<commit_before>---
title: What we get up to
layout: meta
---

Here are some of the projects, past and present that we have been involved with so far...

## What are we up to at present? 

<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>

<h3> Cameroon Budget Inquirer </h3>

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8340/8287000485_4daf7d73da_n.jpg" title="Cameroon Budget Inquirer" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" />

We're collaborating with the World Bank to produce a citizen-friendly representation of Cameroon's budget. 

The project incorporates the open-source 'bubble visualisations' first seen in Where Does My Money Go, as well as many new elements, such as a map based navigation and heatmaps. The project will include 

<ul>
<li>Visualisation of the National Investment Budget, the North-West region's budget of Cameroon (including absolute and per-capita estimates, budgeted as well as actual figures) as well as a similar visualisation of the Tignere local council budget </li>
<li>A sub-national budget transparency index - similar to the work of the International Budget Partnership, but at sub-national levels. This highlights the availability of key budget documents and ranks regions on their availability. </li>
<li> Explore the data: Filter the data by categories such as amount, location, and activity </li> 
</ul> 
</div> 

<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>

<h3> Bosnian Budget Bubbles </h3>

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8063/8219557569_cc12ebbdea_m.jpg" title="Balkan Budgets" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />

We're pleased to announce that the Where Does My Money Go bubbles are on their way to the Balkans! Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, the OpenSpending team will be working with the Centre for Public Interest Advocacy in Bosnia to produce interactive graphics of national and subnational budgets in Bosnia. 

As part of this project we will be:

<ul>

<li> Building visualisations of national, entity-, cantonal- and district-level budgets for Bosnia </li>
<li> Doing training and capacity building workshops with organisations from other Balkan countries, on getting, wrangling and presenting financial data (with OpenSpending and other tools) </li>
<li> Building a tax calculator for Bosnia (similar to the <a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html">Daily Bread.</a> </li>
<li> Test-driving the <a href="http://openspending.org/resources/handbook/ch001_introduction.html">Spending Data Handbook.</a> and augment it with a more technical primer, for those organisations wishing to do more ambitious data work</li>
</ul> 

<a href="http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/26/Balkan-Budgets.html">Read more about the project.</a>

</div> 

<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>

<h3> Spending Stories </h3> 

In 2011, the Open Knowledge Foundation was awarded a Knight News Challenge Grant to work on the <a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/18/spending-stories/">Spending Stories</a> Project. Large numbers are often meaningless to the general public and despite a wealth of information around government spending, the topic of government finance is often overlooked by journalists. The Spending Stories project aims to facilitate reporting by speed up fact-checking around spending data as well as connecting news stories about public spending to relevant datasets and visualisations, to put these stories into context. 

We're into our second year of the project now. <a href="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2012/12/follow-the-money-a-spending-stories-guide-for-journalists345.html">See what we are up to by following our updates on the PBS Idea Lab blog.</a>
 
</div> 

## Already unleashed into the wild 

### Where Does My Money Go? 

<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7088/7315252358_7dae93b263.jpg" title="WDMMG original" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250" />

[Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) (WDMMG) is the project from which OpenSpending was born. Funded originally by 4IP, it allows UK citizens to examine where their taxes are being spent through an interactive 'bubble tree' visualisation. They can even find out how much they contribute on a daily basis through their taxes to various sectors of society through the [Daily Bread](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html) app. 

You can now build a site such as WDMMG for your own country using the OpenSpending API and the WDMMG Toolkit. 

* [Visit the Where Does My Money Go? project](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/)
* [Follow Where Does My Money Go? on Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/wdmmg)
* [Read more about how to create your own Where Does My Money Go? site](http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/16/thekit/)

### OffenerHaushalt 

<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7077/7315281352_2c00d928d8.jpg" title="Offener Haushalt" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250" />

[OffenerHaushalt](http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/) allows users to explore and drill down through the various layers of Germany's federal budget, comparing data from as far back as 2006. Through the new tree maps, the user can easily see and explore the different departments and programmes and see how much is spent, proportion and statistics on changes between years. 

The success of Offener Haushalt and the demand to roll it out on a local level was one of the prime motivations for the creation of OpenSpending. 

* [Visit the OffenerHaushalt Project](http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/)
* [Follow OffenerHaushalt on Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/offenerhaushalt)

### Uganda Aid Visualisation 

Aid flows often do not pass through a recipient government’s conventional budget mechanisms. When this happens, recipient governments themselves may not have the complete overview of where aid money goes and how donor priorities align with their own. This information is vital for governments and aid donors to be able to make the best use of scarce resources.

