Reporting on public spending is key to accountability, but access and analysis of data is not always easy. This is why OpenBudgets.eu, Your Data Stories and DIGIWHIST, three H2020 projects, have focused on tracing public spending, data analysis and storytelling, in the name of accountability..
OpenBudgets.eu was launched in the first week of September and presented at the annual SEMANTiCS conference in Amsterdam. The annual SEMANTiCS conference is the meeting place for professionals who make semantic computing work, and understand its benefits and know its limitations. Every year, SEMANTiCS attracts information managers, IT-architects, software engineers, and researchers, from organisations ranging from NPOs, universities, public administrations to the largest companies in the world.
The OpenBudgets.eu platform offers several applications that are tailored to the needs of data wranglers and domain experts. Complex data mining algorithms are accompanied by state-of-the-art linked data tools that cover large aspects of the complexities involved in the work within the Resource Description Framework (RDF).
The OpenBudgets.eu platform offers several applications that are tailored to the needs of journalists. From ready-to-use massive databases containing budget and spending data to inspiring instances of invdstigative journalism in the field of fiscal corruption, valuable resources are available. This is an overview of the available tools and their function.
The OpenBudgets.eu platform offers several applications that are tailored to the needs of administrations and public officials. From easy-to-use budget visualisations to performance comparisons between cities and participatory budgeting mechanisms, a wide spectrum is available. This is an overview of the available tools and their function.
Today, OpenBudgets officially launches its fiscal transparency platform. Using OpenBudgets.eu journalists, civil servants, and data scientists can process, analyse, and explore the nature and relevance of fiscal data.
As part of our OpenBudgets.eu research we collected twitter data to get an idea of the stakeholders regarding the EU Structural Funds. The analysis was focused on all tweets with the hashtag #cohesionpolicy starting on December 12, 2016 until July 25, 2017..
For most municipalities, participatory budgeting is a relatively new approach to include their citizens directly in the decision making for new investments and developments in their community.
OpenBudgets.eu and Datenschule organised the Story Hunt this spring: a program for Journalists, Activists, NGOs, Designers, and Coders to dive into EU financial flows. The program was based on the previous work of subsidystories.eu; the data collection project brining together all EU subsidy data. StoryHunt encouraged the participants to take a closer look at the data and find stories and leads. The program consisted of two parts: a workshop series and a weekend long data dive. This blogpost reviews the workshop sessions, our weekend recap can be found here.