How does the Italian government organise its public spending? The latest project from campaign group Open Spending gives us a unique insight.
Open Spending is cataloguing the world's public spending by as many governments as they can get their hands on the data. Set up by the Open Knowledge Foundation, it's based on the project's Where Does My money Go? which breaks down UK public spending.
The data, which you can see visualised here in Italian, breaks down the government's spending at the highest level, by subject and by region. You can see it on the Open Spending site with more options too. It was built by a small group of developers, journalists and civil servants in a hectic 48-hour sprint
Why Italy? It's partly inspired by a major open data initiative taking place today in the Italian parliament. Italian journalists, politicians, developers, designers, entrepreneurs, academics, and representatives from public bodies will debate the future of open government data in Italy. We're presenting there too (you can follow it on Twitter #da19) as is Jonathan Gray of the OKF. He says of this visualisation:
There is a lot of interesting work going on in the Italian open data community at the moment. Organisations such as the Italian Open Government Association are doing a great job at pulling people together from different parts of the Italian government to make the case for open data
The data itself comes from Italy's Regional Public Accounts (RPA) project and covers from 1996 to 2008.
You can download it below. What can you do with it?
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