The Spending Blog
Our blog has the latest stories about what is going on in the OpenSpending project and the global spending community.
We cover a wide range of topics, including technical issues, spending tracking processes but also specific issues.
The blog is edited by Anders, and we're always looking for guest posts on interesting developments in different countries. Please get in touch if you'd like to contribute!
Introducing the Progress page 14.05.2013
For the past months we've seen many new users come to the OpenSpending community. The community have now added budget data from more than 80 cities and most recently universities have also found their way onto OpenSpending. While we're thrilled by the uptake in use of openspending for visualising budgets,...
Opening Israel's Budget 22.04.2013
This is a guest post by Aviv Sharon and Adam Kariv from The Public Knowledge Workshop based in Israel. "Show me the money!" If you ask the developers of "Taktziv Patuakh" (Hebrew for "Open Budget"), one of the projects of Israeli non-profit “The Public Knowledge Workshop”, that's more than just...
Join us for Hack Day on EU procurement data May 2 in Brussels 09.04.2013
Next month OpenSpending will be at the annual DataHarvest, where investigative journalists and civic coders dig into data projects from across Europe. The DataHarvest takes it name from the annual release of payments to farmers under the Common Agricultural Policy analyzes by the friends at Farmsubsidy. We wanted to follow...
Visualising Urban development data at UN-Habitat 06.04.2013
This is a guest post by Pontus Westerberg, UN-Habitat In September 2012, UN-Habitat, the UN agency responsible for promoting sustainable towns and cities, became the third UN organisation to publish data to the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) standard. As the project manager for what we have called “The Open...
FAQ - The Daily Bread in the UK 04.04.2013
The annual release of the budget proposal from the UK government last month, once again sparked interest in the Daily Bread calculator, which was featured at the Guardian. This FAQ is intended to give you a quick walk-trough on how and why we made the calculations behind the Daily Bread....
How to Embed Open Spending Databases to Your Own Website 20.03.2013
This post is by Lisa Evans of the Spending Stories project at OpenSpending and cross-posted from the PBS Idea Lab. The Open Spending platform is a hive of activity and packed full of colorful displays of spending and budgets from all over the world. Its aim is to help track...
AfricanSpending - Knight News Challenge with Open Institute and African Media Initiative 19.03.2013
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 with the title AfricanSpending - Monitoring the Money. The focus of this proposal is enabling journalists & CSOs to effectively track...
OpenSpending around the world, Week 11 15.03.2013
We're bringing you an update with news from OpenSpending and financial transparency around the world. Fresh data and activities from OpenSpending Tajima Itsuro has written an excellent guide in Japanese for uploading data to OpenSending. The Open Data Census demonstrated that several countries like Slovenia, Czech Republic and Italy (for...
Publish What You Fund Launches Aid Transparency Tracker 13.03.2013
Publish What You Fund has undertaken some initial analysis of aid donors’ plans to publish to the IATI component of the agreed common standard for aid information. Here, Mark Brough explains the process they went through to take a series of Excel files, convert them into a format suitable for...
Spending Stories, Open Spending Are Moving Beyond Visualizations 05.03.2013
This post is by Lisa Evans of the Spending Stories project at OpenSpending and cross-posted from the PBS Idea Lab. 2013 is going to be a big year for the spending stories project. In 2012, as we explained in more detail on our blog, we improved usability of our platform...
OpenSpending around the world, Week 9 01.03.2013
Fresh data and activities from OpenSpending During Open Data Day we saw activities across cities.In Ottawa Stephane Frechette helped upload budget data for city for 2013. In Goettingen, Germany the Pirate Party used OpenSpending to visualize the city budget for expenditures and revenues. Victoria Vlad from Expert Grup added budget...
Budgetstories.md - using open budget data to create meaningful stories 28.02.2013
This is a guest post by Victoria Vlad from BudgetStories.md. Today Expert-Grup, an independent think tank based in Chișinău, Moldova, launched BudgetStories.md. BudgetStories.md is an open budget website, which includes infographics, budget data visualizations and analysis of the use of public money in Moldova across sectors such as: the public...
