[OKFN-IN] Favourite Examples: Open Data in Action

Wed Aug 15 10:05:37 UTC 2012

Hi Folks,

Thank you to many on the list who welcomes Laura and I while we were
in India over the past months.

While we were there, we received many requests for case studies
proving that Open Data has impact. I thought that I would share my
personal favourite example.

MP's expenses have been quite a hot topic here in Britain since a
scandal broke out a couple of years back on MP's using taxpayers money
to claim for outrageous expenses (from houses for their ducks [0] to
ridiculous expenses on second homes).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/15/mps-expenses-heather-brooke-foi

Possibly as a result of this scandal, this data is now published
proactively and regularly through the Independent Parliamentary
Standards Authority (although this site is very buggy particularly in
Chrome):

http://www.parliamentary-standards.org.uk/

I'm pleased to say, that this is actually one of my favourite examples
of Open Data in action in cleaning up how taxpayers money is spent. It
has apparently done so to the extent that journalists actually write
that it is now a boring topic. I quote from the Guardian [1]

"To be frank, these are getting pretty boring. This was always Ipsa's
plan. The rules are so transparent and tough, compared with the
corrupted scheme that caused the scandal of two years ago, that there
is very little an MP can do wrong. Now they are published regularly
and MPs also don't want to be caught cheating."

I think that is a result :) (but I do hope journalists will keep their
eyes on this just in case as recently some new stories broke on
council spending! [2])

Lucy

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/mps-expenses/5364831/MPs-expenses-Sir-Peter-Viggers-in-duck-house-mystery.html
[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/datablog/2011/jun/02/mps-expenses-performance-voting-activity
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/council-spending/8829271/Council-chief-executives-spending-on-expenses-and-credit-cards.html

-- 
Lucy Chambers
Community Coordinator,
OpenSpending & Data Journalism
Open Knowledge Foundation
Skype: lucyfediachambers
Twitter: @lucyfedia