We are going to build some demonstrators to show what can be done with open data about grant making.  Indigo Trust has engaged Aptivate an NGO expert in data manipulation and visualisation to build some demonstrators and in so doing test the draft data standard. Aptivate will use as a base load the hundreds of […]

360Giving wants to free up 80% of the UK’s grants by value as open data.  So we need to encompass the biggest grant makers. We were delighted to work closely with BIG Lottery officers and recently their Chief Executive Dawn Austwick to begin publishing their impressive grant record as basic open data (on which, more […]

Foundation transparency: why it matters A huge amount of work has gone into making international aid flows more open, resulting in the International Aid Transparency Initiative. The work was led by the UK, yet domestic grants made by UK foundations remain opaque. Why is it that I can look up where the UK government or […]

Sometimes open data on grant making just pops up unexpectedly.  I was giving evidence to the Warwick Commission on Cultural Value and spent some time poking around in the Arts Council England’s website looking for strategy and policy documents as well as any open data they may have.  ACE has a good research capability but […]

I gave evidence to the Warwick Commission today on a range of digital issues and philanthropy. The digital stuff i cover over there but here is the section on philanthropy and transparency.  I call in particular for the Arts Council England, which publishes its grants to publish also the evidence and evaluations they hold for […]

In our view at Indigo, to achieve our objectives we cannot lead the argument with open data itself. Open data is a critical enabler to achieve benefits. It is the benefits that appeal to senior grant makers only rarely the data itself.  An update on activity since the kick off meeting. Nominet Trust, BIG and Indigo […]

BIG Lottery Fund is the largest of the organisations that distributes money from the state-sanctioned Lottery  in the UK. They have given a helpful response to my two FOI requests.  I made two probing requests – one for a set of grants data from a geographic unit of manageable size and one for the nature of data […]

It isn’t always easy for large organisations to just open the floodgates and pour data out.   There’s always a host of compliance issues, some real, some over-cautious.  Tim Berners-Lee’s original, highly readable 2009 article on bureaucracies and open data acknowledges this and urges them just to publish, not spend years agonising: Just do it…There […]

Indigo Trust hosted a meeting at its offices to discus open data, philanthropy, grant making and the principles underpinning this blog.  The minutes will be published in due course, the following attended: Simon Marshall Big Lottery Funding Cathy Pharoah Cass Business School Owen Barder Centre for Global Development Beth Breeze Centre for Philanthropy – Kent […]

In 2010, Esmee Fairbairn a leading grant maker in the social justice area held a futures event.  One team took Esmee’s grant information from their website (where it was published in pdf documents) and turned it into a database.  By turning the data into a versatile database, instead of static documents they were able to […]