George Osborne’s open data moment: it’s the Treasury, hell yeah

As a bit of an outsider, reading the government’s pronouncements on open data feels rather like reading official Kremlin statements during the Cold War. Sometimes it’s not what they’re saying, it’s who’s saying it that’s important.

And so it is, I think, with George Osborne’s speech yesterday morning at Google Zeitgeist, at which he stated, “Our ambition is to become the world leader in open data, and accelerate the accountability revolution that the internet age has unleashed“, and “The benefits are immense. Not just in terms of spotting waste and driving down costs, although that consequence of spending transparency is already being felt across the public sector. No, if anything, the social and economic benefits of open data are even greater.”

This is strong, and good stuff, and that it comes from Osborne, who’s not previously taken a high profile position on open data and open government, leaving that variously to the Cabinet Office Minister, Francis Maude, Nick Clegg & even David Cameron himself.

It’s also intriguing that it comes in the apparent burying of the Public Data Corporation, which got just a holding statement in the budget, and no mention at all in Osborne’s speech.

But more than that it shows the Treasury taking a serious interest for the first time, and that’s both to be welcomed, and feared. Welcomed, because with open data you’re talking about sacrificing the narrow interests of small short-term fiefdoms (e.g. some of the Trading Funds in the Shareholder Executive) for the wider interest; you’re also talking about building the essential foundations for the 21st century. And both of these require muscle and money.

It also overseas a number of datasets which have hitherto been very much closed data, particularly the financial data overseen by the Financial Services Authority, the Bank of England and even perhaps some HMRC data, and I’ve started the ball rolling by scraping the FSA’s Register of Mutuals, which we’ve just imported into OpenCorporates, and tying these to the associated entries in the UK Register of Companies.

Feared, because the Treasury is not known for taking prisoners, still less working with the community. And the fear is that rather than leverage the potential that open data allows for a multitude of  small distributed projects (many of which will necessarily and desirably fail), rather than use the wealth of expertise the UK has built up in open data, they will go for big, highly centralised projects.

I have no doubt, the good intentions are there, but let’s hope they don’t do a Team America here (and this isn’t meant as a back-handed reference to Beth Noveck, who I have a huge amount of respect for, and who’s been recruited by Osborne), and destroy the very thing they’re trying to save.

A first look at the council spending data: £10bn, 1.5m payments, 60,000 companies

Like buses, you wait ages for local councils to publish their spending data, then a whole load come at once… and consequently OpenlyLocal has been importing the data pretty much non-stop for the past month or so.

We’ve now imported spending data for over 140 councils with more being added each day, and now have over a million and a half payments to suppliers, totalling over £10 billion. I think it’s worth repeating that figure: Ten Billion Pounds, as it’s a decent chunk of change, by anybody’s measure (although it’s still only a fraction of all spending by councils in the country).

Along with that we’ve also made loads of improvements to the analysis and data, some visible, other not so much (we’ve made loads of much-needed back-end improvements now that we’ve got so much more data), and to mark breaking the £10bn figure I thought it was worth starting a series of posts looking at the spending dataset.

Let’s start by having a look at those headline figures (we’ll be delving deeper into the data for some more heavyweight data-driven journalism over the next few weeks):

144 councils. That’s about 40% of the 354 councils in England (including the GLA). Some of the others we just haven’t yet imported (we’re adding them at about 2 a day); others have problems with the CSV files they are publishing (corrupted or invalid files, or where there’s some query about the data itself), and where there’s a contact email we’ve notified them of this.

The rest are refusing to publish the CSV files specified in the guidelines, deciding to make it difficult to automatically import by publishing an Excel file or, worse, a PDF (and here I’d like to single out Birmingham council, the biggest in the UK, which shamefully is publishing it’s spending only as a PDF, and even then with almost no detail at all. One wonders what they are hiding).

£10,184,169,404 in 1,512,691 transactions. That’s an average transaction value of £6,732 per payment. However this is not uniform across councils, varying from an average transaction value of £669 for Poole to £46,466 for Barnsley. (In future posts, I’ll perhaps have a look at using the R statistical language to do some histograms on the data, although I’d be more than happy if someone beat me to that).

