
Newsflash! OKFestival Programme Launches
At last, it’s here! Check out the details of the OKFestival 2014 programme – including session descriptions, times and facilitator bios here! We’re using a tool called Sched to display the programme this year and it has several great features. Firstly, it gives individual session organisers the ability to update the details on the session […]
Bonding with Hong Kong and upcoming Open Spending
Learning and sharing across the global Open Knowledge community are the two core purposes of our regular Community Sessions. This week Mart van de Ven and Bastien Douglas joined us to share all about the Open Data Hong Kong community. Some of the key lessons they advised are: ask your community for help more, have […]
Mapping the Open Spending Data Community
We’re pleased to announce the official release of “Mapping the Open Spending Data Community” by Anders Pedersen and Lucy Chambers, an in-depth look at how citizens, journalists, and civil society organisations around the world are using data on government finances to further their civic missions. The investigation began in 2012 with three goals: To identify […]
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 […]
budzeti.ba: Following the money in Bosnia and Herzegovina
We’re pleased to announce the launch of budzeti.ba, a new way to understand public spending in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). budzeti.ba is a joint project of Bosnian civil society advocates CPI and the Open Knowledge Foundation. It allows Bosnian citizens to navigate the complexities of the BiH tax system and to explore the distribution of […]
Visualizing How the Brazilian Government Underspends on the Public Good
This post is authored by Vitor Batista, who works as developer for the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Neil Ashton, Data Roundup Editor for the School of Data blog. It is cross-posted from the PBS Ideas and OpenSpending blogs. Brazilian NGO INESC (Institute of Socio-Economic Studies) and Open Knowledge Foundation Brasil want Brazilians to participate in […]
Predicting city bankruptcies with open data: The case of Detroit
This is a guest post by Marc Joffe of Public Sector Credit Solutions. Many have noticed that the United States last week was struck by its biggest municipal bankruptcy ever, when the City of Detroit declared bankruptcy. Less well known is the fact that Moody’s, the major credit rating agency, downgraded the City of Chicago […]
What’s the deal with the UK government’s new spending tool?
We were pleasantly surprised to learn that this morning the UK government launched a new tool to explore UK public spending. The ‘Government Interrogating Spending Tool’ (fear not – you the user are supposed to be the giver, not the receiver, of interrogation) or ‘GIST’ is, according to the Cabinet Office, “one of the first […]
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: Tax Avoidance and Evasion – 6th June
Want to dig deep into tax avoidance and evasion? We have gathered a wide range of data on this sensitive topic and for one afternoon we’ll guide you through some of the key decisions to think about when writing a story on the topics. With tax evasion and tax avoidance currently such a hot topic […]
IRS: Turn Over A New Leaf, Open Up Data
The following post is co-authored by Stefan Verhulst and Beth Noveck. It is cross-posted from Forbes.com. If you’d like to learn more about tax data, check out our data expedition on tax evasion and avoidance on the 6th June! The core task for Danny Werfel, the new acting commissioner of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service […]
Follow the Money, Follow the Data
The following guest post from Martin Tisné was first published on his personal blog. Some thoughts which I hope may be helpful in advance of the ‘follow the data‘ hack day this week-end: The open data sector has quite successfully focused on socially-relevant information: fixing potholes a la http://www.fixmystreet.com/, adopting fire hydrants a la http://adoptahydrant.org/. […]
Open Budget Oakland and OpenSpending
From small beginnings in a hackathon, here’s a great story from Oakland of how OpenSpending can be deployed to improve civic engagement on a local level. The beta version of Open Budget Oakland went public last week with the release of our mayor’s proposed budget for the next two years. Her announcement was made Wednesday […]
AfricanSpending – Monitoring the Money in Africa
The Open Knowledge Foundation, in partnership with the Open Institute in Kenya and the African Media Initiative have submitted a proposal to the Knight News Challenge on Open Government: AfricanSpending – Monitoring the Money. We want to build a platform (leveraging OpenSpending) for journalists and civil society to track public money and mineral wealth across […]
OpenSpending CSO Workshop – Sarajevo
The full story from Sarajevo can be found on the Open Spending blog A while back, we wrote about the kickoff of our project to deliver the budget of Bosnia and Herzegovina to its citizens in a form they can understand. Last week in Sarajevo we had the kickoff workshop, bringing together a group of […]
Data Bootcamps: Hands on data literacy workshops for the world
As governments around the world start implementing open data initiatives, establishing a critical public able to analyse and contextualise the data released is paramount. To facilitate this the African Media Initiative and the World Bank Institute started to collaborate on a program to bring Data Bootcamps to places with Open Government Data initiatives. Data itself […]
OKFN India Trip – the Roundup
This is the final post in the Open Data in India series. Our visit to India wasn’t just about meetups… the following post deals with the individuals and organisations that Lucy and Laura met whilst in India, the questions they were asked and the projects they were introduced to. It is cross-posted on the OKFN […]
UK Departmental Government Spending – Improving the Quality of Reporting
Continuing in their mission to make spending data more accessible and comprehensible, the Spending Stories team and the team of Data.Gov.Uk are releasing a reporting tool today that will help journalists and analysts to pick the freshest and best departmental spending data to work with when exploring the UK central government expenditure. Spending data is […]
OpenDataMx: Opening Up the Government, one Bit at a Time
On August 24-25, another edition of OpenDataMx took place: a 36-hour public data hackathon for the development of creative technological solutions to questions raised by the civil society. This time the event was hosted by the University of Communication in Mexico City. The popularity of the event has grown: a total of 63 participants including […]
Open Data – Chennai
This is part 2 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. You can read the first post ‘Open Data – Bangalore’ on the OKFN blog. Chennai, formerly Madras, is only a short train ride away from Bangalore. Laura and I hadn’t been intending on travelling to Chennai on this trip, but a mail from […]
Open Data – Bangalore
Laura and Lucy from the OKFN team recently travelled to India to learn where the challenges and opportunities for open data in India lay. This is part 1 of 5 of the Open Data India Series. The Bangalore data scene is huge. A bustling IT and data mining industry means that you are never far […]
5m Intro to OpenSpending at Activate 2012
Last week I gave a quick introduction to OpenSpending and Where Does My Money Go at Activate 2012. Here are the video and slides. Slides
Aid Data: From XML to Visualisations – IATI data in OpenSpending
Are the World Bank and Department for International Development (DfID) spending money on projects in similar sectors and countries? Does all aid to Kenya go the North-East? How much aid in total did India receive last year? Until recently, it was impossible to know. But now, thanks to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI), we’ve […]
Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance: Report Published
In early March, we embarked on a project to map out projects which use technology to further the aims of fiscal transparency, accountability and participation. Today, we are happy to announce the official release of the resulting report, Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance. Preliminary findings were presented at last month’s GIFT meeting in […]
OpenSpending and CityData Project Films: Introducing Our Nominated Projects at the Rio Cities Summit
Next week Rio de Janeiro will invite local governments, companies and experts, to a global summit in service innovation for cities. The event will focus on green and clean development, urban systems and services, tourism and mobility, health and well-being as well as open government and accessibility. The Living Labs Global Award has nominated two […]
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