Open Charity Data Workshop #1
When: Monday, November 24th, 2014 14:00 - 17:00
Venue: Guinness Enterprise Centre, Taylor's Lane, Dublin 8, Ireland (Link for Google StreetView)
Idea
Most large charities have an independently audited report on their website detailing activities for the year and financial statements. In most cases, the financial report is signed-off by the senior auditor in a high-profile accounting firm.
These are very credible and reassuring documents for any donor to read. The problem is that an individual would have to spend several hours reviewing separate charities’ annual reports before getting any sense of who they should be supporting.
Open Data can help make this easier for charities' donors.
Tickets
Additional Information
What is open data? “A piece of data or content is open if anyone is free to use, reuse, and redistribute it — subject only, at most, to the requirement to attribute and/or share-alike.” (more here)
Background
One sunny day last July a group of volunteers came together to gather and create an open dataset for €640 million of 2012 charity data from 25 charities. We placed it in this visualization.(Link)
Benefits
Reassure existing charitable donors that their money is being well spent.
Convince people who have stopped donating after the recent scandals to start giving again.
A prototype of the tool which makes it easy for anyone to assess how charities use donations deployed.
Why you should go?
We want to collaborate with charities to create the 2013 open data tool. It's a strong transparency message to show that charities are are coming together to display their financial data to the public.
You can add links to stories and video and photo content to your charities section of the dataset.
You will get a visualization for your own charity to display your data (llike the above) on your website
Context
"Charities in crisis as 400,000 people stop donating after recent scandals" (Link)
The government auditor has set the goal of establishing the charity regulator in 2014 (Link)
BUT: There is already delays and we don't know when the government will be up to speed (Link) and we don't know if the planned changes will address citizen needs and requirements to bring back their trust in Irish Charities
"Don't let recent charity scandals stop you donating" - We agree and want to help Irish Charities re-gain trust by opening up charity data to everyone and by increasing charity transparency and accountability.
In collaboration with Open Knowledge Ireland.