194,128 suppliers. What does this mean? To be accurate, this is the total number of supplying relationships between the councils and the companies/people/things they are paying.

Sometimes a council may have (or appear to have) several supplier relationships with the same company (charity/council/police authority), using different names or supplier IDs. This is sometimes down to a mistake in keying in the data, or for internal reasons, but either way it means several supplier records are created. It’s also worth noting that redacted payments are often grouped together as a single ‘supplier’, as the council may not have given any identifier to show that a redacted payment of £50,000 to a company (and in general there’s little reason to redact such payments) is to a different recipient than a redacted payment of £800 to a foster parent, for example.

However, using some clever matching and with the help of the increasing number of users who are matching suppliers to companies/charities and other entities on OpenlyLocal (just click on ‘add info’ when you’re looking at a supplier you think you can match to a company or charity)., we’ve matched about 40% of these to real-world organisations such as companies and charities.

While that might not seem very high, a good proportion of the rest will be sole-traders, individuals, or organisations we’ve not yet got a complete list of (Parish and Town councils, for example). And what it does mean is we can start to get a first draft of who supplies local government. And this is what we’ve got:

66,165 companies, with total payments of £3,884,271,203 (£3.88 billion), 38.1% of the total £10bn, in 579,518 transactions, making an average payment of £6,702.

8,236 charities, with total payments of £415,878,177, 4.1% of the total, in 55,370 transactions, making an average payment of £7,511.

Next time, we’ll look at the company suppliers in a little more detail, and later on the charities too, but for the moment, as you can see we’re listing the top 20 matched indivudual companies and charities that supply local government. Bear in mind a company like Capita does business with councils through a variety of different companies, and there’s no public dataset of the relationships between the companies, but that’s another story.

Finally, the whole dataset is available to download as open data under the same share-alike attribution licence as the rest of OpenlyLocal, including the matches to companies/charities that are receiving the money (the link is at the bottom of the Council Spending Data Dashboard). Be warned, however, it’s a very big file (there’s a row for every transaction), and so is too big for Excel (or even Google Fusion tables for that matter), so it’s most use to those using a database, or doing academic research.

* Note: there are inevitably loads of caveats to this data, including that councils are (despite the guidance) publishing the data in different ways, including, occasionally, aggregating payments, and using over-aggressive redaction. It’s also, obviously, only 40% of the councils in England., although that’s a pretty big sample size. Finally there may be errors both in the data as published, and in the importing of it. Please do let us know at info@openlylocal.com if  you see any errors, or figures that just look wrong.

What’s that coming over the hill, is it… the Public Data Corporation?

A couple of days ago, there was a brief announcement from the UK Government of plans for a new Public Data Corporation, which would “bring together Government bodies and data into one organisation”.

A good thing, no? Well, up to a point, Lord Copper.

I tweeted after the announcement: “Is it just me, or does the tone of the Public Data Corp make any other #opendata types uneasy?” From the responses, I clearly wasn’t the only one, and in my discussions since then it’s clear there’s a lot of nervousness out there.

So, what is it, and should we be afraid? The answers are ‘Nobody knows’, and ‘Yes’.

To flesh that out a bit, none of the open data activists and developers that I’ve spoken to knows what it is, or what the real motivation is, and remember these are the people who did much to get us into a place where the UK government has declared that the public has a ‘Right To Data’ and that the excellent ‘Open Government Licence‘ should be the default licence.

In that context, the announcement of a ‘Public Data Corporation’ should be be treated with some wariness.

However, this wariness turns into suspicion, when you read the press release.

First the announcement is a joint one from the Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude (who seems to very much get the need for open public data in the changed world in which we live) and from Business Minister Edward Davey, who I know nothing about, but his department BIS (Dept of Business, Innovation & Skills) has very much not been pushing for open data, and in fact  has in the past refused to make data it oversees openly available.

(My sources tell me the proposal in fact originated from BIS, and thus could be seen as an attempt by the incumbents to co-opt the open data agenda, as a way of shutting it down, smothering it if you like.)