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8159/7315314386_7940819de6.jpg" title="Uganda Aid" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250"  />

Normally this overview is not available – leading to waste, overlap and inefficiency. The lack of comparable information means aid donors and recipient country governments can’t work together to coordinate their efforts, or understand how donor priorities align with recipient priorities; it decreases developing country governments' ownership and undermines the potential for good governance and planning. Donors and governments need to know what others are doing - and crucially, what others are planning on doing - if they are to make sure that these resources are used most effectively. Otherwise, some sectors and areas will not receive enough funding, while others may have too many donors involved.

The Uganda aid visualisation project was a joint between the OKFN and Publish What You Fund to combine two key types of fiscal data, revenues from aid together with spending information, and present them together in an informative way for the first time through an interactive visualisation.

* [Visit the Publish What You Fund Uganda Visualisation Project](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/uganda/uganda-with-data.htm)
* [Visit Publish What You Fund's website](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/)
* [Uganda Budget and Aid to Uganda, 2003-2006 dataset in OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/ugandabudget)

#### Coverage of the Uganda Visualisation 

* [Guardian Poverty Matters Blog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/uganda-aid-confusion-analyse-spending?newsfeed=true)

### IATI

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8007/7315331330_4dafe5ea48.jpg" title="IATI" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250"  />

The International Aid Transparency Initiative is a common format for publishing aid information. 29 signatories representing 75% of global Official Development Finance have committed to reporting timely information about their aid activities in this standard format. Already, 13 signatories representing 45% of ODF have published.

IATI publishers release the data as open data feeds in a common XML format through their own websites. They then register their data with the IATI Registry - which runs on the Open Knowledge Foundation's CKAN software - making it easy for users to find this data.

However, the nature of IATI as a distributed collection of raw data feeds also presents a challenge to non-technical users. The Open Knowledge Foundation worked with Publish What You Fund to transform the data into a format suitable for import into OpenSpending, where the data can be much more easily visualised and analysed.

* [View the IATI data on OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/iati?_time=2011)

## Stories and Data Journalism 

### Data Journalism

<img alt="" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6166/6151919267_897ccfbd1c.jpg" title="<NAME>" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250"  />

We regularly conduct training sessions for journalists on how to locate, extract, work with and visualise spending and other types of data. If you are interested in exploring these possibilities, please get in touch via info [at] openspending.org. 

* [Workshop on EU Spending, Utrecht](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/08/09/data-driven-journalism-workshop-on-eu-spending-tools-techniques-utrecht-8th-9th-september/)
* [EuroHack: One-day data journalism competition and workshop on EU spending](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/09/27/eurohack-one-day-data-journalism-competition-and-workshop-on-eu-spending/)

We are also delighted to work closely with journalists from around the world on Spending related stories. We hope to do a lot more of this in future. Here's a couple of our favourites so far...  

### Privacy International 

<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7213/7315271184_921d9ed606.jpg" title="<NAME>" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250"  />

In early 2012, Privacy International recently approached the Spending Stories team to ask for a search widget to be able to search across all of the government spending datasets held in OpenSpending. They had a list of companies which exhibited at the famous surveillance technology conferences in the US, the so-called Wiretappers' Ball, as well as a list of attendees of the conference and wanted to check which attendees also became customers of these companies. 

Some attendees posed no surprises, the FBI, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency and Interpol to name a few, but there are a few that are downright baffling, like the US Department of Commerce, the US Fish & Wildlife Service and the Clark County School District Police Department.

As more datasets are loaded into OpenSpending, this universal search will get increasingly more powerful, and we look forward to hearing what other people use the search for. 

* [Try out the search for yourself in the spendbrowser](http://opendatalabs.org/spendbrowser)
* [Read more about the story](http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/24/how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball/)

### France - PLF 2012

We experienced an extremely high traffic spike when a visualisation based on French data was featured in Le Monde.

The article "PLF : des avions au bouclier fiscal, la java des amendements", (PLF=Projet de loi de finances, the draft finance law) deals with suggested amendments to the draft finance law and which parties were demanding what amendments.
<commit_msg>Portfolio<commit_after>---
title: What we get up to
layout: meta
---

Here are some of the projects, past and present that we have been involved with so far...

