[open-development] Spending Events @ OKFestival

Fri Jun 29 08:30:07 UTC 2012

Hi All, 

Just a quick update about a few spending-related event happening this year at OKFestival in Helsinki (http://okfestival.org/) - a hackday on Budget Cycle Monitoring. 

THE PROBLEM

We're aware that often, the only way to check *whether* governments are releasing financial documents *when* they should is often tricky to gauge. At present, the only way to find out when to expect a document to be released in a given country is to trawl the legislation of a country and find references to legally mandated release dates, but there may be another way...

A POSSIBLE SOLUTION?

At OKFestival, there will be a 'Budget Cycle Monitoring Hackday' - to build a prototype of a calendar and set of notification services to help journalists, budget-monitoring NGOs etc find out when certain documents should be released and demand that they are.

Mission: To align a calendar of internationally-recognised best practice guidelines for publication of key budget documents with calendars of the fiscal year in different countries and build services which can relate to this. Possible features include:

1. The ability to send out notifications to journalists, CSOs, budget monitoring orgs at the last acceptable date for the docs to be published to check whether they are available.
2. Integrating with FOI request services to allow organisations to have a mechanism to request budget documents directly. For example, autogenerated FOI letters processed through services such as Alaveteli.

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

On the day - join us! 

In advance - I'm particularly keen to hear from those on the list who work monitoring budgets (or topics which also rely on budget transparency - such as aid), whether such a tool would be useful - and any features that they would like to see included.

More information can be found here: http://openspending.org/blog/2012/06/28/OKFest-announce.html

Let me know what you think!

Lucy 

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