Second, despite the upbeat headline “Public Data Corporation to free up public data and drive innovation” (Shock horror: org states its aim is to innovate & be successful), the text contains a number of worrying statements:

• “By bringing valuable Government data together, governed by a consistent set of principles around data collection, maintenance, production and charging[my emphasis], the Government can share best practice, drive efficiencies and create innovative public services for citizens and businesses. The Public Data Corporation will also provide real value for the taxpayer.”
  The idea of ‘value for the taxpayer’ is the same old stuff that got us into the unholy mess of trading funds, and the gordian knot of the Ordnance Survey licence wich is still being unpicked. This nearly always translates as value we can measure in £s, which in turn means what income we’ve got coming in (even if it’s from other public sector bodies).
• “It will provide stability and certainty for businesses and entrepreneurs, attracting the investment these operations need to maintain their capabilities and drive growth in the economy” – quote from Edward Davey.
  If I were a cynic I’d say stability and certainty translates to stagnation and rent-seeking businesses, which may be music to civil servants’ ears but does nothing to help innovation. We’re in a rapidly changing world. Get over it.
• “bringing valuable Government data together, governed by a consistent set of principles around data collection, maintenance, production and charging”.
  If this is the PDC’s mandate I think it could end up focused on the last of these, short-sighted though that would be.
• “It will also provide opportunities for private investment in the corporation.”
  Great. A conflicting priority, to delight the bureaucrats and muddy the focus. Keep it small, keep it simple, keep it agile.

Finally, there’s no mention of open data, no mention of the Open Government Licence, the Transparency Board and only one mention of transparency, and that’s in Francis Maude’s quote.

As Tom Steinberg (a member of the Transparency Board) wrote in a thread about the PDC on MySociety developer mailing list ”

If you’re a natural cynic, you’ll just say the government has already decided to flog everything off to the highest bidder. If you adopt that position, and give up without a fight, the people in Whitehall and the trading funds who want to do that will almost certainly win.

However, if you believe me when I say things are finely balanced, that either side could win, and enough well-organised external pressure could really make a difference over the next year, then you won’t just bitch, you’ll get stuck in.

He’s not wrong there. We’ve got perhaps 6 months to make this story turn out good for open data, and good for the wider community, and I suspect that means some messy battles along the way, forcing government to take the right path rather than slide into its bad old habits, perhaps with some key datasets, which should undoubtedly be public open data, but are currently under a restrictive licence.

I’ve got a couple in my sights. Watch this space.

Not the way to build a Big Society: part1 NESTA

I took a very frustrating phone call earlier today from NESTA, an organisation I’ve not had any dealings with it before, and don’t actually have a view about it, or at least didn’t.

It followed from an email I’d received a couple of days earlier, which read:

I am contacting you about a project NESTA  are currently working on in partnership with the Big Society Network called Your Local Budget.

Working with 10 pioneer local authorities, we are looking at how you can use participatory budgeting to develop new ways to give people a say in how mainstream local budgets are spent. Alongside this we will also be developing an online platform that enables members of the public to understand and scrutinise their local authority’s spending, and connect with each other to generate ideas for delivering better value for money in public spending.

We would like to share our thinking and get your thoughts on the online tool to get a sense of what is needed and where we can add value. You are invited to a round table discussion on Friday 19 November, 11am – 12.30pm at NESTA that will be chaired by Philip Colligan, Executive Director of the Public Services Lab. Following the meeting we intend to issue an invitation to tender for the online tool.

Apart from the short notice & terrible timing (it clashes with the Open Government Data Camp, to which you’d hope most of the people involved would be going), the main question I had was this:

Why?

I got the phone call because I couldn’t make the round table, and for some feedback, and this was the feedback I gave: I don’t understand why this is being done. At all.

Putting aside the participatory budgeting part (although this problem seems to be getting dealt with by Redbridge council and YouGov, whose solution is apparently being offered to all councils), there’s the question of the “online platform that enables members of the public to understand and scrutinise their local authority’s spending, and connect with each other to generate ideas for delivering better value for money in public spending.”

Excuse me? Most of the data hasn’t been published yet, there are several known organisations and groups (including OpenlyLocal) that have publicly stated they going to to be importing this data and doing things with it – visualising it, and allowing different views and analysis. Additionally, OpenlyLocal is already talking with several newspaper groups to help them re-use the data, and we are constantly evolving how we match and present the data.