OpenSpending around the world, Week 8 22.02.2013
We're bringing you an update with news from OpenSpending and financial transparency around the world. Fresh data and activities from OpenSpending City budgets: We're thrilled to see how lots of new cities have been added to OpenSpending. Have a look at some of the budgets added recently from Umeaa, Sweden,...
How to find spending data inside EU's budget - join us for a Google Hangout! 14.02.2013
Last week leaders from the European Union agreed, after months of haggling, on the 2014-2020 EU budget - also known as the Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF). The €960bn budget shown above marked a widely reported reduction in the budget, but many other stories can be told from the 48 page...
Opening Budgets in Morocco 12.02.2013
This post is written by Martin Keegan. In January I attended a conference in Morocco at the University of Mundiapolis in Casablanca, to present OpenSpending. The conference attracted a broad range of interests: civil society organisations, journalists, private companies, academics and students, the World Bank, and the director general of...
Can Open Data and Mobile Technology Eliminate the Need for a "Feedback" Loop? - Reimagining the new World Bank Open Finances app 29.01.2013
This is a guest post by Samuel Lee with contributions from Francesco Ciriaci and Julia Bezgacheva. Efforts to make spending information more relevant and actionable often suffer from low levels of financial literacy, complexity, and just the unfavorable common perception that financial data is boring and hard to understand. At...
The Open Budget Survey is out 24.01.2013
Yesterday the International Budget Partnership published their 2012 Open Budget Survey assessing fiscal transparency across 100 countries. The survey is the most comprehensive of its kind and evaluates countries across 125 questions on everything from the independence of state auditors to the transparency of every step of the budgeting process....
How to decrypt a budget? 22.01.2013
If you’ve ever read, or even better tried to explain a budget you’ll be completely aware that budgets are jargon fests. This would be fine if the budget was just for people who know the lingo, but in the case of a government's budget, well, that’s really something everyone who...
OpenSpending community member identifies unredacted private transactions in UK local public spending data 09.01.2013
A freelance data specialist from our community recently got in touch to let us know that he had used OpenSpending to identify a number of privacy breaches in an individual dataset presented in OpenSpending. This was due to inconsistent redaction of sensitive data by the local authority. Whilst the majority...
An Open Call for Ideas - How Would You Use OpenSpending's Data Calendar? 08.01.2013
With the new year upon us, it's the time of year when you might be thinking about the calendars you use and wondering how they could work better for you. Just over a month ago, the OpenSpending team floated the idea of an open spending calendar The idea was to...
OpenSpending A Year in Review 24.12.2012
Just before I turn on my autoresponder and submerge my computer into the blackness of holiday in a concrete box to which I have no access, I thought I'd just quickly wrap up a few of the highlights from this amazing year. It has been very intense - but we've...
We're hiring! 18.12.2012
Hacker? Passionate about finding stories in the money? Care about which companies get contracts with government? OpenSpending is seeking a lead developer to guide it through its next phase of development and it might be just the job for you! OpenSpending is about mapping the money. We want to make...
Bosnian Budgets - grouping data by categories people care about 30.11.2012
Last week, I sat watching the team of CPI Bosnia mapping the Bosnian budget into functional classifications. We're working on making the budget accessible to the citizens of Bosnia, making clear visually things such as the division of funds between the cantons and municipalities of the country. Functional classifications, for...
Day 3 OpenSpending CSO Workshop - Sarajevo 28.11.2012
This blogpost is the last in the series of the OpenSpending workshop - Sarajevo. Read the first post and the second post on the OpenSpending blog. Day 3 - Getting your message out As a CSO, once you have done all of this work, how can you make sure it...
Day 2 OpenSpending CSO Workshop - Sarajevo 27.11.2012
This blogpost is the second in the series of the OpenSpending workshop - Sarajevo. Read the first post on the OpenSpending blog. Day 2 - Converting Data into Action & Finding Narratives in Data The people we are trying to target with this data are bombarded constantly from every side...
Day 1 OpenSpending CSO Workshop - Sarajevo 26.11.2012
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 techies and policy experts from the Balkans...
