Towards greater transparency in public budgets

Individuals and institutions within the science community have long been pushing for greater data openness. For example, since 2006 through its annual research awards, BioMed Central has been recognising scientists who have demonstrated leadership in the sharing, standardisation, publication, or re-use of biomedical research data. The Patton Principles which were developed in 2009 lay out some guidelines about how data should be made public. The principles explicitly highlight the benefits that society can gain from greater openness. Other sectors have been making moves towards greater openness and may provide important lessons for the science and technology field.

In August for example, Oxfam released details of every overseas project they have funded in 2009-2010; being the first big NGO in the field to do so. Now accessible online, the spreadsheet contains the title, location and allocated funds for 1070 projects. This move towards open data is part of a larger trend towards more open data about aid.

A temporary coalition of donor governments, governments of developing countries and NGOs have established the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI) to make aid spending at country level more open. This is seen as one of the cornerstones of making aid more effective and builds on work that NGOs and others have been doing for years to make budgets available and accessible to individual communities.

This move to more open data has not been confined to aid budgets though. Earlier this year the World Bank announced that it was opening up more than 2,000 indicators from its datasets. It has even developed an iPhone app allowing the visualisation of 70 of these indicators.

Opening data does not come without its costs. One estimate is that IATI will cost donor countries between $3.8m and $8m to implement. However, these are largely one-off costs and could lead to savings of $1.6bn a year through reduced corruption and simplified planning for aid recipient governments.

The moves within international development are instructive. They demonstrate that technology is making the process of opening data much easier and that the potential gains can be huge. However, the World Bank’s release of its performance data suggests that considerably more work needs to be done in thinking through how to turn the raw data into a form that it can be used and understood by the public. Promoting dialogue and learning among different disciplines attempting to increase transparency could help to accelerate the open data revolution.