Despite this, Nesta seems to have decided that it’s going to spend public money on coming up with a tendered solution to solve a problem that may be solved for zero cost by the private sector. Now I’m no roll-back-the-government red-in-tooth-and-claw free marketeer, but this is crazy, and I said as much to the person from Nesta.

Is the roundtable to decide whether the project should be done, or what should be done? I asked. The latter I was told. So, they’ve got some money and  have decided they’re going to spend it, even though the need may not be there. At a time when welfare payments are being cut, essential services are being slashed, for this sort of thing to happen is frankly outrageous.

There are other concerns here too – I personally think websites such as this are not suitable for a tender process, as that doesn’t encourage or often even allow the sort of agile, feedback-led process that produces the best websites. They also favour those who make their living by tendering.

So, Nesta, here’s a suggestion. Park this idea for 12 months, and in the meantime give the money back to the government. If you want to act as an angel funding then act as such (and the ones I’ve come across don’t do tendering). A reminder, your slogan is ‘making innovation flourish’, but sometimes that means stepping back and seeing what happens. This is not the way to building a Big Society

Open data, fraud… and some worrying advice

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmcl/

One of the most commonly quoted concerns about publishing public data on the web is the potential for fraud – and certainly the internet has opened up all sorts of new routes to fraud, from Nigerian email scams, to phishing for bank accounts logins, to key-loggers to indentity theft.

Many of these work using two factors – the acceptance of things at face value (if it looks like an email from your bank, it is an email from them), and flawed processes designed to stop fraud but which inconvenience real users while making life easy from criminals.

I mention this because of some pending advice from the Local Government Association to councils regarding the publication of spending data, which strikes me as not just flawed, but highly dangerous and an invitation to fraudsters.

The issue surrounds something that may seem almost trivial, but bear with me – it’s important, and it’s off such trivialities that fraudsters profit.

In the original guidance for councils on publishing spending data we said that councils should publish both their internal supplier IDs and the supplier VAT numbers, as it would greatly aid the matching of supplier names to real-world companies, charities and other organisations, which is crucial in understanding where a local council’s money goes.

When the Local Government Association published its Guidance For Practitioners it removed those recommendations in order to prevent fraud. It has also suggested using the internal supplier ID as a unique key to confirm supplier identity. This betrays a startling lack of understanding, and worse opens up a serious vector to allow criminals to defraud councils of large sums of money.

Let’s take the VAT numbers first. The main issue here appears to be so-called missing trader fraud, whereby VAT is fraudulently claimed back from governments. Now it’s not clear to me that by publishing VAT numbers for supplier names that this fraud is made easier, and you would think the Treasury who recommend publishing the VAT numbers for suppliers in their guidance (PDF) would be alert to this (I’m told they did check with HMRC before issuing their guidance).

However, that’s not the point. If it’s about matching VAT numbers to supplier names there’s already several routes for doing this, with the ability to retrieve tens of thousands of them in the space of an hour or so, including this one:

http://www.google.co.uk/#sclient=psy&hl=en&q=%27vat+number+gb%27+site:com

Click on that link and you’ll get something like this:

Whether you’re a programmer or not, you should be able to see that it’s a trivial matter to go through those thousands of results and extract the company name and VAT number, and bingo, you’ve got that which the LGA is so keen for you not to have. So those who are wanting to match council suppliers don’t get the help a VAT number would give, and fraudsters aren’t disadvantaged at all.

Now, let’s turn to the rather more serious issue of internal Supplier IDs. Let me make it clear here, when matching council or central government suppliers, internal Supplier IDs are useful, make the job easier, and the matching more accurate, and also help with understanding how much in total redacted payees are receiving (you’d be concerned if a redacted person/company received £100,000 over the course of a year, and without some form of supplier ID you won’t know that). However, it’s not some life-or-death battle over principle for me.

The reason the LGA, however, is advising councils not to publish them is much more serious, and dangerous. In short, they are proposing to use the internal Supplier ID as a key to confirm the suppliers identity, and so allow the supplier to change details, including the supplier bank account (the case brought up here to justify this was the recent one of South Lanarkshire, which didn’t involve any information published as open data, just plain old fraudster ingenuity).

