Technology for Fiscal Transparency – Where Next?

Who is using technology to follow the money? The hunt is on… Over the last month, we have been working on a report entitled “Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance” for the Global Initiative on Fiscal Transparency. We are hoping to identify the most promising projects around the world that are using technology (web, […]

Living Labs Global Award 2012 – Two Open Knowledge Foundation Projects Nominated

Two projects of the Open Knowledge Foundation have been nominated for the Living Labs Global Award 2012: OpenSpending.mobi – Participatory budgeting through augmented reality and CityData – Making Cities Smarter – A central entry point to all your city’s data. Out of nearly 700 submitted showcases, about 15% have been selected to submit an extended […]

How Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers’ Ball

This piece was co-written with Eric King of Privacy International and comes as Privacy International launches a huge new data release about companies selling surveillance technologies. It is cross-posted on the MediaShift PBS IDEA LAB and the OpenSpending blog. Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies […]

Civil Society and Spending Data: Who is mapping the money?

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on the OpenSpending project at the Open Knowledge Foundation. We’re excited to announce that, thanks to the generous support of the Open Society Foundations, OKFN’s activities around financial transparency will expand to include a second pillar: next to the OpenSpending platform, we have just started a 6 […]

Data = Seized, Sanitised and Sanity-checked. Open Data Day 2011

This post is by Mark Brough, Research Officer at Publish What You Fund, Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending, and Irina Bolychevsky, Product Owner for CKAN. It is cross-posted on the OpenSpending Blog and the CKAN blog and Mark Brough’s contribution is also featured on aidinfolabs.org. Saturday, December 3rd was Open Data Day, and London […]

International Open Data Hackathon, Dec 3rd. It’s coming together.

The following guest post is from David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared on eaves.ca. So a number of things have started to really come together for this Saturday Dec 3rd. I’ve noticed a number of new cities […]

Solving Uganda’s budget puzzle: OpenSpending & Publish What You Fund’s Uganda Visualisations Featured in the Guardian

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on OpenSpending. It is cross-posted on the OpenSpending blog. On Friday, the Guardian Poverty Matters blog published a piece on the Uganda visualisation that the OpenSpending team had been working on with Publish What You Fund. From the article “The Publish What You Fund campaign group and […]

International Open Data Hackathon Updates and Apps

The following guest post is by David Eaves who is the founder of datadotgc.ca and a member of the OKF’s Working Group on Open Government Data. The post originally appeared over on his blog. With the International Open Data Hackathon getting closer, I’m getting excited. There’s been a real expansion on the wiki of the […]

Launch of Open Spending Blog: Thoughts on Journalist-Programmer interaction

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. Thanks to the hard work of the OpenSpending team getting the software to an exciting stage of development that we are happy to write about and some aesthetic love from our brilliant designer, Kat Braybrooke, the OpenSpending blog was officially launched yesterday. […]

OpenSpending v0.10 released

This post is by Martin Keegan, project lead on OpenSpending. We’ve released v0.10 of the OpenSpending code, and made it live on http://openspending.org/ Changes in v0.10: Data loading has been separated from the main web application. Web-based and command-line tools for data wranglers to load/reload datasets have been separated from the main end-user facing web […]

Introducing a new list just for open data on companies

The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data One of the key types of data that affects all our lives in a multitude of ways is that on companies and corporate entities. As companies have changed from being single entities to multifaceted, […]

OpenSpending seeks Spending Cartographers: Register Now!

This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending at the Open Knowledge Foundation The OpenSpending team is currently looking for volunteers for a crack-team of ‘spending cartographers’ to guide people with datasets through the OpenSpending loading process and to help them make the most of their data once it is loaded. Interested in […]

OpenCorporates hits 20 million companies, an open data milestone

The following is a guest post from Chris Taggart, co-founder of OpenCorporates.com and member of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Working Group on Open Government Data Less than eight months ago, OpenCorporates : The Open Database Of The Corporate World launched with the rather ambitious goal of creating a URL for every company in the world. Five months later, it had […]

Visualising Italian Spending Data

The following guest post is by Daniele Galiffa, CEO at Visup. Some weeks ago we had the opportunity to develop a 24-hour quick prototype regarding the way the Italian Public Administration spends our money. Our goal was to highlight the value of using simple and effective information visualization solutions to gain greater insight into data, […]

Release of Whole of Government Accounts

The following guest post is by Dan Herbert, who works on our Where Does My Money Go and Open Spending projects. He is the Programme Manager for MSc Accounting at Oxford Brookes University. This week sees the publication of the first Whole of Government Accounts for the UK. WGA represents the end of a decade […]

New Visualisations for OpenSpending

This post is by Gregor Aisch, graphic designer and visualisation architect on the OpenSpending project. Today, at the OpenSpending worksop at OKCon2011 he gave a sneak preview of some of the work he has been doing to create new visualisations for OpenSpending, including a re-adaptation of David McCandless’ famous bubble visualisation from ‘Where Does My […]

OpenSpending goes live

After several months of hard work, we are glad to announce the official launch of OpenSpending and turn to everyone interested in government accountability and financial transparency to help shape the future of the project. The OpenSpending project will make it easier for the global public to explore and understand government spending. Our developers have […]

Opening up Government: Data.gov.uk publishes UK all central government spending data over 25k.

This post is by Friedrich Lindenberg, one of the core developers on the OpenSpending project. He describes some of the hurdles that had to be overcome to get to today’s online release of all UK central departmental spending data over £ 25k and some interesting questions stemming from the data. In November of last year, […]

Interview with OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock on Open Spending

The following post is from Jonathan Gray, Community Coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation. OKF Co-Founder Rufus Pollock recently interviewed at Open Tech 2011 about WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org and OpenSpending.org. You can watch the video on blip.tv or YouTube, or you can download it by right clicking here.

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