Local Spending in OpenlyLocal: what features would you like to see?

As I mentioned in a previous post, OpenlyLocal has now started importing council local spending data to make it comparable across councils and linkable to suppliers. We now added some more councils, and some more features, with some interesting results.

As well as the original set of Greater London Authority, Windsor & Maidenhead and Richmond upon Thames, we’ve added data from Uttlesford, King’s Lynn & West Norfolk and Surrey County Council (incidentally, given the size of Uttlesford and of King’s Lynn & West Norfolk, if they publish this data, any council should be able to).

We’ve also added a basic Spending Dashboard, to give an overview of the data we’ve imported so far:

Of course the data provided is of variable quality and in various formats. Some, like King’s Lynn & Norfolk are in simple, clean CSV files. Uttlesford have done it as a spreadsheet with each payment broken down to the relevant service, which is a bit messy to import but adds greater granularity than pretty much any other council.

Others, like Surrey, have taken the data that should be in a CSV file and for no apparent reason have put it in a PDF, which can be converted, but which is a bit of a pain to do, and means maunal intervention to what should be a largely automatic process (challenge for journos/dirt-hunters: is there anything in the data that they’d want to hide, or is it just pig-headedness).

But now we’ve got all that information in there we can start to analyse it, play with it, and ask questions about it, and we’ve started off by showing a basic dashboard for each council.

For each council, it’s got total spend, spend per month, number of suppliers & transactions, biggest suppliers and biggest transactions. It’s also got the spend per month (where a figure is given for a quarter, or two-month period, we’ve averaged it out over the relevant months). Here, for example, is the one for the Greater London Authority:

Lots of interesting questions here, from getting to understand all those leasing costs paid via the Amas Ltd Common Receipts Account, to what the £4m paid to Jack Morton Worldwide (which describes itself as a ‘global brand experience agency’) was for. Of course you can click on the supplier name for details of the transactions and any info that we’ve got on them (in this case it’s been matched to a company – but you can now submit info about a company if we haven’t matched it up).

You can then click on the transaction to find out more info on it, if that info was published, but which is perhaps the start of an FoI request either way:

It’s also worth looking at the Spend By Month, as a raw sanity-check. Here’s the dashboard for Windsor & Maidenhead:

See that big gap for July & August 09. My first thought was that there was an error with importing the data, which is perfectly possible, especially when the formatting changes frequently as it does in W&M’s data files, but looking at the actual file, there appear to be no entries for July & August 09 (I’ve notified them and hopefully we’ve get corrected data published soon). This, for me, is one of the advantages of visualizations: being able to easily spot anomalies in the data, that looking at tables or databases wouldn’t show.

So what further analyses would you like out of the box: average transaction size, number of transactions over £1m, percentage of transactions for a round number (i.e. with a zero at the end),  more visualizations? We’d love your suggestions – please leave them in the comments or tweet me.