Where Does My Money Go?
December 14th, 2009
Where Does My Money Go? presents an overview of government expenditure in the UK with a limited amount of freedom to drill down by region, time period and type of expenditure. It's pretty and it works well as far as it goes, but I'm not sure how useful it is given that it's providing such high-level data without much in the way of context.
I suppose my fundamental question is this: who would be able to accomplish anything useful with this data presented in this format, without pulling down the data that underpins these charts and doing some number-crunching of their own?
That being said, I'll be fascinated to see where they go with this. The simple act of pulling together all this data in one place is a useful service in itself; perhaps in the long run it'll be the data they collate, not the graphs they draw, that make Where Does My Money Go?1 worthwhile.
[Via Qwghlm]
- I really wish they'd called it Where Does Our Money Go? ↩
December 15th, 2009 at 17:48
Many thanks for the blog post!
Just to let you know, the next phase of development of Where Does My Money Go will involve collecting much more detailed data – to really drill down into local and central government spending.
You can follow our progress at blog.okfn.org. Also we'd love to hear from anyone interested in getting involved! Assembling all the data will partly be a community driven effort involving experts and volunteers both inside and outside government. More details at: http://www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org/get-involved/
December 16th, 2009 at 00:03
I started following your blog feed last night after coming across the site, and look forward to seeing the site offering the sort of in-depth data that can really make a difference.
As to helping out myself, I'm not in a good place right now when it comes to devoting time to a new project, but when that situation changes I might very well be in touch.