Spending Data Handbook - Draft Version 15.11.2012
After four days of intense writing, discussions and editing, it is now almost midnight: our handbook sprint is over. What we have produced is an introduction to the use of data for budget- and spending-focussed advocacy. We've produced a high-level overview that covers a variety of topics, from the context...
Spending Data Handbook Sprint - Day 1 13.11.2012
As you read this, we're writing a book about spending. It'll be finished by Thursday so you can read it over the weekend, as you sit down to do, (or not do) your armchair auditing of government accounts. As we get the opportunity to meet budget and data activists from...
Open Interests Hackathon - November 24-25, London, England 22.10.2012
As a journalist, to understand European Union institutions, policies and commitments, you have to look where the money goes and understand who affects the money flow in the EU. As the influence of Brussels lobbyists grows, it is increasingly important to draw the connections between lobbying, policy-making and funding. The...
OpenSpending visualisations featured in Le Monde 20.10.2012
The OpenSpending platform experienced a huge peak in traffic earlier this week as a visualisation based on French data was featured in Le Monde. The article "PLF : des avions au bouclier fiscal, la java des amendements", (PLF=Projet de loi de finances, the draft finance law) deals with suggested amendments...
Upcoming call - Spending Standard 03.10.2012
At OKFestival we had a fantastic session bringing together the IATI and spending community to talk about how we could make standards work for the users of government financial data. Now we want to keep the ball rolling. Next week, we will have a call to discuss how we can...
PROFILE - 'Publicidad Oficial' - Official Advertising, Fundar, Mexico 02.10.2012
At Open Knowledge Festival, Federico Ramírez from Mexico presented Fundar's project on uncovering which government parties were using taxpayers's money to finance their PR and advertising. In this post, based on an interview Velichka Dimitrova did when she went out to Mexico for OpenDataMx, the Fundar team have delved deeper...
Balkan Budget Bubbles 26.09.2012
We're pleased to announce that the Where Does My Money Go bubbles are on their way to the Balkans! Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, the OpenSpending team will be working with the Centre for Public Interest Advocacy in Bosnia to produce interactive graphics of national...
Where Does the Money Go - International. Updates from OKFestival 24.09.2012
We got a chance to catch up with many old OpenSpending friends at OKFestival last week and got the chance to meet some new ones. For any of you who missed the action, here's a quick recap... Machine Readable Budgets for the Netherlands The week started with Ton Zijlstra announcing...
First steps for Participatory Budgeting in Finland 17.09.2012
This post is written by Raimo Muurinen and Henri Ahti who are taking a lead on one of Finland’s first Participatory Budgeting (PB) projects with Helsinki City Library. The post comes just as we prepare for Tiago Peixoto’s (aka @participatory) keynote and talk on how to involve citizens in the...
UK Departmental Government Spending - Improving the Quality of Reporting 13.09.2012
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...
Spending Data Handbook - How do Civil Society Organisations Wrangle Spending Data? 11.09.2012
Over the last few months, we have been travelling the globe in an effort to work out which organisations are mapping the ebbs and flows of government money - and how they do it. In a series of interviews, currently being published via the OpenSpending blog we've highlighted the issues...
Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Bani pierduti? (Lost money?) 15.08.2012
This is a profile of a very interesting new project coming out of Romania, aiming to make government finances understandable for the average citizen. It is written based on contributions from Elena Calistru, who kicked off the project. Vital Statistics Name of Project: Bani pierduti? (Or, in English, "Lost money?")...
An introduction to the TaxMan 05.08.2012
One of the pieces of technology powering Where Does My Money Go is a standalone application, TaxMan, that performs a rather dull yet important task. As anyone who has filled out a tax return will know, tax can be rather complicated, with numerous steps and calculations to perform. If you...
Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Our Money, the Budapest Institute 27.07.2012
This post was written based on the contributions of Petra Reszkető, Balázs Váradi and Timea Sütő of the Budapest Institute, Hungary. The video of their interview will be displayed as part of the complete series Athens to Berlin. The Budapest Institute is an independent think-thank. It produces public policy research...
