[wdmmg-discuss] Meeting Cambridge City Council

[Lisa Evans]

I met a couple of people from the finance team at Cambridge City Council 
(CCC) this week.

This meeting makes me want to beam a message out to all councils saying 
"if you publish your data in machine readable form, you pretty much don't 
have to worry about presenting this data -- there is already a community 
who will do it all for you for FREE. Everyone wins!"

The outcomes of the meeting where:
- They're going to give me a copy of their accounts in a spreadsheet.
- They refused to give me an export of their Oracle "Balance Sheet"
   report.
- All council budgets are published in excel
- They're going to report their £500 + spending before the Jan 2010.
- When they publish they're going to make sure their data meets the open
   data standards defined by Chris T.

Here is some more detail about the meeting for those interested.

Background:

I've been asking to meet with the finance team in CCC for month. The first 
thing I did was write to them to request a meeting to explain wdmmg and 
get some idea of their finance data. I didn't hear back so I asked again. 
Nothing back. So I sent a freedom of information request for the database 
type, schema and training notes all of which I duly received.

Then I asked for the data, and one of the councilors at CCC saw my request 
on What Do They Know? and helped me by giving the exact tables that I 
needed and he also suggested a report to ask for. I asked for all of this 
and added that I would like to meet as I appreciate it is a big ask.

I didn't get the data but I did get a meeting.

The meeting:
I explained the WDMMG project.

They explained about their current work reporting all spending above £500.

They said that the vast majority of their spending data is below £500, but 
even so this still is more data than they have every shared before.

They plan to share their data before the Jan 2010 deadline and they are 
concerned about if the public will be able to interpret it and also how to 
physically host this large amount data.

I pointed out the open data standards from Chris Taggart and co and how 
there is a community of people eager to do the work of communicating the 
spending to the public, and making the data useable will allow them to do 
this.

They said they would send me a copy of their online accounts in a 
spreadsheet as this is what they have to convert into a pdf before they 
put it on their website.

They refused to give any exports of their reports of which there are a 
number describing in the training notes.

I offered our support for publishing their spending data and they agreed 
that keeping the lines of communication open with OKFN would be useful to 
us both.

They were keen to look up Chris' blog post on open data standards and said 
they would make sure they published their data following those guidelines.

Chris T: they had not heard of spotlightonspend.org.uk

I wrote this blog post 
http://objectgroup.wordpress.com/2010/07/09/reports-on-local-authority-finances/ 
that sums up the approach I'm taking local council accounts