From Opendataday

The OpenSpending team is delighted to announce that they will be participating in Open Data Day 2011. See below for more details of how to get involved:

Contents 1 What is OpenSpending? 2 The OpenSpending Open Data Day Challenge 2.1 Step 1: Find your source data and get it on the DataHub 2.2 Step 2: Extract and clean up the data 2.3 Step 3: Get in OpenSpending data format 2.4 Step 4: load the dataset in OpenSpending 3 How to get in contact

What is OpenSpending?

OpenSpending is a community project to map every piece of government (and corporate) financial information globally. On Open Data Day, get involved and help open up and visualize financial info from around the world.

The OpenSpending Open Data Day Challenge

If you plan to hack on OpenSpending stuff we encourage you to:

• drop in to the etherpad (and add your name): http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/opendataday-2011
• Drop in to irc: #openspending on freenode. You can join via web interface at http://webchat.freenode.net/

Step 1: Find your source data and get it on the DataHub

• Search for budget, spending or contracts data on your government or local authority's website - do they have any data available?
• Download a copy and add it to http://thedatahub.org/ in the rawest format you can find. (Either upload or link to it)
  • When adding to http://thedatahub.org/ add it to the theDataHub Open Data Day Group and also tag your DataHub package 'openspending' and 'opendataday'.

Step 2: Extract and clean up the data

• Get the data into machine readable form (preferably a spreadsheet format -- and even more more prefereably CSV)
  • Scrape the data if needed
  • Use google refine / whatever tool you want

Step 3: Get in OpenSpending data format

Get the data into one big CSV in the OpenSpending data:

• Scrape it / prod it / wrangle it into the data format for OpenSpending and upload that version to your dataset on the DataHub

Then make a 'model' file - this describes your data (what columns are dates, what are numbers) and how to 'map' the data into OpenSpending:

• Model file is in JSON. You can either:
  • write it by hand - see mapping/model file format spec
  • Generate it using the OS Validate tool: https://github.com/okfn/osvalidate
• Either way you'll then want to validate the model (see osvalidate instructions on github page)

Finally you'll want to test your data and model work:

• Run your data and your model through osvalidate and see if they are ready to go!

Step 4: load the dataset in OpenSpending

And get aweseome visualizations (and live happily ever after!) ...

How to get in contact

• Drop in the etherpad: http://wdmmg.okfnpad.org/opendataday-2011
• The team will be available in the #openspending room on irc.freenode.net. Join us there and say hi!
• OpenSpending Discussion List
• OpenSpending Dev List