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Welcome to the wiki on winning the argument for localgov data.

Salford has a range of open data feeds. A lot of these are around council decisions and council meetings. The requirement to publish this information has been overshadowed a little bit by the announcement of the requirement to publish all expenditure over £500. So it's great to see Salford's example of a nice clean page with lots of different feeds covering governance arrangements, job openings, councillor information and an always useful "what's on" listings.

The Prime Minister and CLG Ministers wish to see local authorities publish granular local spending data. The Public Sector Transparency Board has been set up to drive an open data agenda. The Prime Minister has made a specific commitment that new items of local government spending over £500 be published on a council-by-council basis from January 2011. http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/statements-and-articles/2010/05/letter-t... Many local authorities also wish to publish such data. Camden Council asked the Panel for advice on publishing information about payments to suppliers greater than £500 in value.

This is our first attempt at producing a way to navigate around the 3.2m data items released by the UK government as part of Coins. Scroll down the page to choose which chunk of data you'd like to explore - and let us know what you find. Find out what the acronyms mean with our glossary.

A cool app showing which councils are publishing their spending data, whether the data is released with an 'open' licence, and whether is it available as 'linked data' (machine readable).

Having trouble persuading your managers of the benefits of open data? Or just need persuading yourself? Well here we try convincing all of you. What follows is a Q&A compiled initially by Dan Slee of Walsall Council and Stuart Harrison of Lichfield District Council. The first part is a bit of background information, the second part comprises some responses to common arguments. This work is ongoing, and this page will occasionally be updated accordingly. You can watch and contribute on the Open Local Data wiki

A letter from Prime Minister David Cameron to Government departments on plans to open up Government data * Historic COINS spending data to be published online in June 2010. * All new central government ICT contracts to be published online from July 2010. * All new central government lender documents for contracts over £10,000 to be published on a single website from September 2010, with this information to be made available to the public free of charge. * New items of central government spending over £25,000 to be published online from November 2010. * All new central government contracts to be published in full from January 2011. * Full information on all DFID international development projects over £500 to be published online from January 2011, including financial information and project documentation.

Ask every local authority in England to publish all its spending over £500 in an open format and what do you get? A whole load of PDFs. See our list of the best and the worst.

Warwickshire County Council is taking open and linked data seriously. They're opening up data and supporting the developer community to do something useful with it through a Hack Warwickshire competition (open til 25 June). And they're open to suggestions of what data should be open next.

Armchair Auditor lets you see how your council spends your money. Sometimes you want a high-level view of how much money is being spent by each council service or paid to each supplier. Other times you want to examine the details right down to individual payments. Armchair Auditor lets you do both.

The Civica group is a market leader in specialist systems and outsourcing services that help organisations to improve service delivery and efficiency. Everything we do is focused on the local outcomes our customers need to achieve.

A high-level, informal discussion piece about the possibilities of linked data and some of the realities of open data.

A great example of the Government's 'Transparency' agenda (open data and all that) in use. This showing council expenditure by supplier. Neat.

GovMetric enables you to listen to the Voice of the Customer across all contact channels, to prioritise which areas to improve and to measure improvements through near real-time reporting. Click on the sector tabs on the right to find out more. If you have access to YouTube you can see how one of our customers, East Herts Council, has made 18% efficiency savings using GovMetric

This guidance has been produced by the Local Public Data Panel, and builds on the draft guidance published in June this year by the panel, on comments made on that guidance, the Treasury guidance to central government departments on releasing their spending data, and experience from publishing the data, and, crucially, using and analysing it.

Armchair Auditor lets you see how your council spends your money.

Open and linked data in action. Nottingham Insight, previously known as NOMAD+, is a shared evidence base that provides access to data, information and intelligence about Nottingham and the surrounding area. This partnership system aims to improve decision-making, support partnership working and better prepare us for the future.

Another example of open and linked data proving information and analysis about your location.

New open data licence for public sector data.

ScraperWiki is an online tool to make that process simpler and more collaborative. Anyone can write a screen scraper using the online editor, and the code and data are shared with the world. Because it's a wiki, other programmers can contribute to and improve the code. And, if you're not a programmer yourself, you can request a scraper or ask the ScraperWiki team to write one for you.