[OpenSpending] Follow-up to transaction standard call

Tue Oct 23 13:23:02 UTC 2012

On 2012-10-23, at 4:10 AM, Friedrich Lindenberg wrote:

> Hey all,
> 
> I don't think there is any disagreement that both contractual and
> transaction-level information are valuable and need to be published.
> 
> It's important to see that this dicusssion about a transactional
> spending standard does not stand isolated, but it needs to connect to
> the debate about standards for the release of contractual data (see
> http://www.open-contracting.org/). The question of what has priority -
> transactions or contracts - can probably only be answered in
> connection with another question: What for? We all have different
> goals in using this data, often based on the differences between the
> countries in which we operate.
> 
> The best thing we can accomplish is to generate a language that finds
> a fair compromise between reflecting the eccentricities of many
> governments, while not getting lost in the details of each. If what we
> design ends up being the perfect sum of all ways in which people
> record transactional data it will be completely worthless, because it
> will be unusable. So we need to break it down and simplify in a few
> places.
> 
> That said, I'm very keen to see more samples of the data that
> governments are releasing. We can use this to have further evidence of
> what they can (and need to) publish.
> 
> In the end, I hope that what we come up with will be something useful.
> Useful for government so they have concrete guidance on how to publish
> data. Useful for techies like me, who can build tooling. Useful for
> analysts who want to reconstruct flows of funds within government.
> (Still, we should not mix up the analysis with the standard, it
> enables analysis but should not require it.)

Indeed, getting back to my two earlier questions:

> 1. Do you already have data that you want to represent using this standard?
> 2. What are the use cases and requirements for this standard?

Re: contracting, I can't find any discussion group or similar for Open Contracting. Do you know if there exist any ways to participate? For contracts, there is http://code.google.com/p/public-contracts-ontology/

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