The Doodle Poll is out here – please fill it in if you would like to join to help us schedule the call.

If you would like to join, please also add your name and Skype ID to the pad here – then I will add you on Skype before the call. As usual, please feel free to add to and modify the agenda.

Suggested topics for the call

• Best practice (for different stages of pb process) – current examples
• Preventing:
  • Bias in decisions offered
  • Undue influence from special interest groups
  • Gaming the system
  • Herding effects
• Promoting:
  • Voting after sufficient deliberation
  • Maximum participation
  • Maximum information
  • Come-back-next time
• Personal profiles and authentication

I hope you will be able to join us. Please contact me via lucy.chambers [at] okfn.org if you have any questions.

You can contribute to and edit these notes directly via this wiki page

If you are interested in joining the next call, Thursday 8th March, 5pm GMT, please add your name and Skype ID to the etherpad. In the meantime, discussion will continue via the Participatory Budgeting Google Group.

Outline of discussion (more detailed notes on the wiki)

• We worked a lot around the PB budget software census – please continue to add examples and thoughts here

Topics raised

• Before examining technical approaches, what should we bear in mind? Notes in Wiki section
• Personal experiences and lessons learned in using software for PB. Notes in Wiki section
• Classification of PB tools in the census. Please feel free to comment on and edit the classifications in the wiki page:
  • Deliberation – Allows user input, crowdsourcing ideas and facilitating discussion e.g. collecting ideas for projects
  • Simulation – Allows participants to explore how certain spending/revenue choices impact the budget. Such applications are usually educational.
  • Cuts and Additions Users given simple choice to prioritise a given choice more or less highly. Can be used to propose politically unpopular activities (i.e. Poison List).
  • Trade Offs Users given context on the impact of proposed choices and asked to assess relative benefits
  • Personal Impact Users shown what the impact on them personally would be (e.g. increasing spending above budget levels increasing the amount of tax they pay as an individual)
  • Problem Fixing Ask for allocations of more money to solve particular problems that people care about (e.g. on a Fix My Street model)
  • Invite to offline-participation No survey conducted online, but technology used to issue invitations e.g. to town hall meetings where projects will be discussed
  • Kickstart/Pledgebank If additional funds required to get a project off the ground – feedback and the opportunity for citizens to make in-kind or cash contributions
  • Long Term e.g. capital investments
  • Immediate Term e.g. for the next year’s budget
• Tools to aid comprehension of the budget process: How do we ensure that people casting their vote through this system genuinely understand the choices they are about to make? Notes in Wiki section
• Who are the users? Notes in Wiki Section Clear feeling amongst participants that any application that is built must address the needs of the entire spectrum of users. I have added a key in a tab on the PB census called ‘User Key’ – where we briefly attempted to categorise the types of users who may be expected to interact with this system – I would be grateful to anyone who would like to add to it and also help me to complete the ‘Types of user’ column on the main sheet!

Where Do We Go From Here?

You decide, but I would suggest:

• Planning a followup call (5pm GMT, Thursday 8th March, please add agenda items to the etherpad)

And in the meanwhile:

Please share your thoughts on the discussion (please add anything if I have forgotten) via the Participatory Budgeting Google Group:

• Categorisations and
• User groups section of the census

• When: Today, 5pm GMT
• How to join: Add your name and Skype ID to the etherpad

We’re also conducting a Software for Participatory Budgeting Census – if you know of examples which should be in there please add them to this spreadsheet!

Suggested topics (please feel free to add to these in the etherpad):

• Personal experience with using software for PB:
  • Any shining examples stand out?
  • Any frustrations
• Case Studies
  • Geographical focus (idiosyncrasies we need to take into account)
  • Mobile
  • Web
• Measures of success
  • PB has many pieces, which software is best for which piece?
  • Setting up a common framework for impact evaluation
  • Scalability
  • Penetration
  • User retention
  • Epistemic value
• Relevant topics for PB?
  • deliberation on entire budgets at once
  • local / national
  • demand and supply of services & infrastructure
  • problem-solving (a la fix my street – requests for more funds to be directed to solve a problem)
  • allocating resources for area regeneration
  • directing statutory funds to voluntary sector organisations
  • Structural funds – national co-funding
  • Exploring tradeoffs
• Which stages of the PB cycle to focus on?
• Probably no universal solutions – but what are the minimum common principles which can be identified and is there a tech solution for them?
• Low-hanging fruit – what are the next steps in coming months to take this to the next level?

If you can’t make the call – please feel free to contribute to the discussion via the Participatory Budgeting Google Group.

Today, the global surveillance industry is estimated at around $5 billion a year. But which companies are selling? Which governments are buying? And why should we care?

