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British Gov't Releases Spending Data
An anonymous reader writes "In a move sure to have transparency activists salivating, the UK government has released some 195,000 lines of data detailing its financial outgoings. The BBC reports that 'All spending of more than £25,000 made between May and September was published — in line with a pre-election commitment by the Conservatives — although some departments also published spending over £500. People are being encouraged to pick through the enormous quantity of online information to spot waste and hold ministers to account.'"
I think that it should be the case for all country all the time, all department should have a drill down budget up the spending. Yes that would add an extra layer but you could remove all the "inspector" and "auditor" because if all data is online, the population and journalism will do that job. Also, many spending will be avoid because they will know it will be fully available online!
When Julian Assange first released Wikileaks he said that seeing what was being done with Wikipedia gave him the idea that if you just put the stuff out there then the crowds will mold and form it into something useful. He expected blogs and independent third parties to spring up out of the woodwork. So Wikileaks published the data and.... nothing.
Not even the newspapers picked up on the leaks because of the bystander effect. No news agency is willing to invest the resources and waits for someone else to do the hard work. Everything stalls and it falls into obscurity. The crowds just ignore it since there's this overwhelming heap of obscure data.
Having learnt through several iterations, Wikileaks now bids leaks to a news agency who gets a lock in period to go through all the data, pick out the juiciest stories and publish. After that Wikileaks releases the full data together with indicators and summaries of the data to direct the crowds.
Just dumping a huge mess of contextless data does nothing. You need contextual hints so people know where to start. You need experts to translate the internal jargon.
I suspect the most dogmatic reviewers will be freelance journalists, looking for a good story to sell.
Data does not process or analyse themselves! And the UK isn't India, either. When we need some data sifting done, we hire a small number of skilled individuals to write some queries and feed them to a computer, rather than hiring hundreds of Indians to do the work manually.
So this is very relevant to the Slashdot community, since many of us here are data professionals who will be able to perform such analysis ourselves.
There are already sites picking through it (such as http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/ and quite a few surprising entries have already cropped up, such as the massive amount Capita got, but you actually have to know what you want to look for if your going to find anything meaningful.
well, very few people will actually go thru it; those who do are highly motivated - either paid searchers, hired, by say the brit equivalent of the Koch brothers, or cranks, or whatever What ever they find, most of it will be unkown unless published by the media
The UK equivalent of the Kochs are the Barclay brothers, and they own the media (at least the parts not already owned by Murdoch or the Rothschilds). Their paid searchers occasionally dig up some really interesting material... The 2009 UK parliamentary expenses scandal, for instance, was a nice scoop for the Barclay Brothers' Daily Telegraph...
I hope you are wearing a kevlar swimsuit! (and Cuban Heel PHP boots)
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is to make them think they're winning.
Always question.
so , in the end, you don't have this utopian vision of the citizenry rising up to the task of rooting out fraud and abuse; you have people like the republicans who claimed Obama was spending 200 million dollars a day yelling loudly about their pet peeves...br? I predict this will be a bad thing all round
I'd take your prediction a little bit more seriously, if you hadn't put knee-jerks about Koch brothers or the Republicans in there. Democracy doesn't have much point to it, if nobody aside from the people in charge knows what's going on. Handing ammunition in the form of knowledge to your opponents is a feature not a bug of this idea. They are after all the ones with the greatest stake in finding legitimate problems.
...and it resulted in some crooked MPs losing their seats, others are facing criminal prosecution. Good. Well done Telegraph.
The Sunday Times did some excellent work on the House of Lords expenses. Well done Sunday Times.
But it does randomly switch from singular to plural in mid-sentence, or so they would appears to.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
While I can't take away from your excellent post, you actually mis-read the post you were replying to, and the person was simply saying that people ignored Wikileaks in the beginning, and that they got better at releasing data in such a way as to make people pay attention. You cite some of the press organisations who were given exclusive access to the data.
The danger to look out for is how regulations become gamed.
In this case, middle-level managers wanting to hide something will do so by outsourcing the work, rather than doing it 'in-house' in a public body.
Then the details can be labelled "commercially sensitive", and hidden from Freedom of Information requests.
Similar issues were seen in anti-drug operations in Cuba: once US forces started being shot at, the work was farmed out to MNCs - Multinational
Military Corporations, like Blackwater, typically staffed with ex- US special forces, operating from US bases. But the operations were commercial,
and any deaths secret. Unpopular operations became secret again, hidden from FOI requests.
For a political party that wants to see as much as possible privatised, this forces more work into the private sector, even when it could be done
easier and cheaper in the public sector. Beware of such tactics.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
I'd think the disproportionately large libertarian minded audience in here would have immediately gravitated toward this. I mean when I took my first accounting course, one of the first things that they said was that hell would freeze over before governments start to release their balance sheets. If the data is even closely detailed, we are looking at what I'd hope to be a positive step in how governments manage themselves with the populace.
I never thought that so many of you here would be afraid or ultimately jaded about transparency and openness. *shudder* Maybe Steve Jobs has done a better job on you than I thought possible. *making plans to move into the woods and live off twigs and berries*
Bye!
Actually, they switched from plural to singular and back again. Data is the plural form, the singular is datum.
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Public? How about the shadow cabinet? I imagine the ousted party is very interested in this, and aptly qualified to understand it as they had been spending the money for the past 13 years.