Just think about that for a moment, and then imagine that it’s the internal ID number they use for you in connection with paying your housing benefits. If you want to change your details, say you wanted to pay the money into a different bank account, you’d have to quote it – and just how many of us would have somewhere both safe to keep it and easy to find (and what about when you separated from your partner).

Similarly, where and how do we really think suppliers are going to keep this ID (stuck on a post-it note to the accounts receivable’s computer screen?), and what happens when they lose it? How do they identify themselves to find out what it is, and how will a council go about issuing a new one should the old one be compromised – is there any way of doing this except by setting up a new supplier record, with all the problems that brings.

And how easy would it be to do a day or two’s temping in a council’s accounts department and do a dump/printout of all the Supplier IDs, and then pass them onto fraudsters. The possibilities – for criminals – are almost limitless, and the Information Commissioner’s Office should put a stop to this at once if it is not to lose a serious amount of credibility.

But there’s an bigger underlying issue here, and it’s not that organisations such as the LGA don’t get data (although that is a problem), it’s that such bodies think that by introducing processes they can engineer out all risk, and that leads to bad decisions. Tell someone that suppliers changing bank accounts is very rare and should always be treated with suspicion and fraud becomes more difficult; tell someone that they should accept internal supplier IDs as proof of identity and it becomes easy.

Government/big-company bureaucrats not only think like government/big-company bureaucrats, they build processes that assumes everyone else does. The problem is that that both makes more difficult for ordinary citizens (as most encounters with bureaucracy make clear), and also makes it easy for criminals (who by definition don’t follow the rules).

Opening up council accounts… and open procurement

Since OpenlyLocal started pulling in council spending data, it’s niggled at me that it’s only half the story. Yes, as more and more data is published you’re beginning to get a much clearer idea of who’s paid what. And if councils publish it at a sufficient level of detail and consistently categorised, we’ll have a pretty good idea of what it’s spent on too.

However, useful though that is, that’s like taking a peak at a company’s bank statement and thinking it tells the whole story. Many of the payments relate to goods or services delivered some time in the past, some for things that have not yet been delivered, and there are all sorts of things (depreciation, movements between accounts, accruals for invoices not yet received) that won’t appear on there.

That’s what the council’s accounts are for — you know, those impenetrable things locked up in PDFs in some dusty corner of the council’s website, all sufficiently different from each other to make comparison difficult:

For some time, the holy grail for projects like OpenlyLocal and Where Does My Money Go has been to get the accounts in a standardized form to make comparison easy not just for accountants but for regular people too.

The thing is, such a thing does exist, and it’s sent by councils to central Government (the Department for Communities and Local Government to be precise) for them to use in their own figures. It’s a fairly hellishly complex spreadsheet called the Revenue Outturn form that must be filled in by the council (to get an idea have a look at the template here).

They’re not published anywhere by the DCLG, but they contain no state secrets or sensitive information; it’s just that the procedure being followed is the same one as they’ve always followed, and so they are not published, even after the statistics have been calculated from the data (the Statistics Act apparently prohibit publication until the stats have been published).

So I had an idea: wouldn’t it be great if we could pull the data that’s sitting in all these spreadsheets into a database and so allow comparison between councils’ accounts, thus freeing it from those forgotten corners of government computers.

This would seem to be a project that would be just about simple enough to be doable (though it’s trickier than it seems) and could allow ordinary people to understand their council’s spending in all sorts of ways (particularly if we add some of those sexy Where Does My Money Go visualisations). It could also be useful in ways that we can barely imagine  – some of the participatory budget experiments going in on in Redbridge and other councils would be even more useful if the context of similar councils spending was added to the mix.

So how would this be funded. Well, the usual route would be for DCLG or perhaps the one of the Local Government Association bodies such as IDeA to scope out a proposal, involving many hours of meetings, reams of paper, and running up thousands of pounds in costs, even before it’s started.

They’d then put the process out to tender, involving many more thousands in admin, and designed to attract those companies who specialise in tendering for public sector work. Each of those would want to ensure they make a profit, and so would work out how they’re going to do it before quoting, running up their own costs, and inflating the final price.

