[OpenSpending] budgetary data disclosure and OGD principles - an assessment proposal

[Andrew Stott]

Gisele

 

Many thanks for sharing.  This is an excellent paper and provides a
methodological framework which could be used in other contexts - and not
just about spending data.  It is important, as you have done, to take the
headline open data principles and define a practical threshold for the data
being released.

 

Some thoughts:

 

(1) the 48 hour threshold for timeliness you have set is demanding, but here
it is justified by the *legal* requirement in Brasil to publish in real
time.  

 

(2) the licence-free judgement is a bit harsh if, as the paper says, the
Freedom of Information Act makes it explicit that information on government
management is a priori public.  However it would be better if websites made
this explicit.

 

(3) the 50% of datasets published as PDFs is disappointing, particularly
given the nature of financial data and the very high probability that the
data is held by the government agency in a machine readable format in the
first place.  Conversion to PDF is an additional step - but it is not
unknown elsewhere (see
http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/parking_ticket_data_14#incoming-49483
for a particularly glaring example)

 

Regards

 

Andrew

 

From: openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org
[mailto:openspending-bounces at lists.okfn.org] On Behalf Of Gisele S. Craveiro
Sent: 30 January 2013 08:46
To: OpenSpending Discussion List
Subject: [OpenSpending] budgetary data disclosure and OGD principles - an
assessment proposal

 

Dear all,

I am sending a paper that will be presented next month in ICDS 2013Conf.
We hope we have brought some contributions to this discussion and
suggestions and comments to improve our future work are very welcome. 

Gisele

Abstract:

Budget transparency is an instrumental factor for better understanding the
concept of budget within a democratic context.
 International codes for best governance practices in public management have
appointed the internet as a communication 
media with the potential to provide this information in a timely and
transparent manner to the several players in the society,
 and open government data has added important elements to this scenario.
Currently, there is no structured framework to 
evaluate the quality of the budgetary information disclosed on the web. This
paper takes this into consideration when 
proposing an assessment framework and analyzing data collected from two
samples: one composed by 54 budgetary 
websites from different Brazilian executive power levels (national, state
and municipal), complemented with another sample 
of 34 Brazilian audit court websites.

full paper:
http://www.gpopai.usp.br/IMG/pdf/Craveiro-ICDS2013.pdf

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