Presentation of the OpenBudgets.eu project at the OGP meeting

A post by Olga Kalatzi of Open Knowledge Greece Journalists.

The participation and involvement of governmental bodies, stakeholders and citizens in order to promote open data initiatives and open government was one of the main goals of the event “Open Government: Participate, Propose and Be Heard! Conformation of the Third National Action Plan 2016-2018.”

The event was co-organized by the Ministry of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, Aristotle University and Open Knowledge Greece, on the 30th of May. The first part included speeches, among the speakers were Christoforos Vernardakis, the Alternate Minister of Interior and Administrative Reconstruction, Cecile LeGuen, Open Knowledge International, Open Spending Project Manager & OGP GIFT Network, Charalampos Bratsas, CEO of Open Knowledge Greece and members from the regional Administration of Western Macedonia and the municipality of Thessaloniki. The second part was a workshop where the participants, divided in four teams, made proposals on open government, based on the three issue areas of integrity and accountability, access to information and authorization to the citizens.

A lot of focus is given to open budget initiatives as part of strengthening and promoting the fiscal transparency of the country. Cecile LeGuen introduced the Fiscal Openness Working Group that helps and supports OGP member governments to implement their commitments on open budgets. Additionally, Open Knowledge has developed an Open Fiscal Data Package for publishing information on budgets in open data formats.

Open Knowledge Greece in particular, as part of Η2020 OpenBudgets.eu, is currently selecting and analyzing the financial performance indicators from a number of municipalities that are provided by the government according to the law and creates visualizations. Thus, it is an important step towards the reinforcement of transparency and accountability of public services, and corruption tackling.

Moreover, a new collaborative concept linking tool was presented. Users, assisted by the application, can create links between fiscal code lists, expressed in the Standard Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) vocabulary. By linking code lists among different countries and organization, the end user is one step closer to achieve the comparative analysis between otherwise incomparable budget data. For instance, the road-cleaning expenditure in Thessaloniki and Barcelona can now be normalized and automatically compared, as long as the links of the budget items are in place.

The participants the OGP meeting

Additionally, there is a significant interest in local level expressed by the administrations. The regional Administration of Western Macedonia has made two commitments on budget. The first is open budget that enables the citizens to see the administration’s budget and monitor its implementation. However, the data is available only in spreadsheet format and there is a need to create aggregate diagrams and visualizations, as well as real-time update on the data.

The second one concerns the participation budget which will give the citizens the opportunity to vote and co-decide the budgetary management. As Mr. Theodoropoulos, Investments Evaluator at Region of Western Macedonia, presented to the event there will be a pilot program, as part of e-participation and e-democracy, where people could decide where to invest a certain amount of money (100.000 EUR). At the beginning the money will be invested in promoting cultural and touristic services.

These initiatives could be optimized by OpenBudgets.eu and certain stakeholders, for instance journalists and businesses. There is a shift towards Data Journalism and Investigative Journalism, where open data on budget and other governmental information and its data services (platforms) are a key factor to create interesting and meaningful stories for the citizens.

Recently, even more data on budget have become available to the public because of the current situation with the law that forces the openness of the public information. The OpenBudget.eu project can have a great impact on supporting and promoting such fiscal transparency initiatives.

More information: Open Knowledge International blog post