The Public Knowledge Workshop is an NGO focused on using tech to promote transparency and transform "public data" into "public knowledge"

Since 2010, the "Budget Key" project (aka "Open Budget") aims to unravel the secrets within the State's Budget (approx $120B)

The beginning (Dec. 2010): scraping and parsing 100s of xls/text/html files to create the first budget DB spanning over 20 years of budget data

We only got the data through a combination of FOIA requests and the aid of a government minister (MK Michael Eitan)

Launched in Mar. 2011 - "The Open Budget" - our open-source, open-data, first of its kind budget site, spanning 20 years of fully-searchable budget data (and we got ourselves a government domain name!)

Budgetary transfers - changes in the budget during the year - were the next target. The Knesset's Finance Committee (which is appointed to approve these changes) only got the proposed transfers during the meeting. Unfortunately, the MOF claimed they only kept the paper trail, without any digital record.

In 2012 we sent volunteers to scan the records in the Knesset archives...

And we built a crowd-sourcing platform, calling citizens to help us digitize the scanned records back into machine readable form (by re-typing each and every number...)

Only 8 hours passed since the site launched until the media caught on the story and MOF backed-down and "miraculously" found all the transfers' data. Later that day all data from 2005 to 2011 was published in an Excel file.

The story of budgetary transfers does not end here - in 2013 we started working with the Knesset's youngest MK - Stav Shaffir - who took it upon herself to fight this bad practice of extensive changes to the budget throughout the year.

Turns out that over 13% of the budget is reallocated through the course of one year. Some of these changes are technical, but some are highly political, used to avoid public scrutiny or as a means for the MOF to exert their power over other minisitries.

We built a tool whose only purpose was to be used during the Finance Committee sessions. MK Shaffir used it to get an in-depth report for each proposed change, allowing her to "ask the hard questions" in real-time, before decisions were made.

One of the side effects of this political campaign was that in 2014 the MOF started to publish proposed budgetary transfers one week before the committee's meeting - and in digital form. What a major policy change in just two years!

In 2014 we started to look at spending data. Our first data source was the grants database - a long list of organizations, financially supported by the government.
The government does not release this data in a machine readable form - only in a website that only works in IE6. But this doesn't frighten us...

One thing that caught our eye were records that only started to appear in 2014. These records were from the "Settlement Division" - Israel's secretive organization for settling in the occupied territories. Although not being part of the government, this branch of the WZO is fully funded directly from the State's Budget

An interesting side note - turns out that budgetary transfers are used to increase the actual budget for the settlement division throughout the year, making it 10 times bigger than what was originally approved by the Knesset.

The grant records were a first glimpse into the inner working of the division. We passed the findings to a group of researchers. By analyzing them they found a disproportional allocation of resources as well as few instances of corruption in one specific unit.

The findings were published in major news outlets (we even got to the NY Times...). Today there's an ongoing police investigation related to corrupt money passing through the division. The specific corrupt unit was shut down. And the government's legal advisor wrote a report prohibiting future funding directly from the budget (but it ain't over yet...)

Our first attempt at reaching a wider public was back in 2013. It was done in collaboration with Calcalist, a major economic news outlet. We visualized the difference between the proposed 2013 budget and the current budget using playful 'bubbles'.

Calcalist followed the deliberations in the Knesset on the proposed budget with in-depth articles accompanied by our data analysis and visualization.

In late 2014 we launched the "Budget Key" - our main website which replaced the original website launched 3 years before.

This time we took an opinionated approach - putting our focus on the what we think is important in the budget. One example is the emphasis we put on the significance of budgetary transfers...

Another example is procurements which gets exempt from going through tender processes. We devised an "interest" formula, which brings first the most suspicious requests for exemption.

When we're not finding specific cases of corruption, we try to bring interesting budget-related issues to the public through the front pages of popular media and news agencies. For example: An extensive piece regarding budgetary transfers.

Another example: Our analysis of out-sourcing and privatization in the Education system.

We aim to keep a bi-partisan position and a clear "transparency only" agenda. We try to reach non-obvious audiences as well...

...which tend to receive us with a positive approach.

Other than working with the media, we work with the third sector as well. Being a technology oriented NGO, we see it as our responsibility to help other NGOs discover public data which might help their cause.

Diving into procuremens, trying to complete the corruption cycle

Adding narratives on top of budget figures (a.k.a "DataTours")

Collaboration & Cooperation