Show me the money

By J.S. and K.N.C.

When transparency is the handmaiden to innovation

THE opening bell for open data has been rung. Over the past week, a ganglion of groups has unveiled initiatives in support of freely accessible, public sector information. Together, it suggest that the open data movement has finally come of age.

The most prominent activity was a high-level meeting in London last weekend of the Open Government Partnership, some 62 countries that ascribe to open practices. Britain committed to creating an open database of beneficial ownership of companies. Initial findings show that around 350 people hold more than 100 directorships apiece in Britain, with instances of individuals holding up to 1,000—a suspiciously large number for anyone to do meaningful diligence, as directors’ must.

Another big win came from the Open Data Institute, a London-based charity that supports practical number-crunching. In just its first year, it has tapped open data to reveal easy-to-reduce medical expenses in Britain. Last week it announced the creation of 13 affiliates around the world, from America to Dubai. And a report by McKinsey Global Institute calculated the value of open data (including licensed proprietary data) at a breathless $3 trillion from seven sectors, including energy and transport.

Yet one of the most interesting developments comes from the relatively obscure area of aid. The charity Publish What You Fund (PWYF) ranks donors by their level of transparency. Its latest index of 67 donor agencies placed America’s Millennium Challenge Corporation first with a score of 89%, closely followed by the health charity GAVI, Britain’s Department for International Development and the UN Development Programme. By contrast, China and many small countries in Europe such as Malta and Greece barely manage to score at all.

The index considers influential groups with budgets of more than $1 billion that have commitments to national transparency standards. It looks at data published online, using a standard established by the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI). Formed in 2011, it has been endorsed by big charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, as well as 190 other donor agencies and 22 countries.

Yet many multilateral agencies, such as the IMF, have yet to sign up, and other big donor governments, such as Japan and Italy have only just done so—too late for the index. Thus, all three rated poor or very poor. (For the agencies that did not file data to IATI, PWYF identified their activities by looking at the biggest projects in the countries that receive most aid.)

The group evaluated 39 indicators, covering a commitment to transparency (10% of the final score), publication of data for the organisation (25%) and its specific programmes (65%). The biggest weights for individual indicators are given to budget and audit information and the results of their initiatives. Amazingly, 46 organisations do not publish consistent information about the performance of their current activities, which make up 13% of the final score.

The index looks at how comprehensive the data are, whether they were current and on the format used. Thus PDF files, the bane of data scientists, are considered worst and the IATI’s standard, in computer-readable code, is deemed best. The 27 agencies that publish to IATI thus tend to score highest on this measure, which applies to the majority of indicators. A chart of the index is below; an interactive version is online that lets people change the weightings for each indicator.

It is one of the biggest ways that open data can make an impact. "All this transparency stuff is super-important and super-consequential and super-easy to do and yet laughably not done," says Caroline Fiennes, a long-time champion of disclosure in the non-profit sector. "You're supposed to be helping people—often with public money—yet you won't reveal what you are doing? It's really remarkable that anybody has to have a campaign on this stuff."