Standardizing UK-Government Fiscal Data

We were taken on by UK SBS to increase public spending transparency in the UK by standardising the publication of finance data.

In a positive trend, multiple governments are choosing to publish finance and spending data as part of open government and transparency initiatives. Public spending data is a great example of a type of public data that should be made open, since how taxpayers’ money is spent is of direct concern to citizens. While CTO at the Open Knowledge Foundation (OKF), Paul worked with the UK Cabinet Office’s Transparency Team, as well as the UK SBS office, to develop technologies and methodologies for standardizing the publication of finance data. As part of this work, he consulted with stakeholders on User Experience Design and built technical architecture for a number of related codebases. Notable outcomes included the development of a dashboard to assess the publication quality of UK Spend Data and v1 of the goodtables Python library and command line tool, which has seen wide adoption by governments and organizations such as 18f.