Openness and transparency can act as a disincentive to corruption. The current lack of open budget and open transaction data makes it very hard for citizens and other stakeholders to get an overview on public spending. The comparison of budgets between administrative regions and other government levels proves even more difficult.
The OpenBudgets platform is designed for public administrations, citizens, NGOs, media organisations, public service companies, and stakeholders working with fiscal data. The key challenge is to provide a scalable platform that is easy-to-use, flexible, and attractive for all these different types of users. This will be realized by providing an open-source software framework and accompanying Software-As-A-Service (SAAS) platform around fiscal transparency and open budgets.
- The project delivers the following four main components:
A semantic data model The semantic data model for (open) budget data integrates datasets. This integration allows for analysis and comparisons across government levels, regions, and countries. These comparisons and analysis shed light on anomalies within and between datasets. - Libraries of visualisation, data-mining, and comparative analysis tools. Stakeholders such as journalists and activists can use these tools to compare different cases and find patterns, trends, abnormalities and work on data-driven stories. Visualisation tools help to present data in different granularity and modalities (spatial, temporal, administrative), clarifying and strengthening the stories and contributing to the analysis.
- A feedback and citizen engagement interface which enables users to discuss and give feedback on the provided data, for example, suggesting different priorities for budgeting, or discussing a particular transaction. The OpenBudgets.eu open-source framework and portal will integrate these components into a comprehensive portal.
- Engaging user groups. From the start of the project user groups will be actively involved in the project. Data journalists are included through workshops and tailor-made tools. The project team will support civil society organizations and citizens through large scale pilots on participatory budgeting with the use of the platform. Finally, policy makers will be encouraged to use the platform for corruption platform, piloting a project on European Structural Funds.
Mobile Age project focuses on open government data, mobile technology, and the provision of public services in relation to Europe’s elderly population. Europe’s senior citizens are growing steadily and are predicted to comprise of 28% of Europe’s population by 2020. However, senior citizens do not normally share the same level of connectivity to the Internet as younger generations, and while government agencies are increasingly providing their services through digital platforms, this risks excluding senior citizens from the design and use of such services.
Mobile Age provides the basis for the development of mobile-based open government services focused on senior citizens.
A co-creation methodological approach is followed that allows a substantive participation of senior citizens and make them benefit from the production and use of open data for cities. This is achieved by pursuing four objectives:
- explore and implement innovative ways to support senior citizens to access and use public services through personal mobile technologies that are based on open data
- develop and deploy co-creation approaches and methodologies to engage senior citizens effectively
- develop a situated, practice-based understanding of accessibility, mobility and usability of services from a senior citizen’s point of view
- develop a framework for impact assessment and evaluation for co-creation approaches to open service development for the ageing population.
YourDataStories, or YDS in short, is a platform that helps make sense of open and social data. It answers your specific question by turning data into the substrate for stories that human beings can comprehend and act upon. YDS addresses professionals in government, public administration, business, and journalism, but it is also made for citizens.
The revolution in information technology over the last years has proven its ability to process huge amounts of data and made evident that big data can change the world. Open Government Data (OGD), from being an obscure possibility just five years ago, is spreading across the globe at a phenomenal rate, delivering the promise to spur innovation, to deliver better services for less money, to improve planning, to increase transparency, and to reduce corruption. In this context, YourDataStories envisions to bring this promise closer to reality, through a highly customisable online platform for data exploitation focused in the financial flows that are critical for transparency, collaboration and participation. Users, ranging from governmental bodies to journalists and to citizens, will be facilitated by powerful and established tools, not only to discover relevant information but also to remix it with diverse and dynamic data sources: YourDataStories acts like an interactive canvas to enable data citizens to (re)write their own data history.
YourDataStories brings an innovative solution whose innovation potential spreads across many directions, from leveraging best practices and proven technologies across Europe, to exploiting the social Web for accessing citizens, and to supporting sustainable public services across borders. Building on top of the “Transparency Portal” initiative of the Greek government, YourDataStories can be viewed as a way to showcase and transfer the existing expertise to European level, in an attempt to transform governments and governance in Europe. At the same time, YourDataStories seeks to exploit and embed in this effort the benefits of the social Web, establishing an innovative bidirectional channel between the Social and Semantic Web. Finally, YourDataStories aims to support sustainable services, supported by a marketing ecosystem of applications offering cross-border services of public finance flows across Europe.
The CLARITY project will support European Member States in their pursuit for greater trust, transparency and efficiency within their open eGovernment initiatives and highlight best practice within this field.
More specifically, CLARITY will:
- Mobilise and engage with the multidisciplinary network of stakeholders across the European open eGovernment ecosystem
- Conduct an interactive needs assessment and gap analysis in order to understand gaps in the market to support the growth in innovation in open eGovernment applications
- Work with the open eGoverment network to develop a blueprint for the future of open eGovernment in Europe
We invite you to join the CLARITY network to:
- Receive updates on, and attend innovation activities such as focus groups, workshops, the week-long CLARITY Sprint Event and the CLARITY Exhibition and final conference
- Contribute to the future vision for open eGovernment applications in Europe
- Learn the findings from the needs assessment and gap analysis which will deliver up-to-date data on current gaps in the provision, design and development of open eGovernment applications
- Use and contribute to the establishment of the interactive Open eGovernment Marketplace – a space for the advertising of various open eGovernment applications from across Europe
