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 […]

Elvis maps your tenders

Ever heard of public procurement? Public tenders? Public spending? It is what your government does with your hard earned taxes: hires companies to do things. In return for your taxes, companies build roads, buildings, deliver cozy office chairs for the ministries, or take care of catering for public schools. A lot of data on public […]

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 […]

Open Budget Survey 2017: global comparison of budget transparency comes at a critical time

On 30 January 2018 the International Budget Partnership (IBP) has published the Open Budget Survey 2017 with an interactive Data Explorer developed for the IBP by Open Knowledge International and updated for the 2017 survey. Launched in 2006, the Open Budget Survey (OBS) is the world’s only independent, comparative assessment of the three pillars of […]

Openbudgets.eu: the new platform for financial transparency in Europe

Today, OpenBudgets officially launches its fiscal transparency platform. Using OpenBudgets.eu journalists, civil servants, and data scientists can process, analyse, and explore the nature and relevance of fiscal data. The platform offers a toolbox to everyone who wants to upload, visualise and analyse fiscal data. From easy to use visualisations and high level analytics to fun games and accessible explanations of public budgeting and corruption […]

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 […]

Open Knowledge Brazil summer 2016 update

This blog post is part of our summer chapters updates and was written by the team of OK Brazil.  Brazil is not only about the Olympics. A lot has been going on in the Brazilian chapter of the Open Knowledge Network as well. Here we highlight the significant chapter developments, including some new faces and some […]

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, […]

New research project to map the impact of open budget data

I’m pleased to announce a new research project to examine the impact of open budget data, undertaken as a collaboration between Open Knowledge and the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam, supported by the Global Initiative for Financial Transparency (GIFT). The project will include an empirical mapping of who is active around open […]