So here’s part two of my plan, instead going down that route, I’d come up with a proposal that would:

• be a fraction of that cost
• be specified on a single sheet of paper
• paid for only if I delivered

Obviously there’s a clear potential conflict of interest here – I sit on the government’s Local Public Data Panel and am pushing strongly for open data, and also stand to benefit (depending on how good I am at getting the information out of those hundreds of spreadsheets, each with multiple worksheets, and matching the classification systems). The solution to that – I think – is to do the whole thing transparently, hence this blog post.

In a sense, what I’m proposing is that I scope out the project, solving those difficult problems of how to do it, with the bonus of instead of delivering a report, I deliver the project.

Is it a good thing to have all this data imported into a database, and shown not just on a website in a way non-accountants can understand, but also available to be combined with other data in mashups and visualisations? Definitely.

Is it a good deal for the taxpayer, and is this open procurement a useful way of doing things? Well you can read the proposal for yourself here, and I’d be really interested in comments both on the proposal and the novel procurement model.

New feature: one-click FoI requests for spending payments

Thanks to the incredible work of Francis Irving at WhatDoTheyKnow, we’ve now added a feature I’ve wanted on OpenlyLocal since we started imported the local spending data: one-click Freedom of Information requests on individual spending items, especially those large ones.

This further lowers the barriers to armchair auditors wanting to understand where the money goes, and the request even includes all the usual ‘boilerplate’ to help avoid specious refusals. I’ve started it off with one to Wandsworth, whose poor quality of spending data I discussed last week.

And this is the result, the whole process having taken less than a minute:

The requests are also being tagged. This means that in the near future you’ll be able to see on a transaction page if any requests have already been made about it, and the status of those requests (we’re just waiting for WDTK to implement search by tags), which will be the beginning of a highly interconnected transparency ecosystem.

In the meantime it’s worth checking the transaction hasn’t been requested before confirming your request on the WDTK page (there’s a link to recent requests for the council on the WDTK form you get to after pressing the button).

I’m also trusting the community will use this responsibly, digging out information on the big stuff, rather than firing off multiple requests to the same council for hundreds of individual items (which would in any case probably be deemed vexatious under the terms of the FoI Act). At the moment the feature’s only enabled on transactions over £10,000.

Good places to start would be those multi-million-pound monthly payments which indicate big outsourcing deals, or large redacted payments (Birmingham’s got a few). Have a look at the spending dashboard for your council and see if there are any such payments.

A simple demand: let us record council meetings

A couple of months ago we had the ridiculous situation of a local council hauling up one of their councillors in front of a displinary hearing for posting videos of the council meeting on YouTube.

The video originated from the council’s own webcasts, and the complaint by Councillor Kemble was that in posting these videos on YouTube, another councillor, Jason Kitcat

(i) had failed to treat his fellow councillors with respect, by posting the clips without the prior knowledge or express permission of Councillor Theobald or Councillor Mears; and
(ii) had abused council facilities by infringing the copyright in the webcast images

and in doing so had breached the Members Code of Conduct.

Astonishingly, the standards committee found against Kitcat and ruled he should be suspended for up to six months if he does not write an apology to Cllr Theobald and submit to re-training on the roles and responsibilities of being a councillor, and it is only the fact that he is appealing to the First-Tier Tribunal (which apparently the council has decided to fight using hire outside counsel) that has allowed him to continue.

It’s worth reading the investigator’s report (PDF, of course) in full for a fairly good example of just how petty and ridiculous these issues become, particularly when the investigator writes things such as:

I consider that Cllr Kitcat did use the council’s IT facilities improperly for political purposes. Most of the clips are about communal bins, a politically contentious issue at the time. The clips are about Cllr Kitcat holding the administration politically to account for the way the bins were introduced, and were intended to highlight what the he believed were the administration’s deficiencies in that regard, based on feedback from certain residents.
Most tellingly, clip no. 5 shows the Cabinet Member responsible for communal bins in an unflattering and politically unfavourable light, and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this highly abridged clip was selected and posted for political gain.

The using IT facilities, refers, by the way, not to using the council’s own computers to upload or edit the videos (it seems agreed by all that he used his own computer for this), but the fact that the webcasts were made and published on the web using the council’s equipment (or at least those of its supplier, Public-i). Presumably it he’d taken an extract from the minutes of a meeting published on the council’s website that would also have been using the council’s IT resources.

