Transparency in the Council: Kensington and Chelsea and the big spreadsheet
Kensington and Chelsea have joined the growing number of councils that are exposing their expenditure data. Although there are only 20ish so far, that number is getting bigger all the time, so much so that I've made the decision that I'm no longer going to feature councils that just publish expenditure data in this blog. You have to be doing something a little bit different. RBKC is doing that.
Yesterday I featured them in a post about what format expenditure data should be published in - advocating for the time being both CSV and PDF - and if you have to choose only one, go with CSV. (XML even better, but let's not get ahead of ourselves).
RBKC are publishing expenditure data in both pdf and csv, but they're also placing the expenditure data in context. Not only does it sit alongside information about senior officer salary details and members allowances, but this rather nifty visualisation of their overall budget as well as making links to information on how the council manages money and its performance.
You can see the list of councils publishing open data in this Google spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is noteworthy on its own. It's a collaborative effort between CLG, LG Group and Chris Taggart of Openly Local, and is now the master list - avoiding duplication of collation.
