---
redirect_from: /2013/08/openspending-news-round-up-august-12/
title: OpenSpending News Round-up, August 12
authors:
- Teodora Beleaga
---
<p dir="ltr">Fiscal transparency never sleeps, and neither does the OpenSpending community. To keep track of all happenings across the open spending spectrum, we’re rounding up on latest blogs, stories and datasets each week. But we’re only human, so if we miss anything, give us a nudge at info [at] openspending [dot] org.

<p dir="ltr"><strong>Updates from the community</strong>

<a href="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/08/OS-Capture.png"><img class="size-medium wp-image-624 alignleft" src="http://blog.openspending.org/files/2013/08/OS-Capture-300x159.png" alt="OS Capture" width="300" height="159" /></a>

<p dir="ltr">Last week saw several accounts of the <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/06/30/spending-data-party-announce/">City Spending Data Party</a> we hosted in July, 19-21. <a href="http://okfn.org/members/prakashneupane/">Prakash Neupane</a> shared the systematic way in which our community in Kathmandu, Nepal approached the <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/08/05/kathmandu-metropolitan-spending-party/">city’s expenditure data</a>, in addition to <a href="http://np.okfn.org/2013/07/24/kathmandu-metropolitan-in-city-spending-data-party/">the more detailed account</a> available on the Nepalese OKFN website.<!--more-->

In Lagos, Nigeria the people at <a href="http://yourbudgit.com/">BugtIT</a> visualised the city’s revenue and expenditure. Showing year-on-year changes from 2008 to 2013 this is a great example of <a href="http://www.thefunctionalart.com/">functional art</a>. <a href="http://okfn.org/members/oluseunonigbinde/">Oluseun Onigbinde</a> <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/08/02/lagos-city-spending-party/">blogged </a>about how the team in Lagos put this together.

Further accounts of <a href="http://blog.openspending.org/2013/07/26/city-spending-party-around-the-world/">the City Spending Party</a> are still to come. If you were part of the project and are yet to share your experience (Toronto and Tokyo, Tel Aviv or San Francisco, we mean your amazing work) please get in touch at info [at] openspending [dot] org.

In the community, Michael Bauer from the School of Data <a href="http://mihi-tr.github.io/openspending-sankey/">experimented</a> with Sankey diagrams made using d3.js and BOOST data from Kenya. Data journalist David Cabo also showed how he visualised budgets from <a href="http://aurrekontuak.irekia.euskadi.net/en/budgets">Euskadi</a> and <a href="http://presupuesto.aragon.es/resumen">Aragon</a>, both Spain.

<strong>Financial transparency around the world</strong>

<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2013/08/07/introducing-the-open-economics-principles/">The Open Economics Principles</a> were made available as part of the Open Economics project at the Open Knowledge Foundation. In <a href="http://okfn.org/members/vndimitrova/">Velichka Dimitrova’s</a> words, Project Coordinator of Open Economics, they are “the guiding principles of transparency and accountability in economics that would enable replication and scholarly debate as well as access to knowledge as a public good.” Add your endorsement to the principles <a href="http://openeconomics.net/principles/">here</a>.

<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/23/slovenia-launches-supervizor-an-official-public-web-app-for-monitoring-public-spending/">Slovenia’s public web portal</a> designed to monitor government spending and expose corruption has won the prestigious <a href="http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/pressrels/2013/unisinf479.html">UN Public Service Award</a>.

Marc Joffe, principal consultant at <a href="http://www.publicsectorcredit.org/">Public Sector Credit Solutions</a> and Ian Makgill, managing director of the <a href="http://www.spendnetwork.com/">Spend Network</a>, both part of the OpenSpending community, reviewed at <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/local-government-network/2013/aug/01/open-governance-projects-compare-council-finances">the Guardian</a> how local municipality projects work to open up spending, referencing other great projects such as <a href="http://openbudgetoakland.org/">OpenBudget Oakland</a> and <a href="https://github.com/hasadna/omuni-budget">Open Muni</a> from Hasadna.

Interested in the Oakland Community Democracy project instead? The OpenSpending community found <a href="http://www.shareable.net/blog/community-democracy-project-to-open-entire-city-budget">this article</a> worth a read.

The <a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/">Sunlight Foundation</a> and <a href="http://codeforamerica.org/">Code for America</a> have teamed up to produce what they hope will be the most comprehensive survey of local procurement processes. Working in local US government? Give them a hand by filling in <a href="https://codeforamerica.wufoo.com/forms/local-gov-procurement-survey/">this</a> form.

<strong>New datasets on OpenSpending Datasets</strong>

<a href="http://openspending.org/financial_aid">EU Financial Crisis Aid</a> as donated by country from 2008 to 2011 has been uploaded and visualised on OpenSpending.

<a href="https://github.com/openspending/datatoload/issues.">datatoload</a> is the place where we track government spending data that yet has to be loaded into OpenSpending. We have data from Massachusetts and New York to Finland and Moldova awaiting to be cleaned. Kudos to our team of data wranglers for claiming datasets and working their magic at unlocking data from pdfs and cleaning spreadsheets up. Want to join them? Get in touch at the data wrangling mailinglist

<strong>Did we miss anything?</strong>

While we strive to produce a comprehensive snippet of the fiscal transparency landscape across the world, this mammoth task gets the better of us every once in awhile. When that happens we trust we can rely on the wonderful community at the heart of OpenSpending to give us a nudge at info [at] openspending [dot] org.

