My presentation from the Open Government Partnership 2013 summit in London. Lessons learned from our experience building OpenSpending sites around the world.

1. 5 easy steps to building
a budget monitoring
site
PRESENTED BY
Lucy Chambers
@lucyfedia / @openspending
CC-By v3 Licensed (all jurisdictions)

2. 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

3. Create tools, skills and
communities
Data => Knowledge
Knowledge => Action

4. OpenSpending
A global community:
Creating an open map of government
money

5. THE STEPS
Y!
L
L
A
R
CC-By v3 Licensed (all jurisdictions)

6. STEP 1:
What question are you trying to answer? /
What problem are you trying to solve?

7. Help citizens understand
political processes?
Source: Meieraha.eu
Source: The Guardian
HINT: DON’T USE FLASH!
Source: Budget Allocator

8. Help citizens see how
government spending
relates to them personally?
Source: WhereDoesMyMoneyGo.org
Source: Budzeti.ba

9. Help correct
misconceptions?
Source: AMiPenzunk.hu

10. 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

11. Push for more, better
information
Source:Cameroon.OpenSpending.org

12. STEP 2:
Find
Get
Clean
NOTE: These steps take
approximately 70% of
the time on most
OpenSpending projects

13. Supply-side obstacles preventing re-use of data
No bulk download

14. Governments often don’t like to
release financial data
Ministry of Finance reacts to FOI-request for
the 2013 budget data

15. Sometimes data is only available in
paper copy
Government official: “Please receive our annual audit
reports in this stack of papers.”

16. Even when released electronically, data is
still rarely machine readable

17. It’s work to clean up and format!

18. 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

19. STEP 3:
Analyse
Transform

20. National budget data
Map it to international
COFOG classifications
(then translate to
human)
Advanced:
Compare the budget
to the actual spent amount

21. STEP 4: Present

22. A quick quiz

26. Visualisation Tools
OpenSpending
http://openspending.org/
DataWrapper
http://datawrapper.de/
D3.js
http://d3js.org/

27. Some last tips ;-)

28. 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?

29. Ask yourself, is a site the right
delivery mechanism?
Source: priceofthestate.org

30. Collaborate and you will win!
Get your friends together and build broad coalitions

31. Source: bjornmeansbear
- Flickr

32. So let’s get to work!
The OpenSpending community is always in your corner!

33. My calls to action

34. http://okfn.org/
info@openspending.org
http://openspending.org/
http://apps.openspending.
org/oscontactsmap/

35. SHAMELESS PLUG:
Join us now for the Joined Up Data session: