5 easy steps to building a budget monitoring

site

Lucy Chambers@lucyfedia / @openspending

PRESENTED BY

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Quick overview● The key steps in producing a

budget monitoring site● Tools you can use to help you along

the way● Things to ask for from your

government● A quiz ● Lots of animated images

Create tools, skills and communities

Data => KnowledgeKnowledge => Action

OpenSpendingA global community:

Creating an open map of government money

THE STEPS

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RALLY!

STEP 1:

What question are you trying to answer? /

What problem are you trying to solve?

Help citizens understand political processes?

Source: The Guardian

HINT: DON’T USE FLASH!

Source: Meieraha.eu

Source: Budget Allocator

Help citizens see how government spending

relates to them personally?

Source: Budzeti.baSource: WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org

Help correct misconceptions?

Source: AMiPenzunk.hu

Strip PR from dialogue around budgets spending?

“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 my constituency, I have spent 12mn KSH in 2010 and 8mn KSH in 2009. Since 2007, I’ve funded 201 projects, of which 72 (9mn KSH) related to Education, 56 (7.2mn KSH) related to Health and 20 (4.2mn KSH) to Infrastructure.

The largest projects I have funded include… “

- See more at: http://community.openspending.org/2012/01/hakuna-my-data-nbo-data-bootcamp/#sthash.XaRj9NdO.dpuf

Push for more, better information

Source:Cameroon.OpenSpending.org

STEP 2: FindGet

Clean

NOTE: These steps take approximately 70% of

the time on most OpenSpending projects

Supply-side obstacles preventing re-use of data

No bulk download

Governments often don’t like to release financial data

Ministry of Finance reacts to FOI-request for the 2013 budget data

Sometimes data is only available in paper copy

Government official: “Please receive our annual audit reports in this stack of papers.”

Even when released electronically, data is still rarely machine readable

It’s work to clean up and format!

Some data cleaning tools can help!

● Excel & Google Spreadsheets for basic cleaning

● Open Refine - for cleaning spreadsheets● Tabula - for converting PDF-tables

Resources from Open Knowledge Foundation:● School of Data

STEP 3: Analyse

Transform

National budget data

Map it to international COFOG classifications (then translate to human)

Advanced:Compare the budget

to the actual spent amount

STEP 4: Present

A quick quiz

Visualisation ToolsOpenSpending

http://openspending.org/ DataWrapper

http://datawrapper.de/ D3.js

http://d3js.org/

Some last tips ;-)

STEP 5: RALLY!

Ask yourself: ● What is my call to action?● Is it easy to find? ● Are there opportunities for people to get

more deeply involved?

Ask yourself, is a site the right delivery mechanism?

Source: priceofthestate.org

Collaborate and you will win!

Get your friends together and build broad coalitions

Source: bjornmeansbear - Flickr

So let’s get to work!

The OpenSpending community is always in your corner!

My calls to action

http://okfn.org/info@openspending.org

http://openspending.org/ http://apps.openspending.

org/oscontactsmap/

SHAMELESS PLUG:

Join us now for the Joined Up Data session: