[OpenSpending] Follow-up to transaction standard call

[James McKinney]

Excellent start, Lucy. With the exception of "How does money move around inside and outside government?" I think the current list of questions can be satisfied by an augmented version of the UK's Payments Ontology: http://data.gov.uk/resources/payments#structure Payments are broader in precision than transactions, but lower-level and broader in scope than contracts.

Salaries and employee expenses also came up in the discussion, but I wonder if these are better handled separately. I can imagine many governments being more open to transparency around payments than around salaries and expense accounts. I also expect the questions we'd like to ask of payments to suppliers are different from those we'd like to ask of payments to employees.

My suggestion then as we develop the questions/use cases is to focus on suppliers.

James

On 2012-10-24, at 8:48 AM, Lucy Chambers wrote:

> 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 & OpenSpending
> Open Knowledge Foundation 
> Skype: lucyfediachambers
> Twitter: @lucyfedia
> 
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