We show how the OpenSpending platform can be used to speed up fact checking, showing which of these companies have government contracts, and, most interestingly, with which departments…

The Background

Big Brother is now indisputably big business, yet until recently the international trade in surveillance technologies remained largely under the radar of regulators and civil society. Buyers and suppliers meet, mingle and transact at secretive trade conferences around the world, and the details of their dealings are often shielded from public scrutiny by the ubiquitous defence of ‘national security’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this environment has bred a widespread disregard for ethics and a culture in which the single-minded pursuit of profit is commonplace.

For years, European and American companies have been quietly selling surveillance equipment and software to dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa – products that have allowed these regimes to maintain a stranglehold over free expression, smother the flames of political dissent and target individuals for arrest, torture and execution.

They include devices that intercept mobile phone calls and text messages in real time on a mass scale, malware and spyware that gives the purchaser complete control over a target’s computer and trojans that allow the camera and microphone on a laptop or mobile phone to be remotely switched on and operated. These technologies are also being bought by Western law enforcement, including small police departments in which the ability of officers to understand the legal parameters, levels of accuracy and limits of acceptability is highly questionable.

The data that has just been released on the Privacy International Website included the following:

1. An updated list of companies selling surveillance technology, and
2. Naming all the government agencies attending an international surveillance trade show known as the wiretappers ball.

Some names are predictable enough: the FBI, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, the UK Serious Organized Crime Agency and Interpol, for example. The presence of others is deeply disturbing: the national security agencies of Bahrain and Yemen, the embassies of Belarus and the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Kenyan intelligence agency, to name but a few. A few are downright baffling, like the US department of Commerce or the US Fish & Wildlife Service and Clark County School District Police Department.

Now, with the aid of OpenSpending, anyone can cross reference which contracts these companies hold with governments around the world. The investigation continues…

Using OpenSpending to speed up fact-checking

Privacy International approached the Spending Stories team to ask for a search widget to be able to search across all of the government spending datasets for contracts held between governments and these companies (until this point, it had only been possible to search one database at a time).

The Spending Browser is now live at http://opendatalabs.org/spendbrowser. And, as the URLs correspond to the queries, individual searches can be passed on for further examination and, importantly, embedded in articles directly. Try it yourself against the list of companies listed in the Surveillance Section of the Privacy International Site (Just enter a company e.g. ‘Endace Accelerated’ into the search bar).

The Spending Browser will become increasingly more powerful as ever more data is loaded into the system.

Want to help make this tool even more powerful? Get involved and help to build up the data bank.

Coverage

You can read more about the background to these stories on the Privacy International Site and recent coverage by the International Media:

• Privacy International investigates the sale of surveillance technology
• Guardian Surveillance trade shows: which government agencies attend?
• Wall Street Journal High-Tech Surveillance Comes to Small Towns

Thanks to our API, there can be an infinite number of answers. With the BubbleTree diagram, the Daily Bread application and the transactional spending browser, we have a few simple answers.

But as Michal Škop blogged recently, up to now it has been fairly difficult to use both these widgets and the OpenSpending API to create custom front-ends.

To make things easier, we’ve now created the Assembly Kit. The kit is in fact the source for a newly styled version of the Where Does My Money Go? site that has gone live yesterday. Contained in this is a clean set of templates that can anyone who knows basic HTML can easily use to make a lightweight, white-label budget visualization site, styled according to your own wishes.

A set of widgets are included and can be adapted to another dataset with just a few edits. And since everything runs against the OpenSpending API, you don’t need to run your own database. Instead, you can load your data into OpenSpending.org and then customise the user facing side – for example, you can just use a generic blog or a set of static HTML files.

Our next step in March will be to make it easier for users – especially Journalists – to create custom configurations for the visualizations via a graphical interface, save specific views and share them through a simple embed code. We’ll also work to roll out the mapping support more widely and to create more custom apps on top of the API.

Our goal is to make OpenSpending the easiest way to publish and analyze a government finance dataset – with your help! So please provide us with feedback and contribute your own visualizations to the OpenSpending platform.

• Assembly Kit

The half-success story of implementing OpenSpending.org and OtwarteDane.pl into BudovaniStatu.cz (‘Building of the State’, the name referes to Peroutka‘s book)

It all started almost 2 years ago. Our partner NGO NasiPolitici.cz started to think about putting the Czech public money data on the web and asked us at KohoVolit.eu if we were interested. And we said yes, we always wanted to do something ‘about money’ (we used to be a parliamentary watchdog only till then).

We found out that there is a huge amount of public financial data available on-line. Every single public organization has to fill several detailed accounting forms every year, the oldest data are from 1994 (not published, but they are there). And it is available even in xml. Can you ask for more?

