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Commitment 1 progress report: Sep – Nov 2017

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.