Want to open the budget now? Ask me how! Budget data literacy in Israel - a case study

A particularly useful type of data literacy, instrumental for civic participation, for the ability to hold governments accountable, and to monitor policy implementation, as well as the fairness of public funds allocation - is budget and spending data literacy. These types of data have a long lasting aura of intimidating spreadsheets and a convoluted bureaucratic jargon, in addition to being oftentimes technically inaccessible and not complying to open data standards.

In this essay I’m sharing my experience of working for the Israeli civic-tech non-profit organisation The Public Knowledge Workshop, and what I learned from creating a budget data literacy programme, especially about what it takes to achieve this type of literacy and how it further affects the government itself.

The PKW (Hasadna, in Hebrew) is part of the global movement of Open Government Data. For the past ten years its volunteer community has been developing open source technological tools for visualising, analysing and making government data accessible to the public, along with pushing for the publication of more open data by the central government and municipalities, and advising on open data standards. Its projects analyse data such as parliamentary activity and legislation, road accidents data published by the National Bureau of Statistics, real time public transport location data, financial data on citizens pension funds management and more.

The BudgetKey is one of PKW’s flagship projects - a web based tool with joyful colours and beautiful visualisations, that demystifies the undecipherable spreadsheets of financial data. It combines over 30 different data sources (and still counting) from a plethora of agencies to provide a searchable one stop shop for all budgetary interests citizens may have:

The BudgetKey walks the user through the money pipeline, from the budget allocation, to the funds recipient on the other end. One can find how much money the Ministry of Education has allocated for youth movements and then see how it actually spent it - which movements received how much funding, and how this funding changed over the years. One can find government contractors, and check how spending on outsourced consultants has changed or how privatisation of social services has played out in recent years. One can also follow up on funds that municipalities receive from government offices, and tell if cities take full advantage of bike lane construction subsidies. Finally, it could simply be used as a search engine for government tenders and calls for proposals, which otherwise were scattered around the web.

It’s hard to overemphasise the role that the BudgetKey played in giving access to the budget for the public. For decades the Israeli state budget has been dwelling in the archives of the Knesset (Israeli parliament), available only as a bundle of hard copy booklets. Full procurement data was not published until 2016. Other data sets were scattered around the net, in every format imaginable. Read more about the full saga of fiscal data “liberation” by the PKW in this case study published by the Open Government Partnership.

The unavailability of quality open data, went hand in hand with a lack of interest, lack of understanding and mere intimidation with the budget on the part of civil society organisations (CSOs), journalists and the general public. This was not surprising given the government’s history of holding the budget and spending data close to its chest and the entrenched culture of centralising these processes within the Ministry of Finance. For years, the Ministry controlled the budgeting process almost entirely, with very little consultation even with other government offices and almost no oversight by the Knesset. Within the government offices, only budget and accountant officers had access to the government's financial system, and only to the data concerning their own office. Other civil servants, as well as members of the Knesset had as little access to the budget as a lay person on the street. For decades, deliberation on fiscal matters was regarded as strictly professional rather than political, and reserved for economists only. This severely hindered the ability of civil society to participate in any budgeting processes and monitoring government fund allocation and spending.

However, contrary to the expectation that “if we build it they will come”, the BudgetKey did not provide an instant remedy. The Budget Key, a love child1 of a team of open data activists*, though very powerful, was still too complex for the uninitiated citizen. Without training, users were unable to take advantage of the data, and to understand the story it could be telling. So the PKW started offering individual training on-demand, explaining the inner works of the budget and the intricacies of the data. Soon, this proved to be highly time consuming and unsustainable, given the small team at the organisation. This is how the idea of a MOOC was born - a sustainable model for a mass training programme that has also provided a flexible study framework for participants. They could study on their own schedule and their own computer, no travel needed, except for a single face-to-face session, indispensable for building a community.

The programme was named Budgetism - an amalgam of budget and activism. PKW developed it together with two other transparency NGOs - the Movement for Freedom of Information (FOIM) and the Social Guard (SG).

CSOs started showing interest in the curriculum and the course took off. After several terms it became clear that it was not useful only for advocacy organisations and think tanks, but for any non-profit that was interested in exploring government funding opportunities. Since the BudgetKey contains data about government money received by non-profits, and vice versa, data about the non-profits themselves and all types of funds they received, it could serve as tool for researching and analysing the field, discovering funding opportunities and potential partners or competitors.

The programme is a six week long online course based on Open Edx platform, that consists of eight chapters for self study and one face-to-face session. The study material is designed to accommodate diverse learning styles, and includes short video tutorials, articles, podcasts, toolkits and hands-on exercises. It covers the following topics:

1. The budgeting process and the main actors in the government and the Knesset.
2. The role of the Knesset Finance Committee in approving ongoing changes to the budget.
3. Understanding the data and navigating the BudgetKey website.
4. Managing freedom of information (FOI) requests to obtain missing information.
5. Gender based budget analysis.
6. Monitoring implementation of government resolutions with budgetary implications.
7. Reading municipal budgets.

The programme is aimed mostly at civil society, but has inadvertently attracted central and local government officials, journalists and researchers as well.

Its core goals are to promote greater government transparency and accountability and to increase the capacity of activists and CSOs in Israel to act as watchdogs against unfair or corrupt spending of public funds, with the long term vision to democratise the budgeting processes and open them to public participation. The programme equipped them with tools and skill sets for effective monitoring of government policy implementation and public funds redistribution. This is particularly relevant to CSOs representing minority and vulnerable social groups which are often subject to budgetary discrimination.

A secondary goal was to forge a broad community of informed and involved citizens, who could build on the mutual experience, turn to each other for advice, and further promote public discussion on budgetary topics.

An important byproduct of the programme however, is the impact on the government itself, as the data producer and publisher, as much as the data user.

One of the setbacks to open data publication is that many of the data sets are never made use of. The BudgetKey provided a powerful demonstration of the real life value of open data, and could now be used as an incentive for demanding the release of still more data. On the other hand, the fact that so many eyes were now looking at the data, served as a cataliser for improvement of the quality of the data that is already being published. When presented at various governmental fora, it served as an inspiration for government officials and showcased the importance of the core principles of open data, such as the need for interoperability (ability to combine data sets from different sources), standardisation, completeness etc.

To sum up, data literacy is a case of chicken-and-egg. First you need data, then you need technology to process it. Further you need to teach fellow citizens how to make sense of it. But without the educated citizen to begin with, it is hard to get data published, and to get the citizen interested in learning how to use it. Thus, to really achieve the goal of data literacy it is necessary to act simultaneously on all fronts.