Later on, we found that there were some serious catches. The Ministry of finance, which provided the data, severely limited the number of downloads from one IP. It would have taken us a couple of months just to download everything (some 60 GB of data). The Tor and mobile connection (changing IP) came in useful. The forms were in xml, but mixing raw basic data with sums with no clear distinction between them at all. Funny. They changed the system for 2010. Et cetera. We were progressing rather slowly, with no financial support at all.

Finally, help from Anticorruption Endowment came and we got funding for about two month (developer) to build a site connecting (just) the government budgets with the politicians. That was important, I could not just show the data in some nice way, I needed to do other things with the application – showing historical data, connecting to politicians.

I spent a month just fiddling with the data, trying to find a suitable a) data storage and b) application to build on.

I tried OpenSpending.org first, but I was not able to set up the data there. I tried to tweak our parliamentary API, but it was just too much work, I would not be able to finish it in time. After a few weeks, I still was not sure if I would get the results using OpenSpending.org. The guys behind OtwarteDane.pl were very helpful and so we decided to store the data with them.

I did not use OpenSpending.org’s API, but their bubbletree chart was good. I needed to catch a few bugs, but it took me just a few days to get it running more-or-less in a way I wanted (well yes, I still need to clean the code for ‘pull request’). And – importantly – it was possible to build our application(s) on it.

I think, we have hit the bubbletree’s limit on number of bubbles there. It runs rather well with data we limited it to later (about 3600 bubbles), but it takes javascript about 10 sec on my medium computer to process the full data, 24000 bubbles for 2010 year, Opera cannot handle it and IE had problems, too (try it on our development site).

And how about the ‘where does my taxes go‘ app? Well, it was rather easy from the developer’s view. I could copy the British idea, just program it in Javascript instead of the Flash. The hard part was the economics here. We could not use just the income tax as it accounts for about 10 % of all the taxes only (the VAT, the health tax, the social tax are more important). The taxes are messy. The general financial reporting is a mess, too. I have found about 15 % difference in ‘public taxes’ in different financial reports from Czech Statistical Office. So which one to use to calculate the overall taxes? But this is just one reason more why OpenSpending.org will be useful, to standardize this mess.

For the future, we will update the project once the 2011 data is available. We shall solve the problem with bubbles’ scaling. We will write analyses based on it mainly push others to do it. And I already have the Prague 2012 budget data ready to bubble…

“My Name is XXXX, I am a member of the Kenyan parliament for the constituency of XXXX in the 2007-2012 election cycle. During my time in parliament, I have positioned myself against taxes for MPs.

Of the Development Funds allocated to my constituency, I have spent 12mn KSH in 2010 and 8mn KSH in 2009. Since 2007, I’ve funded 201 projects, of which 72 (9mn KSH) related to Education, 56 (7.2mn KSH) related to Health and 20 (4.2mn KSH) to Infrastructure.

The largest projects I have funded include… “

Auto-generated, spending data-driven campaign speeches like this are just one of the many ideas of the Data Bootcamp that took place in Nairobi last week. Invited by the African Media Initiative and the World Bank Insititute, about 70 participants – both journalists and developers – met on Strathmore University’s campus to learn and practise both the skills and tools required for data-driven reporting.

The four-day programme combined tools training with practical work in small groups. Elena Egawhary (BBC NewsNight) gave a workshop on data analysis in Excel, Sreeram Balakrishnan (Google Fusion Tables) introduced both Refine and Fusion Tables. Team members from both the Kenya data portal and the World Bank finance site presented their respective offerings, while Gregor and myself from the OpenSpending team gave intros to web scraping and advanced map visualisation.

During group work, journalists and developers teamed up to try their newly learned skills in different domains ranging from sports (football player profiles) to education (missing toilets in schools, “The Shit Ordeal”) and the financial transparency story-telling mentioned above.

The workshop also served as a community-building event for Kenya’s young and impressive Open Data initiative. Future events, aimed at civil society organisations and polictical actors will help to further promote the re-use of government information released through the initiative.

All this is happening in a place where transparency is an essential tool to be developed: Not only is the access to information now guaranteed by the 2010 Kenyan constitution, there are also major political issues that deserve close attention from local and international watchdogs. These include not only the ongoing incursion of Kenyan troops into Somalia in an effort to fight Al-Shebab terrorist groups, but also the upcoming nationwide elections in December 2012. The elections will instate a new bicameral system of government, with many previously unknown candidates standing for office. In the previous 2007 vote, bad polling station data had quite literally led to widespread unrest and thousands of deaths across the nation.