## What are we up to at present? 

<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>

<h3> Cameroon Budget Inquirer </h3>

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8340/8287000485_4daf7d73da_n.jpg" title="Cameroon Budget Inquirer" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 2em;" />

We're collaborating with the World Bank to produce a citizen-friendly representation of Cameroon's budget. 

The project incorporates the open-source 'bubble visualisations' first seen in Where Does My Money Go, as well as many new elements, such as a map based navigation and heatmaps. The project will include 

<ul>
<li>Visualisation of the National Investment Budget, the North-West region's budget of Cameroon (including absolute and per-capita estimates, budgeted as well as actual figures) as well as a similar visualisation of the Tignere local council budget </li>
<li>A sub-national budget transparency index - similar to the work of the International Budget Partnership, but at sub-national levels. This highlights the availability of key budget documents and ranks regions on their availability. </li>
<li> Explore the data: Filter the data by categories such as amount, location, and activity </li> 
</ul> 
</div> 

<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>

<h3> Bosnian Budget Bubbles </h3>

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8063/8219557569_cc12ebbdea_m.jpg" title="Balkan Budgets" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" />

We're pleased to announce that the Where Does My Money Go bubbles are on their way to the Balkans! Thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for Democracy, the OpenSpending team will be working with the Centre for Public Interest Advocacy in Bosnia to produce interactive graphics of national and subnational budgets in Bosnia. 

As part of this project we will be:

<ul>

<li> Building visualisations of national, entity-, cantonal- and district-level budgets for Bosnia </li>
<li> Doing training and capacity building workshops with organisations from other Balkan countries, on getting, wrangling and presenting financial data (with OpenSpending and other tools) </li>
<li> Building a tax calculator for Bosnia (similar to the <a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html">Daily Bread.</a> </li>
<li> Test-driving the <a href="http://openspending.org/resources/handbook/ch001_introduction.html">Spending Data Handbook.</a> and augment it with a more technical primer, for those organisations wishing to do more ambitious data work</li>
</ul> 

<a href="http://openspending.org/blog/2012/09/26/Balkan-Budgets.html">Read more about the project.</a>

</div> 

<div class="well" 'markdown="1"'>

<h3> Spending Stories </h3> 

In 2011, the Open Knowledge Foundation was awarded a Knight News Challenge Grant to work on the <a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2011/01/18/spending-stories/">Spending Stories</a> Project. Large numbers are often meaningless to the general public and despite a wealth of information around government spending, the topic of government finance is often overlooked by journalists. The Spending Stories project aims to facilitate reporting by speed up fact-checking around spending data as well as connecting news stories about public spending to relevant datasets and visualisations, to put these stories into context. 

We're into our second year of the project now. <a href="http://www.pbs.org/idealab/2012/12/follow-the-money-a-spending-stories-guide-for-journalists345.html">See what we are up to by following our updates on the PBS Idea Lab blog.</a>
 
</div> 

## Already unleashed into the wild 

### Where Does My Money Go? 

<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7088/7315252358_7dae93b263.jpg" title="WDMMG original" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250" />

[Where Does My Money Go?](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/) (WDMMG) is the project from which OpenSpending was born. Funded originally by 4IP, it allows UK citizens to examine where their taxes are being spent through an interactive 'bubble tree' visualisation. They can even find out how much they contribute on a daily basis through their taxes to various sectors of society through the [Daily Bread](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/dailybread.html) app. 

You can now build a site such as WDMMG for your own country using the OpenSpending API and the WDMMG Toolkit. 

* [Visit the Where Does My Money Go? project](http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/)
* [Follow Where Does My Money Go? on Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/wdmmg)
* [Read more about how to create your own Where Does My Money Go? site](http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/16/thekit/)

### OffenerHaushalt 

<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7077/7315281352_2c00d928d8.jpg" title="Offener Haushalt" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250" />

[OffenerHaushalt](http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/) allows users to explore and drill down through the various layers of Germany's federal budget, comparing data from as far back as 2006. Through the new tree maps, the user can easily see and explore the different departments and programmes and see how much is spent, proportion and statistics on changes between years. 

The success of Offener Haushalt and the demand to roll it out on a local level was one of the prime motivations for the creation of OpenSpending. 

* [Visit the OffenerHaushalt Project](http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/)
* [Follow OffenerHaushalt on Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/offenerhaushalt)

### Uganda Aid Visualisation 

Aid flows often do not pass through a recipient government’s conventional budget mechanisms. When this happens, recipient governments themselves may not have the complete overview of where aid money goes and how donor priorities align with their own. This information is vital for governments and aid donors to be able to make the best use of scarce resources.

