We’re really excited to announce the launch of Armchair Auditor OnTheWight.
It’s a whole Website devoted to making it as easy as possible for anyone to be able to examine the details of each of the Isle of Wight council’s expenses over £500 that we published a couple of days ago.
You can view the spending through many different ways. The major ones are
- Expense type – eg Electricity or Postage
- Service Area – eg Archaeological Reburial or Occupational Therapy
- Suppliers – eg Island Waste Services or Psychic Frontiers Ltd
Add comments
Each of the pages of information that you find has an area towards the bottom of the page where you can type in comments – to share information, findings, comments with others who might be interested in the same areas.
If you don’t want to go as far as typing a comment, you can use the ‘Like’ thumbs up/down.
Finding suppliers
If you come across a company that you don’t recognise like, for example, Broxap Ltd, there’s a simple link to click on that carries out a Google search for the company name, helping you find their Website.
Each area that is displayed, can be clicked on to find further details.
It’s highly addictive!
We’ve been using the Armchair Auditor and not only is it a fantastic tool (well done WightGeek – see below), but we’ve found it highly addictive!
To help you in your clicking around, we’ve programmed it so if you’ve visited a link before, it will appear with a light grey background instead of the initial light green.
Sharing
Each of these pages have their own Web address (URL), so you can copy and paste the links to share with your friends via email or Facebook.
How it came about
When VB started asking the council to release its data, we also got to thinking about how the data might be best viewed.
Happily we came across the excellent Armchair Auditor site, created by Adrian Short when the Local Government Open Data pioneer, the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead released their data.
WightGeek = Hero
Another happy co-incidence was bumping in to WightGeek, an Island technical whizz, who is super-tuned up at writing (something called) Ruby on Rails. He took direct inspiration from Adrian’s Armchair Auditor and coded his own version of by hand.
WightGeek has been working hard importing the IWC data into the system and tuning the code to make it the easy to use system you see now – so a huge HURRAH! to him. While we’re doing ‘Thank Yous’, we want to pass them on to fellow Islanders Garth Oatley for assisting and Tony Hirst for the ideas.
The future
Our hope is now to build on what you can now see. If you come up with any ideas on reports that you might like to see, or graphs drawn – just get in touch on [email protected]
Have fun!
