Going Dutch with Openspending in the Netherlands
When you’re dealing with local governments or institutions, collecting data is a huge undertaking but not impossible. You just need to re-engineer government.
Until recently, in the Netherlands it was impossible to gain access to financial open dataBy opening up data and making it sharable and reusable, governments can enable informed debate, better decision making, and the development of innovative new services. Technical specifications: Polici... of all these decentral governments. A couple of years ago, Open State Foundation sat down with some civil servants of the Central Borough of the City of Amsterdam. We not only got to know how local government organises its finances but also how it was obliged to report their financials to the central government. We discovered that every local government in the Netherlands sends a uniform quarterly financial statement in the form of an Excel sheet with seven tabs to the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands.
With several Excel sheets this local government until then only sent to the Central Bureau of Statistics we quickly created a website (openspending.nl) to visualise the data. We then approached the six other boroughs of Amsterdam, requested the same files and noticed that the sheets and tabs were all in the same format. We could now not only visualise and compare the budget and spending of one borough but we could also compare budgets and spending across all boroughs of Amsterdam. We had a tool to show what unlocking all local government financial data would look like.
The easiest thing for Open State Foundation to do now was to approach the Central Bureau of Statistics and ask for all the sheets of all local governments. However, policymakers at the government’s statistics office said that they were not allowed to release that data because it belonged to the local governments. It was the decision of the local governments themselves whether the data could be open or not.
Even a small country such as the Netherlands, with a population of 17 million, consists of 390 municipalities, 12 regional provinces and 24 water management boards. Open State Foundation decided then to approach all local governments ourselves and ask each of them for the data. It would be a great opportunity to raise awareness about the importance of open data not only for society but also for the local governments themselves.
“It is our social responsibility to share this data”, the CFO of the city of Utrecht, Frank Halsema, said. “Government holds such an amount of information with which so many great things can be done”. A member of the regional council of Groningen, Mirjam Wulfse, pointed to the problems that could be solved when this information would be available. “The more government makes information available, the more problems can be solved with people outside government,” she said. “It helps the government to improve itself”.
Open State Foundation started with civil servants first. If they declined the request for data, we could approach the alderman. If the alderman declined, we would go to the council. And so, in various local councils members raised questions and even resolutions were tabled. Building up political support helped to create room for local civil servants to collaborate. This raised the awareness without filing a single freedom of information request.
Using this approach, within a year, Open State Foundation managed to unlock financial government data from more than 200 local and regional governments in the Netherlands, collecting thousands of files, containing millions of data points. “As elected member of the council I really need this data”, Mirjam Wulfse told us. “It also shines a light at places in the budget that inform me where there is budgetary room for change.”
Not only local council members used the website to hold government to account, also citizens and journalists saw the advantages of openspending data. Jaap Prins, who owns a cafe near a bridge in his town, said that he challenged the local government using openspending data. “We could show them that we could do the maintenance of the bridge for just a third of the amount we found in the budget”. Journalist Sjoerd Hartholt told us that he gained so much more insight in what municipalities are doing. “It enables me to compare incomes and expenditures. The more detailed the data, the better I can do my work as a journalist.”
Last year, with the data of 200 local governments in our hand, together with the Ministry of Interior we again approached the Central Bureau of Statistics. We could now show that a clear majority of local governments are willing to make public spending data available for everyone. Not much later, the Central Bureau of Statistics sent out a memorandum to all local governments in the Netherlands notifying them that from the end of 2015, all budget and spending data of all local governments, regional authorities and water councils will be published as open data.
From that moment, the data is quarterly released in a sustainable manner. Eventually, success depended on the right approach to trigger various different local governments. With a strong community and a mix of technical and political knowledge, everyone should be able to hold power to account.