Beyond Transparency: Discover the new National Treasury spending and data portal

It will help journalists spend fewer hours on end searching for the information

Civic tech NPO OpenUp has built several tools that make big data sets and relevant documentation easily accessible to journalists, to help them add context and deepen their reporting.

Recently, National Treasury, in partnership with Imali Yethu, a coalition of civil society organisations, appointed OpenUp to build a budget data portal. It makes national and provincial government budget data and documentation easily accessible in one place, rather than journalists having to spend hours on end searching for the information.

Experienced journalist and trainer Raymond Joseph will conduct a free 90-minute workshop in which he will share ideas for stories and simple explanations of how budgets work and are allocated. The aim is to spark less obvious story ideas that go beyond the usual reporting on budgets.

He’ll also share useful links, interesting budget datasets and a list of contacts and sources, including Treasury experts and people working within civil society organisations, which goes beyond the “usual suspects”.

He will also briefly touch on Municipal Money, another National Treasury tool that contains information about every single municipality in South Africa.

Please join us on Tuesday 13 February at JoziHub, 44 Stanley, and register at https://goo.gl/forms/SetvAp3Z79kYiuLi1