Budget Key

The BudgetKey project is an open-source, volunteer-based project that has been making Israeli government finances more accessible and understandable to the public for over a decade. From writing the code to heading off to parliament to discuss the project with journalists, the BudgetKey project was completely developed and led by while true co-founder Adam. It offers a powerful ETL feature capable of scraping and collecting data from over 30 different government data sources and combining them into a single database. With an intuitive and attractive website, the BudgetKey project allows stakeholders to access data relating to government budget, procurement, subsidies and contracts. It has become a central tool among activists and government officials.

Mapping Israel's Urban Trees for Better City Planning

Following a government resolution to improve the state of shading in Israel’s urban areas, the Digital Forest Project collects and processes information about urban trees from various sources - tree surveys, various existing databases and satellite imagery analysis. The project provides a central viewing interface used by decision makers and city officials for better planning, resource allocation and information sharing.

Providing Open Data Portals as a Service for Israeli Municipalities

Using our ckan cloud solution, we have developed a platform that enables the Public Knowledge Workshop to provide CKAN as a service to Israeli Municipalities. Ths basic instance is modified and tailored to the specific needs of municipalities - including multi-lingual support, theming, and integration with national level data sources.

The platform is designed to be easily managed by a local administrator and easily maintained by the Public Knowledge Workshop.

Opening Up Municipal Data in the Israeli City of Beersheba

Like many cities worldwide, Beersheba uses CKAN to openly publish municipal data. When they engaged while true founder Adam, the city’s authorities were looking to replace an old CKAN instance and migrate their data into a new, improved CKAN solution. Adam worked with Beersheba to a) create a containerized CKAN deployment that was customized to their needs, b) modify their instance to suit their data schema, and c) develop a custom ETL service based on the Jenkins platform and the Dataflows Library that pulled data from various internal, domain-specific systems (such as ESRI ArcGIS).

Publishing the World’s Primary Fiscal Data Sets

OpenSpending is an open-source, global database for fiscal data that was developed by the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF) and primarily funded by The Global Initiative for Fiscal Transparency (GIFT). It while true founders Adam and Paul worked with colleagues at OKF and a range of government and civic tech stakeholders to design a powerful, flexible system that allowed users to upload and visualize fiscal data. As part of this effort, they created a fiscal data schema that later evolved into the full standard known as the Fiscal Data Package.

https://openspending.org

Producing an SMB Information Portal for the City of Beer Sheba

Business Gate is a project aimed at providing small business entrepreneurs in the city of Beer Sheba relevant information about opportunities, licensing requirements, fees and other various insights - all contextual to their selected business type and location. The innovative user interface, based on a friendly chatbot, takes the user through a list of questions, explanations and deep-dives into the various aspects of starting a business, until finally leaving the user with a handy pack of cards, to be reviewed at all times, and a point of contact in the municipality to follow up the process.

Giving a Platform to Gender-Equality Data

Research institutions worldwide are building open data portals to share their findings with citizens everywhere. She Knows (‘Yodaat’), Israel’s Gender Knowledge Center, offers an open data website that presents a large collection of publications, datasets and other information related to gender issues in Israel and elsewhere. With funding from the Ministry of Social Equity, the website was built by the team at the Public Knowledge Workshop, an Israeli nonprofit of which while true’s Adam is co-founder. Adam collaborated with She Knows to build a data collection system that could import and then combine data from multiple sources and generate clean, uniform datasets. The result was a beautiful, multilingual web interface.

Social Procurement Portal

This project, in cooperation with Israel’s Prime Minister’s Office, aims to map all the social services the government provides in the fields of welfare, education and health.

Working with the different government ministries’s procurement departments, the project collects and processes data on the different social services, their budgets and the suppliers that were contracted to provide them. The data is then presented in an intuitive and user-friendly interface, allowing the public to access detailed information and insights on the government’s social services.

The project is based on the BudgetKey platform, which has been making Israeli government finances more accessible and understandable to the public for over a decade.

Subsidy Stories - making EU Funds transparent

Subsidystories.eu intends to increase transparency of EU-Funds by unravelling how the European Structural Investment Funds are spent (The European Structural and Cohesion Funds (ESIF) are the main financial instrument for the implementation of the EU’s regional policy. They cover 44 % of the overall 1082 Billion 7-year EU budget). We collected and standardised all available beneficiary lists for the ERDF, ESF and CF for the 2007-2013 and 2014-2020 funding periods. The data is published independently by all member states and independent regions, in various formats (CSV files, Excel, PDF and websites).