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

Francis Irving francis at flourish.org
Mon Oct 4 16:03:57 UTC 2010


The WhatDoTheyKnow features that Chris used to implement it are
documented here.

http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/api

So other sites can do something similar, if they like.

Yes, was Lisa who wanted tagging on requests in the first place, to
help manage her own requests. Not sure when I'm going to be able to
add a user interface for that though. One thing at a time...

Francis

On Mon, Oct 04, 2010 at 03:30:14PM +0100, Chris Taggart wrote:
> Yes. The machine-tag idea I think might even have originally been suggested
> by Lisa, or at least from something Lisa wanted. I'm going to see how things
> go to start off with but potentially roll it out to other areas if there are
> no probs/once searching by machine tags is implemented.
> 
> I've got one idea in particular, but it requires the search facility to
> work, so I'll talk about that then...
> Chris
> 
> On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 2:42 PM, K Corrick <kathryn.corrick at googlemail.com>wrote:
> 
> > Chris, Francis,
> > Great work!
> > Is this something that could be applied to other types of requests?
> > Kathryn
> >
> >
> >
> > On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 2:33 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:
> >
> >> 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
> >> >
> >> > _______________________________________________
> >> > wdmmg-discuss mailing list
> >> > wdmmg-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> >> > http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wdmmg-discuss
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Jonathan Gray
> >>
> >> Community Coordinator
> >> The Open Knowledge Foundation
> >> http://blog.okfn.org
> >>
> >> http://twitter.com/jwyg
> >> http://identi.ca/jwyg
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> wdmmg-discuss mailing list
> >> wdmmg-discuss at lists.okfn.org
> >> http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wdmmg-discuss
> >>
> >
> >
> 
> 
> -- 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> OpenlyLocal :: Making Local Government More Transparent
> http://openlylocal.com
> Blog: http://countculture.wordpress.com
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/CountCulture

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