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8159/7315314386_7940819de6.jpg" title="Uganda Aid" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250"  />

Normally this overview is not available – leading to waste, overlap and inefficiency. The lack of comparable information means aid donors and recipient country governments can’t work together to coordinate their efforts, or understand how donor priorities align with recipient priorities; it decreases developing country governments' ownership and undermines the potential for good governance and planning. Donors and governments need to know what others are doing - and crucially, what others are planning on doing - if they are to make sure that these resources are used most effectively. Otherwise, some sectors and areas will not receive enough funding, while others may have too many donors involved.

The Uganda aid visualisation project was a joint between the OKFN and Publish What You Fund to combine two key types of fiscal data, revenues from aid together with spending information, and present them together in an informative way for the first time through an interactive visualisation.

* [Visit the Publish What You Fund Uganda Visualisation Project](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/uganda/uganda-with-data.htm)
* [Visit Publish What You Fund's website](http://www.publishwhatyoufund.org/)
* [Uganda Budget and Aid to Uganda, 2003-2006 dataset in OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/ugandabudget)

#### Coverage of the Uganda Visualisation 

* [Guardian Poverty Matters Blog](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/25/uganda-aid-confusion-analyse-spending?newsfeed=true)

### IATI

The International Aid Transparency Initiative is a common format for publishing aid information. 29 signatories representing 75% of global Official Development Finance have committed to reporting timely information about their aid activities in this standard format. Already, 13 signatories representing 45% of ODF have published.

<img alt="" src="http://farm9.staticflickr.com/8007/7315331330_4dafe5ea48.jpg" title="IATI" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250"  />

IATI publishers release the data as open data feeds in a common XML format through their own websites. They then register their data with the IATI Registry - which runs on the Open Knowledge Foundation's CKAN software - making it easy for users to find this data.

However, the nature of IATI as a distributed collection of raw data feeds also presents a challenge to non-technical users. The Open Knowledge Foundation worked with Publish What You Fund to transform the data into a format suitable for import into OpenSpending, where the data can be much more easily visualised and analysed.

* [View the IATI data on OpenSpending](http://openspending.org/iati?_time=2011)

## Stories and Data Journalism 

### Data Journalism

<img alt="" src="http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6166/6151919267_897ccfbd1c.jpg" title="<NAME>" class="pull-left" style="margin-right: 1em;" width="250"  />

We regularly conduct training sessions for journalists on how to locate, extract, work with and visualise spending and other types of data. If you are interested in exploring these possibilities, please get in touch via info [at] openspending.org. 

* [Workshop on EU Spending, Utrecht](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/08/09/data-driven-journalism-workshop-on-eu-spending-tools-techniques-utrecht-8th-9th-september/)
* [EuroHack: One-day data journalism competition and workshop on EU spending](http://blog.okfn.org/2011/09/27/eurohack-one-day-data-journalism-competition-and-workshop-on-eu-spending/)

We are also delighted to work closely with journalists from around the world on Spending related stories. We hope to do a lot more of this in future. Here's a couple of our favourites so far...  

### Privacy International 

In early 2012, Privacy International recently approached the Spending Stories team to ask for a search widget to be able to search across all of the government spending datasets held in OpenSpending. They had a list of companies which exhibited at the famous surveillance technology conferences in the US, the so-called Wiretappers' Ball, as well as a list of attendees of the conference and wanted to check which attendees also became customers of these companies. 

<img alt="" src="http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7213/7315271184_921d9ed606.jpg" title="<NAME>" class="pull-right" style="margin-left: 1em;" width="250"  />

Some attendees posed no surprises, the FBI, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency and Interpol to name a few, but there are a few that are downright baffling, like the US Department of Commerce, the US Fish & Wildlife Service and the Clark County School District Police Department.

As more datasets are loaded into OpenSpending, this universal search will get increasingly more powerful, and we look forward to hearing what other people use the search for. 

* [Try out the search for yourself in the spendbrowser](http://opendatalabs.org/spendbrowser)
* [Read more about the story](http://blog.openspending.org/2012/02/24/how-spending-stories-fact-checks-big-brother-the-wiretappers-ball/)

### France - PLF 2012

We experienced an extremely high traffic spike when a visualisation based on French data was featured in Le Monde.

The article "PLF : des avions au bouclier fiscal, la java des amendements", (PLF=Projet de loi de finances, the draft finance law) deals with suggested amendments to the draft finance law and which parties were demanding what amendments.

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