The slides from the #GIFT2012 talk by @OKFN - Technology for Transparent and Accountable Public Finance

1. by Rufus Pollock, Lucy Chambers & Velichka Dimitrova
Open Knowledge Foundation
@okfn[.org], event hashtag #TTAPF

2. Terms of Reference
● Case studies of technology to promote
transparency and accountability around
revenue, spending and off-budget
information
● Transparency around and participation in
decision making (e.g. participatory
budgeting)
● Feedback from users of the tools as well as
creators (where possible)

3. The Open Knowledge Foundation
● Non-profit founded in 2004
● Build and foster tools and communities to
create, use and share open knowledge and
data
● Activities include
○ CKAN - data portal platform which powers many
governmental and non-governmental portals around
the world
○ OpenSpending.org - platform to upload, explore and
visualise financial data
○ 15+ working groups and local chapters

4. What is Open Data (exactly)?
http://OpenDefinition.org/ defines open data as:
Data that anyone is free to use, re-use and
redistribute data without technical or legal
restrictions.
Why Open Data?
●transparency
●innovation

5. Overview of Projects

6. Publishing Fiscal Data

7. Data Portals
http://data.gov.uk/
http://www.data.gov.bc.ca/
http://www.digitalbrain.go.kr

8. Publishing Fiscal Data: Highlights
Highlights
● Portals deliver consolidation of resources in one convenient location
● Data portals can be useful both within government as well as outside
● An explicit open data policy is not needed to start an open data portal
Recommendations
● Open financial data must be openly licensed and available in machine
readable format (in bulk)
● Keep it simple - one can begin extremely simply
● Engage with your provider and user community
● Open tools for open data

9. Using Fiscal Data

10. How easy is it to actually find and
use data?
● Fiscal transparency is about more than budgets: e.g.
procurement, corporate identifiers
● How are things at present? Feedback was mixed
● Key complaints:
○ Machine readability: PDFs - 10 complaints
○ Disappearing data or hidden data
○ Lack of supporting documentation to complement data releases
○ Poor quality: 6 responses, e.g. inconsistencies between years
What can be done about this?

11. Standards for Fiscal Data

12. Standards for Fiscal Data
Standards enable a distributed rather than a centralised approach in
data publication and use
● No or very limited general data standards in existence and in use
Recommendations
● Use well-known, commonly used formats (CSV, XLS or XML) for the
release of data.
● Adopt existing coding conventions for shared entities
● Publish additional information on the coding schemes used, such
as functional or economic classifications, charts of account
● A simple user-driven standard for transaction-level spending data.
Best Case Scenario
● A global spending data registry - similar to the IATI registry for aid
information

13. Revenue, Spending and Invisible
Money
Tools for Oversight

14. Where Does the Money Come From?
http://sierraleone.revenuesystems.org/ http://www.revenuewatch.org/issues/data-tools

15. Where Does the Money Come From?
● User groups and audiences might not be whom you
expected, e.g. GoSL
● Bear in mind less-web-savvy users and lower bandwidth
/ older computers
● “Data is not always actionable simply because it is
available.”
● Substantial data-cleaning and data-wrangling may be
required

16. Where Does the Money Go?
Tools for Oversight

17. Presenting Fiscal Data: Journalists
● Not used to working with raw data
● Often rely on pre-computed
statistics
● Up to date data (want notification
services)
● Tools more commonly used by
advocacy groups, more time to
dedicate to research.
● Structured data around the
budgeting process e.g. how
different MPs voted
● Disaggregated data
http://reporting.sunlightfoundation.com/budgets/

18. Getting Off-Budget On-Budget:
OpenSpending and Publish What
You Fund bit.ly/uganda-example

19. The importance of good data... a
personal anecdote...
OpenSpending / PWYF joint project - mapping aid onto budgets
Data Collection 6 months - multiple
and Wrangling people
< 1 man month
Visualisation

20. Where Does the Money Go?
Summary
● Raw, machine readable data is vital. Converting data is
one of the most labour-intensive parts of the process.
● Very few projects are currently able to trace difference
between planned and actual expenditure. Sunlight’s
work in the United States is one of the few examples of
success in this area.

21. Social Auditing and Following
the Invisible Money

22. Key resources for social
auditors...
publishing (near) real time data. http://nrega.ap.gov.in/
coming soon, mobile data collection

23. Social Auditing and Following
the Invisible Money
● Technology (e.g. mobile) can help transform traditional
labour-intensive social auditing practices - possibility to
scale up significantly
● SMS technology has the possibility of reaching out to
rural areas
● Many project rely on sub-national level data to function:
it is at local and regional level
● Technology + social audit offers possibility of close to
real-time feedback and reporting

24. Participation

25. Participation http://solokotakita.org/

26. Participation http://demo.citizenbudget.com/

27. Participation: Highlights
● Outreach and feedback: examples from World Bank and others of
effective use of tech for outreach and feedback e.g. geo-targeted SMS
automatic phone-calls with the voice of the mayor and the Gol Mobile App
http://bit.ly/gol-app
● Deliberation: Allowing citizens to submit their own project ideas (http:
//budgetballot.com/).
● Remote participation: online voting and surveys (numerous examples in
census.) (http://demo.citizenbudget.com)
● Raising additional funds: Leih Deiner Stadt Geld in Germany (https:
//www.leihdeinerstadtgeld.de/)
● Increasing Budget Literacy http://demo.budgetallocator.com/ "Although
you have balanced your budget, based on your current selections, we may
still have to increase rates by 6.4%. Typically a 1% rates increase equates
to 12 cents a week."

28. Highlights

29. Data, More and Better
● Publish more and publish openly
○ Hard to utilize technology without access to data
○ Data portals can play a key role here
● Data quality is still poor:
○ Bulk machine-readable data - spreadsheet NOT
PDF
○ Better use of standards (+ new, simple, standard(s))
○ Connections to other datasets through e.g. reference
identifiers, geospatial information
○ Very significant portion of time spent cleaning and
preparing data
● Timely data releases
● Opportunity to build on IBP's OBI work

30. Reaching Out
● Technology can foster closer collaboration between
advocacy NGOs and journalists (and vice-versa: closer
collaboration enhances value of tech)
● Extensive capacity-building for journalists to enable
them to analyze and present data.
● Tech and esp mobile can clearly play a significant role
on reaching out whether to inform or to receive
feedback

31. Participation
● Technology can add additional channels for
participation to reach out to 'the hard to reach' -
tools are not a substitute for face-to-face contact.
● Keep it simple: Effective tools can target a particular
part of the PB process rather than a 'super-app' that will
work at every stage.
● Technology can also be overwhelming, e.g. allowing
unfacilitated debate can create a lot of additional work
for policy-makers to extract the key points

32. Technology Is Not a Magic Potion
● The report provides clear examples how technology can
and is delivering real benefits in relation to fiscal
transparency.
● BUT technology is not a "magic potion".
● The existence of data and apps do not guarantee use
and use does not guarantee change.
Participatatory Budgeting
Tools, Applications, Outreach
Open Data + Portals Visualizations Lots of NON-tech stuff
Data Analysis Change

33. Thanks
Rufus Pollock - @rufuspollock
Lucy Chambers - @lucyfedia
Velichka Dimitrova - @vndimitrova
@okfn