In all, it was a fantastic to get in touch with the Kenyan participants of the workshop and to see how the organizers of the event – a brilliant team including Craig Hammer, Justin Arenstein and Jay Bhalla – are working to foster an open data community in this bustling developing nation.Given the great ideas generated during the team sessions, I’m sure this work will soon bear its first fruits.

How can transparency and technology point out connections between politicians and bad entrepreneurs? Well, first of all you will need some information about the politicians and about the entrepreneurs.

In Brazil, in spite of the historical lack of transparency in governments (Brazil’s freedom of information law was sanctioned just late last year), the Electoral Court has been proactively providing information on political candidates since 2002. One piece of info is the financial donation to the candidates, containing info about who is donating to whom and how much. Although this database is released only after the elections — the info would surely be more powerful if it were released DURING the political campaigns –, one must admit this is a rich source of information.

January, 2010. Elections for President and for the Parliament, as well as for State Governors and State Parliaments, would happen in only 9 months time, in October. However, many people were already discussing them.

At that time, 2010 had just begun, I was at work, thinking of how to find rich and useful information on the candidates. Then I was reminded of the so-called “Dirty List” — this is a list regularly published by the Ministry of Labour which indicates the companies and farmers who are caught by government officials using workers in very lousy conditions, similar to slavery.

The list published in the Ministry’s website is in not-so-friendly PDF format, but it has a plus: there is not only the name of the companies or the entrepreneur/farmer, but also their registry numbers within the government. I remembered that in the Electoral Court one can also find the numbers. That was important because having the registry numbers would avoid ambiguities.

I had both lists: the donators to the previous elections (2008, 2006, 2004 and 2002) and the “Dirty” companies. But I had a problem; I did not know how to matchup the datasets. My tech knowledge allowed me to transform the PDFs into CSV, but I could no go further without help.

I then sent the datasets, in CSV format, to Transparencia Hacker, a Google Groups list which now gathers over 800 people interested in the connections between transparency and politics/public administration.

Within 2 days, the guys made the datasets talk, and we found that 16 politicians had been elected with the help of “Dirty” money in the 4 previous elections. Other 13 politicians had received donations from the “Dirty List” but had not succeeded in winning the elections.

A local newspaper told the story.

In October 2012, there are local elections in Brazil. Hope we can shed even more light in the candidates.

Behind the news:

Roughly how long did it take you to extract the data from the PDFs? Do you know how long the guys from Transparencia Hacker spent working on the data?

This was kind of easy. It took me just some minutes. The “Dirty List” is a 20-page PDF. I always use a website to convert it into xls or csv (I like Cometdocs for this work).

Here is the Dirty List, in PDF (last updated on the 8th of November, 2011; the list we used is in CSV but it it very outdated because it was due to January 2010) Here are the Electoral Court pages for the list of donators: 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010.

What I asked the Transparencia Hacker community was to check whether the CNPJs (companies register number within the governments) in the CSV would match any item in the Electoral Court webpage. The guys worked on the data for 2 days.

Is sufficient data available to visualise the total amount lobbyists donated to political campaigns, and would it be useful to / no? If you were to visualise the info – what would the priorities be to show? Would any tools be useful to explore the data?

Yes, there is enough data. And YES, it would be very useful to visualize those links. I would prioritise the presidential and governor candidates as well as some Congressmen who hold top-positions in both Houses of Congress. Also, the donations to political parties (not to individual politicians) would be a plus.

A search form would be very useful. The search could have filters for position (Presidential candidate, governor candidate, political party etc), geography (Brazil, states) and donators (with no filters, just a blank for writing)

In your ideal world, in time for the impending elections – what would be done differently from last time? Any additional data you would like to see released?

I’d have to think more carefully to respond that, but concerning additional data: the number which identifies the market (the field) in which the companies work.

Interested in writing a “Behind the News” piece for the OpenSpending blog? Get in touch via our twitter account or email info [at] openspending.org.

Some useful links (mainly in Portuguese):

• Brasil adopts access to information law
• View the Dirty List in Full

• Working on implementing Collections <- draft notes, beware.
• Prototyping the Compar-o-tron Mockup 1, Mockup 2.
• Continuing work on Embeddable widgets for Spending Stories.

The topic

Accountants spend their entire working lives mapping the money:

• How can their expertise be put to good use in Open Spending Data projects?
• What interesting initiatives are going on around the world which could benefit from the input of accountants?

All are welcome! If you’d like to contribute to the discussion by joining the call, please just add your name and Skype ID to the pad

Please feel free to share with colleagues friends and other communities.

N.B. Over the next weeks, we’ll be trying to theme the discussions and proactively invite people along to join them. If you have a suggestion for a topic you think the group should discuss, please drop us a line via the OpenSpending mailing list.