[wdmmg-discuss] One-click Freedom of Information requests for local spending data

Mon Oct 4 13:33:23 UTC 2010

Chris: perhaps you and Francis might be able to run a session on "the
beginnings of a highly interconnected transparency ecosystem" at
<http://www.opengovernmentdata.org/camp2010> based on things like your
message below? E.g. looking at things like:

  * what bits and pieces do we need and what do we already have
  * common, open source infrastructure that we can use to do this in
other countries (e.g. What Do They Know Germany, ...)
  * what you hope this area will look like in 2, 5, 10 years time ;-)

What do you think?

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Chris Taggart <countculture at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thought the list might be interested in knowing thanks to the excellent work
> of Francis at WhatDoTheyKnow.com I've now added one-click Freedom of
> Information requests for local spending data payments over £10,000.
>
> Full details are at the blog post:
> http://countculture.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/new-feature-one-click-foi-requests-for-spending-payments/
> but it basically populates an FoI request with the right council, the
> details of the transaction (date, amount, supplier, id etc) and the usual
> boilerplate, meaning the user only has to add their name.
>
> The key thing, however, is that WDTK have now added the ability to do
> machine tags, meaning we can tag requests with information about the
> submitted transaction, which in turns mean we can (soon -- just waiting for
> Francis to implement) get info for given machine tags meaning we can find
> (and show on OpenlyLocal) requests relating to a transaction (and via that
> to a supplier).
>
> Feels very exciting, the beginnings of a highly interconnected transparency
> ecosystem.
>
> By the way, OpenlyLocal is intending to import all the local council
> spending data (and making avail as open data to download). So far we've
> imported 233,143 transactions from 34 councils, with more being imported
> every week.
>
> Cheers
> Chris
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------
> OpenlyLocal :: Making Local Government More Transparent
> http://openlylocal.com
> Blog: http://countculture.wordpress.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture
>
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>

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