[OpenSpending] Follow-up to transaction standard call

Wed Oct 24 12:48:52 UTC 2012

Hi All,

So, my feeling is that to channel this debate, we need to come back to the
questions people need to be able to answer with the data, I think that
question 2. you indicate, James, is exactly hitting the nail on the head.

Summarising the discussion from above, trying to put [Question][Why?].
Thank you Andrew, Gisele and Alastair for providing your input. I've added
some thoughts from my research also:

== What do people want to answer? ==

=== Understanding Internal Government Processes ===

* Who authorised payments?  (*Could be useful for: - conflict of interest
tracking, holding officials who made bad decisions to account.* )
* What was the date of supply? (*to track for instance speed of paying
bills, a big problem for SMEs dealing with many public agencies*)
* How does money move around inside and outside government? (*Was a
transaction to pay an external company, or was it an inter-departmental
transfer?*) <- *Qs:* is this a means or an end question? Or is this just
something that it is impossible to tell from current transaction data? Is
this the same question as 'In some circumstances it would also be good to
know the source of funding (eg is this general discretionary spending of
the agency concerned, or is it a pass-through payment on behalf of
another).'?

=== Evaluating Choices, Efficiency and Value for Money ===

* What specific goods is it for? (Not just category) (*Could be useful for:
- answering questions such as 'how much did government X spend on
[computers] last year. Often, this question is impossible to answer due to
different departments coding identical purchases in different ways. To
think about, how detailed would this get? Would 'Computer equipment'
suffice? Or are we looking for information on thinks such as brand '1000 x
MacBook Pro'?'. The latter I guess is the 'Checkbook' style option, but the
former is also interesting and I know people always want to make
calculations such as these.*)
* What was the location of the work? + What was the location that
benefitted? (*Very important question, both inside and outside government,
I would say, to measure impact and efficiency*)
* To highlight cost overruns (*Q.* *Presume this means comparing amount
budgeted and amount actually spent?*)
* To highlight disputes, and mismanagement (*Q.* *Agree interesting, but
how would you see this, either in transactions or contracts?*)

=== Information on Suppliers ===

* Which supplier was involved? (*This is presumably the same issue as
highlighting non-performance, but also things like whether a particular
supplier is getting a large proportion of the contracts, maybe even good
performance, so you can see who should be getting the contracts again?*)
* What were the terms of the contract? (*For this you would need links to
the contract documentation, presumably*)

My suggestion would be to keep working on this list of questions, and we
can build on the discussion from there, working out what kind of
information is contained in which source.

Does that make sense? Please let me know if I have missed / misinterpreted
anything!

Lucy

-- 
Lucy Chambers
Project Coordinator,
School of Data <http://schoolofdata.org/> &
OpenSpending<http://openspending.org/>
Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/>
Skype: lucyfediachambers
Twitter: @lucyfedia <https://twitter.com/#!/lucyfedia>
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