Visualising UK Ministerial Lobbying & “Buddying” Over Eight Months by Roland Dunn.
From the post:
[This is a companion piece to our visualisation of ministerial lobbying – open it up and take a look!].
…
Eight Months Worth of Lobbying Data
Turns out that James Ball, together with the folks at Who’s Lobbying had collected together all the data regarding ministerial meetings from all the different departments across the UK’s government (during May to December 2010), tidied the data up, and put them together in one spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhHlFdx-QwoEdENhMjAwMGxpb2kyVnlBR2QyRXJVTFE.
It’s important to understand that despite the current UK government stating that it is the most open and transparent ever, each department publishes its ministerial meetings in ever so slightly different formats. On that page for example you can see Dept of Health Ministerial gifts, hospitality, travel and external meetings January to March 2013, and DWP ministers’ meetings with external organisations: January to March 2013. Two lists containing slightly different sets of data. So, the work that Who’s Lobbying and James Ball did in tallying this data up is considerable. But not many people have the time to tie such data-sets together, meaning the data contained in them is somewhat more opaque than you might at first be led to believe. What’s needed is one pan-governmental set of data.
An example to follow in making “open” data a bit more “transparent.”
Not entirely transparent for as the author notes, minutes from the various meetings are not available.
Or I suppose when minutes are available, their completeness would be questionable.
I first saw this in a tweet by Steve Peters.