Athens to Berlin - Romania's Money Mappers. 20.07.2012
Although the people I meet here in Romania seem to dispute the fact - Bucharest has a very strong NGO scene. Corruption, both institutional and petty, comes high on the focus agenda as well as making citizens vaguely data-literate about how the government spends money and getting a good grasp...
Caring for My Neighbourhood - Geolocating Spending in Brazil 19.07.2012
This post was written by Gisele Craveiro, of the University of São Paulo, member of OKFN Brazil and one of the coordinators of GPoPAI (Research Group of Public Politics in Access to Information). The public budget should express the population's needs and priorities and its implementation should be as transparent...
Athens to Berlin - PROFILE - Linked Data and Public Spending 16.07.2012
From the hot, dusty streets of Athens, I trundle in to breezy but baking Thessaloniki on a late-night train... In the apparent absence of any budget-monitoring or advocacy groups in Greece, a group of programmers are working directly with the Diavgeia data to present it in interesting ways to make...
Athens to Berlin - Chicken or the Egg? Days 2-4 (Athens and Thessaloniki) 16.07.2012
Immediately after landing in Greece, I have my first experience of where austerity cuts were hitting services. While attempting to buy tickets for the metro, I struck up conversation with an irate but lovely lady named Tina, who was irritated to have to travel all the way into central Athens...
Athens to Berlin - Day 1, Diavgeia 11.07.2012
This is the first update from the project: Athens to Berlin - a European Financial Profile In the sweltering heat of downtown Athens, I visit the heart of Greece's new transparency initiative - Diavgeia... Diavgeia - Transparency, for Governments' Sake Greece has historically been known for its lack of financial...
Athens to Berlin - a European Financial Profile 05.07.2012
How does the work of budget monitoring organisations, investigative journalists, academic researchers and think-tanks differ in the various countries of Europe? What are the key questions these organisations address - are they largely the same in every country, or does each country have a different issue at the forefront of...
Budget Cycle Monitoring Hackday at OKFest 28.06.2012
Often, the only way to check whether governments are releasing financial documents, is retroactively. But what if it were possible to receive alerts and check up against internationally recognised best-practice guidelines as to when the government in your country should be releasing key budget documents? At present, the only way...
Video Instruction Guide - Loading Data Into OpenSpending 11.06.2012
Recently, the OpenSpending team have been working on a project to visualise financial data in Cameroon. One of the aims of the project is to create a platform which is sustainable for years to come and that means that it needs to be really easy to load and maintain datasets...
Workshop - Open Budget and Procurement Zurich June 28th 2012 11.06.2012
As part of the Opendata.ch conference on June 28th 2012 in Zürich there will be a workshop dedicated to the topic of open budget and procurement. Various speakers from Switzerland and Germany will make short presentations and the discuss with the audience the implications and possible future actions. First, Friedrich...
Aid Data - From XML to Visualisations 05.06.2012
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...
Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance 29.05.2012
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...
Voting Systems for E-Participatory Budgeting - Upcoming Call 13.03.2012
What are the best systems for voting in tech-solutions to Participatory Budgeting? Join upcoming call to contribute to the discussion. The Doodle Poll is out here - please fill it in if you would like to join to help us schedule the call. If you would like to join, please...
Technology for Fiscal Transparency, Where Next? 12.03.2012
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...
Participatory Budgeting and Technology 06.03.2012
Last week we held our first Open Meeting on Software for Participatory Budgeting. We just scratched the surface of this huge topic, but here are the first notes. A full write up in blog-post form will follow after a few more calls You can contribute to and edit these notes...
Open Meeting: Software for Participatory Budgeting 29.02.2012
There are already shining examples of direct forms of democracy and deliberation going on around the world but many of them are small scale, local and idiosyncratic solutions. Can technology help to take these discussions to the next level and offer templates for solutions that could be applied all over...
How Spending Stories Fact Checks Big Brother, the Wiretappers' Ball 24.02.2012
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 Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which...
Announcing the Where Does My Money Go? Assembly Kit 16.02.2012
Over the past few months, we've made a lot of progress on OpenSpending. The core of the application is now mostly stable and it is getting ever easier to load data into the platform through the web-based dataset editor. Yet, inevitably, this raises a simple question: I've imported my data,...
