[OpenSpending] Update - Athens to Berlin: Romania

[Lucy Chambers]

Hi All,

As many of you know, I was recently in Romania talking to Civil
Society Organisations working in the field of Public Finance about how
they use technology, data and cunning data acquisition methods in
their work.

There's a lot going on in this area in Romania and this update covers:

* The work of the team behind Lost Money
(http://banipierduti.cloudapp.net/) - which brings the spending of the
Romanian state closer to the people through beautiful visualisations
* An interesting view on treating petty corruption as an unofficial
tax, and crowd-sourcing information market rates for public services:
Bribe Market (http://www.piatadespaga.ro/)
* Investigating how political parties use public money to buy
advertising in media companies in exchange for publicity.
* Methods of getting hold of data in Romania (more on this to come!)
* Civil society collaboration - how can CSOs work together to share
the data which they produce and add value to?

This was a really rich debate so there is much more to come come from
this group, but I've written up a quick overview of the discussion
here:

http://openspending.org/blog/2012/07/20/Romania.html

Thoroughly recommend having a look at the applications these guys are
producing!!

Lucy

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