[OpenSpending] [euopendata] Methods for publishing/visualizing expense data?

Wed Aug 15 09:46:52 UTC 2012

Hi Peter,

We've actually recently had some similar stories in the news recently
here in the UK. There were some specific stories on events and
retreats, but I can't appear to lay my hands on them now, most of the
things I have to hand are based on the publication of the expenses of
individuals rather than planned, large-scale outings, if I find the
articles I was thinking of, I will send them across.

MP's expenses have been quite a hot topic here in Britain since the
scandal broke last year, see recent coverage when some credit card
bills were got hold of:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/council-spending/8829271/Council-chief-executives-spending-on-expenses-and-credit-cards.html

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

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

The Guardian have also done a whole range of stories on MP's expenses
including some very interesting visualisations:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/mps-expenses

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!).

Lucy

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/datablog/2011/jun/02/mps-expenses-performance-voting-activity

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 9:51 AM, Peter Krantz <peter at peterkrantz.se> wrote:
> Hi all!
>
> In the past couple of weeks we have had several interesting newspaper articles in Sweden regarding government agency spending on representation/dinners/seminars [1]. In short there are indications that government agencies have tried to book representation expenses on accounts for seminars and one head of an agency already had to quit (it is likely there will be more).
>
> I am interested in finding more information on government expense publishing in the following areas:
>
> 1. Examples from other countries and research articles ion the effects of expense publishing.
> 2. Time frames (yearly data dumps or "real time" from finance application)
> 3. Visualizations of expense data.
>
> Any links or pointers would be greatly appreciated
>
> [1]: (in swedish - use google translate) http://www.dn.se/Stories/stories-nyheter/stories-sverige/dn-granskar-sloseriet-med-skattepengar
>
> Regards,
>
> Peter Krantz
> http://www.opengov.se
> https://www.facebook.com/groups/opengov/
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> euopendata at lists.okfn.org
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-- 
Lucy Chambers
Community Coordinator,
OpenSpending & Data Journalism
Open Knowledge Foundation
Skype: lucyfediachambers
Twitter: @lucyfedia