The Czech budget on-line: the half success story 15.02.2012
This post is by Michal Škop, of KohoVolit.eu. The half-success story of implementing OpenSpending.org and OtwarteDane.pl into BudovaniStatu.cz ('Building of the State', the name referes to Peroutka's book) It all started almost 2 years ago. Our partner NGO NasiPolitici.cz started to think about putting the Czech public money data on...
Hakuna My Data: NBO Data Bootcamp 30.01.2012
This post is by Friedrich Lindenberg, developer on OpenSpending. "My Name is XXXX, I am a member of the Kenyan parliament for the constituency of XXXX in the 2007-2012 election cycle. During my time in parliament, I have positioned myself against taxes for MPs. Of the Development Funds allocated to...
Updates from the OpenSpending Dev Team 23.01.2012
What are we focusing on this week? Working on implementing Collections <- draft notes, beware. Prototyping the Compar-o-tron Mockup 1, Mockup 2. Continuing work on Embeddable widgets for Spending Stories.
Transparency and technology in Brazil: linking politicians to bad entrepreneurs 23.01.2012
This story by Fabiano Angélico, who formerly worked at Transparencia Brasil, is about how technology and the help of coders can be used to highlight links between politicians and corrupt entrepreneurs. It is followed by a brief "Behind the News" interview which shows some of the time costs of datawrangling...
Open Bookkeeping: What role can accountants play in Open Spending & Budget Projects? 17.01.2012
The next OpenSpending online community meeting will take place on Thursday, 19th Jan - 6pm GMT. The topic Accountants spend their entire working lives mapping the money: How can their expertise be put to good use in Open Spending Data projects? What interesting initiatives are going on around the world...
Civil Society and Spending Data: Who is mapping the money? 12.01.2012
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on the OpenSpending project at the Open Knowledge Foundation. The post is cross-posted on the Open Knowledge Foundation blog. 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...
Data = Seized, Sanitised and Sanity-checked. Open Data Day 2011 12.12.2011
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 Open Knowledge Foundation Blog and Mark Brough's contribution is also featured on aidinfolabs.org. Saturday, December...
How Spending Stories Spots Errors in Public Spending 05.12.2011
This article was originally published on MediaShift Idea Lab and was co-written by Martin Keegan, project lead for Spending Stories and Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator for OpenSpending. How public funds should be spent is often controversial. Information about how that money has already been spent should not be ambiguous at...
OpenSpending visualisations featured in the Guardian 28.11.2011
This post is by Lucy Chambers, Community Coordinator on OpenSpending. 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 the Open...
OpenSpending v0.11 Released 16.11.2011
We are happy to announce the release of the latest version of OpenSpending. Most of our work has been to improve how we store and or organise spending data. Users will notice that the web frontend has been refreshed and is now much better integrated. New features include New backend...
New Translation Documentation for OpenSpending 11.11.2011
There's been a lot of demand for us to document the translation procedure for OpenSpending, so this is now up and live on the wiki For reference, I've also briefly included the steps here: In order to translate OpenSpending, please follow the following steps: Create an account on Transifex Email...
Thoughts from the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 27.10.2011
This post is by Lucy Chambers, community coordinator at the Open Knowledge Foundation, and Friedrich Lindenberg, Developer on OpenSpending. They recently attended the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2011 in Kyiv, Ukraine, and in this post, bring home their thoughts on journalist-programmer collaboration... The conference The Global Investigative Journalism Conference must...
Uploading Data to OpenSpending 20.03.2011
The amount of datasets that are available on OpenSpending.org are growing fast and we want more! Currently the process looks like this: You give us data. We look at it, try to understand it, possibly ask you some more questions. We write a custom loader script to load the data....
'Where Does My Money Go?' Goes international. Welcome to OpenSpending. 01.03.2011
This post is by Friedrich Lindenberg, one of the developers working on OpenSpending. Our primary goal has to be to grow WDMMG as an open platform, similar to Open Street Map: while on OSM you sketch out your local streets, WDMMG should become the place to upload and analyze your...