Last weekend saw Accountability Hack, a hackathon focussing on making innovative use of public data from National Audit Office, Office of National Statistics and Parliament.
The joint event was a great opportunity to examine how Parliament works, to delve into how public sector expenditure is audited, and to understand the key statistics generated by the public sector.
We provided our API and were very pleased to see two teams make use of it to come up with interesting projects. In fact, the PFi Explorer team who had our very own Xavier Riley in it even won the Multi-organisation category award!
Hacks using OpenCorporates
The following are accounts of the projects by the teams that worked on them:
MP & Friends (mult-org) by Tom Paskhalis, Sharechiwai, Daeus, Derek Jones
What is the Hack? A List of MPs’ company directorships and company co-directors
Data on MPs and registered UK companies from OpenCorporates has been combined to list the company directorships of every MP and the names of every co-director of those companies.
The data is presented as a ‘Friends’ graph linking each MP to their companies and the directors of those companies.
Project URL: derek-jones.github.io/MP-and-Friends
GitHub: Derek-Jones/MP-and-Friends
PFI Explorer [NAO] by Richard Palmer, Vica Rogers, Xavier Riley, James Southern
What is the Hack? Visualise & Explore Private Finance Initiative Data
Our project brings together data from HM Treasury & the NAO, and OpenCorporates alongside academic research on private finance initiatives, allowing the user to browse through all historical and current projects, looking at costs over the period of the project, connections (via OpenCorporates ) to owning companies (allowing connections between directors to be made), reports on projects by the Audit Office.
Project URL: pfi-explorer.meteor.com
GitHub: jms301/pfi-explorer
OTHER HACKS
http://hacks.rewiredstate.org/events/acchack14
Follow the updates from the Hack with #AccHack14 on twitter or read this blog.
blog.opencorporates.com 