However, let’s step back a bit. This, ultimately, is not about councillors not understanding the web, failing to get get new technology and the ways it can open up debate. This is not even about the somewhat restrictive webcasting system which apparently only has the past six month’s meetings and is somewhat unpleasant to use (particularly if you use a Mac, or Linux — see a debate of the issues here).

This is about councillors failing to understand democracy, about the ability to taking the same material and making up your own mind, and critically trying to persuade others of that view.

In fact the investigator’s statement above, taking “a politically contentious issue at the time… holding the administration politically to account for the way the bins were introduced… to highlight what the he believed were the administration’s deficiencies in that regard” is surely a pretty good benchmark for a democracy.

So here’s simple suggestion for those drawing up the local government legislation at the moment, no let’s make that a demand, since that’s what it should be in a democracy (not a subservient request to your ‘betters’):

Give the public the right to record any council meeting using any device using Flip cams, tape recorders, frankly any darned thing they like as long as it doesn’t disrupt the meeting.

Not only would this open up council meetings and their obscure committees to wider scrutiny, it would also be a boost to hyperlocal sites that are beginning to take the place of the local media.

And if councils want to go to the expense of webcasting their meetings, then require them to make the webcasts available to download under an open licence. That way people can share them, convert them into open formats that don’t require proprietary software, subtititle them, and yes, even post them on YouTube.

I can already hear local politicians saying it will reduce the quality of political discourse, that people may use it in ways they don’t like and can’t control.

Does this seem familiar? It should. It’s the same arguments being given against publishing raw data. The public won’t understand. There may be different interpretations. How will people use it?

Well, folks that’s the point of a democracy. And that’s the point of a data democracy. We can use it in any way we damn well please. The public record is not there to make incumbent councillors or senior staff memebers look good. It’s there to allow the to be held to account. And to allow people to make up their own minds. Stop that, and you’re stopping democracy.

Links: For more posts relating to this case, see also Jason Kitcat’s own blog posts, Brighton Argus post, and posts form Mark Pack at Liberal Democrat voice, Jim Killock,  Conservative Home, and even a tweet from Local Government minister Grant Shapps.

Making OpenCharities even better… more features, more data, more charities

I had a fantastic response to the launch of OpenCharities — my little side project to open up the Charity Commission’s Register of Charities — from individuals, from organisations representing the third sector, and from charities themselves.

There were also a few questions:

• Could we pull out and expose via the api more info about the charities, especially the financial history?
• How often would OpenCharities be updated and what about new charities added after we’d scraped the register?
• Was there any possibility that we could add additional information from sources other than the Charity Register?

So, over the past week or so, we’ve been busy trying to answer those questions the best we could, mainly by just trying to get on and solve them.

First, additional info. After a terrifically illuminating meeting with Karl and David from NCVO, I had a much better idea of how the charity sector is structured, and what sort of information would be useful to people.

So the first thing I did was to rewrite the scraper and parser to pull in a lot more information, particularly the past 5 years income and spending and, for bigger charities the breakdown of that income and spending. (I also pulled in the remaining charities that had been missed the first time around, including removed charities.) Here’s what the NSPCC’s entry, for example, looks like now:

We are also now getting the list of trustees, and links to the accounts and Summary Information Returns, as there’s all sorts of goodness locked up in those PDFs.

However, while we running through the all these charities, we wondered if any of them had social networking info easily available (i.e. on their front page). It turns out some of the bigger ones did, and so we visited their sites and pulled out that info (it’s fairly easy to look for links for twitter/facebook/youtube etc on a home page). Here’s an example social networking info, again for the NSPCC.

[Incidentally, doing this threw up some errors in the Charity Register, most commonly websites that are listed as http://http://some.charity.org.uk, which in itself shows the benefit of opening up the data. All we need now is a way of communicating that to the Charity Commission.]

We also (after way too many hours wasted messing around with cookies and hidden form fields) figured out how to get the list of charities recently added, with the result that we can check every night for new charities added in the past 24 hours, and add those to the database.

This means not only can we keep OpenCharities up to date, it also means we can offer an RSS feed of the latest charities. And if that’s updated a bit too frequently for you (some days there are over 20 charities added), you can always restrict to a given search term, e.g http://OpenCharities/charities.rss?term=children for those charities with children in the title.

