This is big, and I just found out about it today. The UK government, one of the first governments worldwide to put open government data on the agenda, has released the Combined Online INformation System, or Coins.  Basically this is a huge online dataset in which the government shows every aspect, to the tiniest of details, of their expenditure.

With Coins everybody can dive into them and monitor how the UK budget is being spent. The database is so large and complex that simply reading won’t do the trick. It is now up to the online community to make this database insightful. I hope to see open-source search engines and representation tools soon, so we can actually see what all this data means.

The government is not done yet. in it’s Big Society Paper it states that it is planning to release further datasets, including:
• Ultra-local data on crime, health and education
• Every item of local and government and quango expenditure over £25,000, plus every project that receives EU funds
• All procurement tender documents for contracts worth over £10,000

The opportunities are amazing: Central governments can do only so much with the vast amounts of data. Now everybody can start analyzing problems that live in their society. The community is presented two new tools. First of all, they can monitor the government and judge their actions, based on objective data. Moreover, the public can tap into one of the most important tasks of the government: identify problems. The question of course, is whether these issues will find their way into the other tasks of the government: finding a solution to the problem and executing this solution. My hope is that because of this tool initiatives will start to emerge that present these issues in such a way that the governments are forced to put them on the agenda.

The idea of crowdsourcing governance might bring a whole new level of democracy. Now that the UK government is actually playing ball, let’s see what the community will do with it. A positive example will be a huge stimulus for other countries (like in The Netherlands, where this notion is completely absent on the level of the central government). I don’t know about you, but I’m holding my breath.

You can check the original article on the guardian here

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