Category Archives: Uncategorized

Keeping track of the spending cuts

Posted on August 25, 2010 by lisa

I’ve changed the way you can let the ‘Where Does My Money Go?’ team know about a spending cut. It’s really easy now, you just need to paste in the url of a place the cut is reported … and … Continue reading →

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HMRC are, at their option, exempt from freedom of information law.

Posted on July 16, 2010 by lisa

An important part of the Where Does My Money Go? project is to gather more information about our taxes. I thought the obvious place to look for that kind of information is HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), so, I explored … Continue reading →

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Reporting council spending: a taste of things to come

Posted on July 13, 2010 by lisa

I met a couple of people from the finance team at Cambridge City Council (CCC) this week. This meeting makes me want to beam a message out to all councils saying: “if you publish your data in machine readable form, … Continue reading →

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The whole of government accounts: an exercise in elimination

Posted on July 7, 2010 by lisa

When the large sample of COINS data was published on the 4th June it was accompanied by a guide to the data. The guide is very useful, but one thing it doesn’t explain in very much detail is where the … Continue reading →

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Understanding COINS

Posted on June 17, 2010 by lisa

Something amazing has happened since the government spending recorded in the COINS database was made openly available to everyone. I’m talking about the impressive range of free, and in many cases open source, products to display the COINS data.

So far there are COINS search engines from The Guardian and The Open Knowledge Foundation, graphs from Rapid Gate Way and Alpine Interactive and [...]

Related posts:

  1. COINS: A Users Guide
  2. The Hunt For COINS
  3. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
Continue reading →

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COINS: A Users Guide

Posted on June 4, 2010 by lisa

At 0930 BST today the UK government released the COINS database, one of the biggest sources of information on UK public spending. Open Knowledge Foundation Director Rufus Pollock says:

The release of this data marks another milestone in the opening up of public data – in which the UK leads the way. While this [...]

Related posts:

  1. Understanding COINS
  2. A Big Part of COINS was not Published
  3. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
Continue reading →

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UK Government commits to open up new spending data!

Posted on June 2, 2010 by lisa

It’s exciting times right now for people in the UK interested in how public funds are being used. The new government has proposed to publish unprecedented amounts of spending data in unprecedented detail. In the new Coalition Programme for Government (PDF), the PM has committed to the following, which is very similar to the Conservative [...]

Related posts:

  1. Open data on Russian government spending
  2. What was COINS missing? The mystery of the Government’s hidden spending data
  3. Opening up UK local spending data
Continue reading →

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Update on local spending, HMRC Aspire contract and more COINS.

Posted on May 26, 2010 by lisa

Here are three updates on requests about public spending, made recently: I’ve been asking for more detail on the way local council accounts are held at Cambridge City Council, Warwickshire County Council, East Cambridgeshire District Council and Huntingdonshire District Council. … Continue reading →

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