Slashdot Mirror
UK Gov't Spending Details Now Online
krou writes "The UK government has released a treasure trove of public spending data in an effort to lift what Prime Minister David Cameron calls the government's 'cloak of secrecy.' 'The first two tranches of data are from 2008/09 and 2009/10. The Combined Online Information System (Coins) includes what departments were authorised to spend, what they actually spent and what they are forecast to spend in future.' Since the government admits that 'some degree of technical competence' will be needed to use the files, they have asked the Open Knowledge Foundation to help make it 'more accessible,' and have also promised 'more accessible formats' by August. The datasets can be downloaded from data.gov.uk."
And on a similarly happy note, reader mccalli writes "Bletchley Park's archive is to be digitised and put online. It seems HP made an offer to help out with scanners and expertise, and the result is that these texts will be made available to all."
The Guardian newspaper have already built an interesting tool for exploring the data.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
if Her Majesty's Government uses torrents, they must be OK, right?
How does the UK spending report shape up vs a US Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_annual_financial_report
That would show an accurate picture of the UKs institutional funds, financial holdings, assets and total investment incomes, for the government.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm just really impressed that the .gov.uk is using torrents. I'd have expected you'd have had to apply, and it would have been posted to you on a stack of DVDs.
Get your own free personal location tracker
It's the Daily Mail. They probably just made it up.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
It is a contract job for an Italian University, funded with EU money. I am looking for real world examples of the availability of public data like these have actually been good for local businesses, making them sustainable or cheaper to run. Every feedback is welcome. Here are more details on the project: Open Data, Open Society: a research project about openness of public data in EU local administrations. Again, thanks to all who will provide relevant pointers & info!
Most of those 20 million are deceased. Their records are held because of their relationship to a living citizen, which is needed to correctly assess eligibility for certain benefits.
However, there are also some duplicates - people who have for some reason assigned multiple tax records under different National Insurance numbers. There are legitimate reasons for this (for example, foreigners working in the UK are first assigned a temporary record, and later created a permanent record - with these two records then being linked together). However, there are also instances where this is due to fraudulent reasons. One of the key benefits for CIS (the system in question) is fraud detection: before CIS, the same data was scattered across 26 different systems, which naturally makes fraud detection very difficult.
(Disclosure: I was one of the architects for this system)
I am all for transparency but it will also have a negative effect on the efficiency of the government
I work for a non elected government body and there is already that much red tape that it takes two weeks to get a purchase order for items over less than £1000 (having spent up to half a day doing the purchase paperwork and justification).
If we have to document it and everything it adds another layer of junior civil servants who's job it will be to document all the spending for public consumption. This at a time when my budget has been cut by over 1/3 (£200K). Do you really need to know I spent £2K on 64GB Ram for a blade ? Will it enrich your life. We are always being asked to do more with less, but then we look at all these mad hat ideas that drain cash. Cash that could be used to provide better services to you the public.
Most people don't realise but there is an extra ordinary amount of oversight even now. Even our small government dept has 3 levels of external auditing.
To purchase expensive kit (Like i do regularly -ie 40K at a time it can take several months to get it all sorted.
If they want to interfere in every minor purchase and put it online it will cause almost paralysis in most government organisations.
Just my 2ps worth. Posting as AC for obvious reasons.
Good. Transparency, and honesty, make for better government. I was shocked at how our school district was consistently ignoring the budget that had been set and choosing to spend more despite repeated voter instructions to stop this behavior.
but is it at all possible that the coalition is doing GOOD instead of evil?
I do believe that's unprecedented.
From the site: "The ‘fact tables’ are approximately 70MB. With a fast broadband link of 8mbps, it will take approximately 10 minutes to download this file."
70MB at 1MB/second = 600 seconds!?!? This left me rather concerned as to the reliability of the figures on the site. I never went on to look at the data but I can imagine it would be something like this:
Expenses: £100,000,000,000.00
Bureaucracy: £500,000,000,000.00
Propaganda: £25,000,000,000.00
Big Brother: £50,000,000,000.00
Foreign Wars: £10,000,000,000.00
Total: £1.23