Open Government Partnership New Zealand National Action Plan 2016-2018
Date: September to November 2017
Commitment 1 progress report: September to November 2017
Commitment 1: Open Budget
Lead agency: The Treasury
To promote public discussion/debate and participation through accessibility of the Budget and include relevant groups outside of government in the formative phase of the Budget, ensuring they are informed about the process and issues.
Milestones
Milestone 1
Ask key stakeholder groups how the Budget could be made more accessible
Progress: completed
Milestone 2
Invite feedback on the previous Budget – this means making it available in forms people can engage with, which could include machine readable data, plain English published material and visual presentations
End date: May 2018
Progress: underway
Milestone 3
Provide Budget data in machine readable form – this could include open source formats
End date: May 2018
Progress: underway
Milestone 4
Work with agencies that have expertise in presenting Budget data in ways that make it easy to understand
End date: May 2018
Progress: underway
What have we been doing?
- A new contents page for “figures and tables” was added to the Pre-election Update as a result of stakeholder feedback.
- The Treasury has discussed establishing an open data programme with Statistics New Zealand, and how best to present financial data. The outcome of the meeting was to take a simple approach, based on examples of good practice (e.g. Singapore).
- Established that the appropriate license for Budget data has already been determined – Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
What’s next?
Data
- Plan how to make the license terms known on the landing pages where data is available for download (Treasury website, data.govt.nz).
- Determine whether or not license info needs to be in the data file itself e.g. CSV or JSON.
- Develop the presentation page.
- Establish what data will be released initially.
Budget 2018 Design
- Publish a diagram outlining the budget process and broad timeline.
- Publish a roadmap on how to use the Budget publications and what each provides.
- Increase use of table of contents, figures, page references, tabs, and hyperlinks within and across documents.
- Provide targeted, bite size pieces of information (e.g. social media snippets), with links to more detailed information.