Finally, we’ve been looking at what other datasets we could link with the register, and I thought  a good one might be the list of grants given out by the various National Lottery funding bodies (which fortunately had already been scraped by the very talented Julian Todd using ScraperWiki).

Then it was a fairly simple matter of tying together the recipients with the register, and voila, you have something like this:

Note, at the time of writing, the import and match of the data is still going on, but should be finished by the end of today.

We’ll also add some simple functionality to show payments from local councils that’s being published in the local council spending data. The information’s already in the database (and is actually shown on the OpenlyLocal page for the charity); I just haven’t got around to displaying it on OpenCharities yet. Expect that to appear in the next day or so.

C

p.s. Big thanks to @ldodds and @pigsonthewing for helping with the RDF and microformats respectively

Drawing up the Local Spending Data guidelines… and how Google Docs saved the day

Last Thursday, the Local Public Data Panel on which I sit approved the final draft of the guidelines for publishing by councils of their spending over £500 (version 1.0 if you like). These started back in June, with a document Will Perrin and I drew up in response to a request from Camden council, and attracted a huge number of really helpful comments.

Since then, things have moved on a bit. The loose guidelines were fine as a starting point, especially as at that time we were talking theoretically, and hadn’t really had any concrete situations or data to deal with, but from speaking to councils, and actually using the data it became clear the something much firmer was needed.

What followed then was the usual public sector drafting nightmare, with various Word documents being emailed around, people getting very territorial, offline conversations, and frankly something that wasn’t getting very far.

However, a week beforehand I’d successfully used a shared Google Spreadsheet to free up a similar problem. In that case there were a bunch of organisations (including OpenlyLocal, the Local Government Association and Department for Communities and Local Government) that needed an up-to-date list of councils publishing spending data, together with the licence, URL and whether it was machine-readable (Basically what Adrian Short was doing here at one time – I’d asked him if he wanted to do it, but he didn’t have the time to keep his up-to-date.) In addition, it was clear that we each knew about councils the others didn’t.

The answer could have been a dedicated web app, a Word document that was added to and emailed around (actually that’s what started to happen). In the end, it was something much simpler – a Google spreadsheet with edit access given to multiple people. I used the OpenlyLocal API to populate the basic structure (including OpenlyLocal URLs, which mean that anyone getting the data via the API, or as a CSV would have a place they could query for more data), and bingo, it was sorted.

So given this success, Jonathan Evans from the LGA and  I agreed to use the Google Docs approach with the spending guidelines. There are multiple advantages to this, but some are particularly relevant for tackling such a problem:

• We can all work on the document at the same time, messaging each others as we go, avoiding the delays, arguments and territoriality of the document emailing approach.
• The version tracking means that all your changes, not just those of the saved version are visible to all participants (and to people who subsequently become participants). This seems to lead to a spirit of collaboration rather than position-taking, and at least on this occasion avoided edit-wars.
• The world can see the product of your work, without having to separately publish it (though see note below)

You can also automatically get the information as data, either through the Google Docs API or more likely in the case of a spreadsheet particularly, as a CSV file. Construct it with this in mind (i.e. 1 header row), and you’ve got something that can be instantly used in mashups and visualisations.

Important note 1: The biggest problem with this approach in central government is Internet Explorer 6, which the Department of Communities & Local Government are stuck on and have no plans to upgrade. This means the approach only works when people are prepared to make the additions at home, or some other place that have a browser less than 9 years old.

Important note 2: Despite having put together the spending scoreboard spreadsheet, we were hopeless at telling the wider world about it, meaning that Simon Rogers at the Guardian ended up duplicating much of the work. Interestingly he was missing some that we knew about, and vice versa, and I’ve offered him edit access to the main spreadsheet so we can all work together on the same one.

Important note 3: A smaller but nevertheless irritating problem with Google Documents (and this seems to be true of Word and OpenOffice too) is that when they contain tables you get a mess of inaccessible HTML, with the result that when the spending guidance was put on the Local Public Data Panel website, the HTML had to be largely rewritten from scratch (by one of the data.gov.uk stars late at night). So Google, if you’re listening, please allow an option to export as accessible HTML.