[OpenSpending] The open spending handbook sprint

Wed Nov 14 11:57:39 UTC 2012

 Hi,

 The Open Spending Handbook sounds like a great idea.
> We're putting together a list of resources and organisations working in 
> the area of public spending and budgets, along with lots of advice for 
> NGOs to really use public data.
> 
> If you have examples you would like included then please shout out on this 
> thread.
> 
> 
> 

 I've been meaning to announce this for a few weeks, this is a good excuse: after seeing the Spanish version of Where Does My Money Go [1], the Government of Euskadi - one of the Spanish regions, championing a solid Open Data initiative - contacted me to build a more detailed and complete version of it.

 The result, the first open spending site promoted by a Spanish public administration, is called Aurrekontuak [2] (means 'Budget' in Basque). It shows both revenues and expenditures for the last 10 years, both at an overview and detailed level. It also compares budgeted vs actual amount, although only at a high level. We also added a basic tax calculation model (including direct and indirect taxes), a glossary (not in English), and search functionality, so you can see for example, the money budgeted for each hospital in the region [3]. The web itself is in three languages (Spanish, English, Basque), but the budget data itself only in Spanish and Basque.

 Technically, I considered using an instance of Open Spending for the backend, but their development environment was Ruby-based, so we created instead a custom Rails app, partially optimized for the Spanish budget structure, which will be open-sourced soon. The visualizations are done using D3.js.

 I'm hoping this will be a turning point for public administrations in Spain. I'm now working with another region, Aragon, to open up their budget data too: it's still work in progress, but they did open their proposed budget for 2013 [4]. I'm considering using OpenSpending here as the backend, but it's still early to say, it depends on their technical requirements.

 Happy to answer any question you may have.

 Regards,

/david

PS: For those looking at the overview diagram and interested in the Spanish administration structure, taxes are normally collected by regions, sent partially to Madrid, pooled and then redistributed. But Euskadi has a quite unique agreement, in which provincial councils do the tax collections, pay an agreed amount to the central government for common services, and distribute the rest among the regional government, local and provincial councils.

[1]: http://dondevanmisimpuestos.es 
[2]: http://aurrekontuak.irekia.euskadi.net/en
[3]: http://aurrekontuak.irekia.euskadi.net/en/search?q=hospital
[4]: http://presupuesto.aragon.es/es/policies
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