Throughout our mapping and analysis of the 36 case studies on the Technology for Transparency Network we have tended to group projects by their geographic region. This is in large part because our team of researchers and research reviewers were hired explicitly to map and evaluate technology projects that promote transparency and accountability in the regions were they are based. However, when one steps back to take in all of the projects from a global perspective, it becomes readily apparent that there are thematic and strategic categories which apply across regions. This week's posts aim to tease out some of those trends and offer constructive criticism and concrete recommendations to funders, project leads, and researchers as to how such projects can become more effective, efficient, and sustainable. On the Technology for Transparency Network platform we have organized case studies and project listings into ten different categories: budget monitoring, civic complaints, election monitoring, parliament informatics, extractive industries, private sector transparency, advocacy, crime, local government, and aid transparency. You can sort through each of the ten categories by clicking on the filters beneath our map interface. If you have suggestions for other categories that we should be tracking, please leave a comment below. Today's post will focus on two of the largest categories we reviewed – budget and election monitoring. Monitoring the budgets of local and national governments is a key instrument in the toolkit of any accountability activist. Active budget monitoring can both prevent and expose corruption. As an example, despite protests from privacy activists, the Mexican government decided to publish the salaries of elected officials. (At the time, Mexican governors were among the highest paid in the world.) The reasoning is that any elected official who is clearly spending more than his/her salary permits should be scrutinized closely to determine where that money is coming from, and whether it is linked to political misbehavior. Budget monitoring can also lead to improved public services and infrastructure. For example, in the United States the government recently passed the largest economic stimulus program in the country's history. To track how that money was spent the government created Recovery.gov while ProPublica created Eye on the Stimulus, which also tracks how the money is spent. Kenya had its own stimulus program, called the Constituency Development Fund, which started in 2003 as a way to fund local governments to improve their infrastructure and services. Budget Tracking Tool is a way to see how that money is being spent and to leave comments to report on the progress of those projects. However, so far few people seem to use the tool, and even fewer comment on the progress of the development projects in their constituency. In order to effectively monitor and evaluate any budget, the data must be available in a format which allows for analysis in a spreadsheet or database program. The information should be both granular, in order to evaluate as many variables as possible, and timely, in order to expose corruption and inefficiencies before it is too late. Unfortunately, most governments that do publicly release their budget information do so using Adobe's PDF format, which doesn't allow for data analysis. As Noam Hoffstater and Alon Padan of Our Budget pointed out in our interview, the accounting offices of governments obviously have their budget information in spreadsheet format, but they purposely publish it as a PDF document in order to discourage closer scrutiny. Our Budget uses OCR technology to create an Excel spreadsheet version of the Tel Aviv municipal budget. Volunteers go over and check every entry, and then they make visualizations and graphs of how the municipality is spending taxpayers’ money. Importantly, while they have done this for two years running, in the end they decided that litigation (demanding that the municipality release the budget in spreadsheet format) was a better strategy than time-consuming, technological solutions. Dinero y Politica uses a similar strategy to create more information about campaign financing in Argentinian elections so that voters can make fully informed choices. In Argentina, political parties must disclose all of the campaign contributions they received at least ten days before the election. But, once again, they only have to disclose those numbers in a PDF report, which, doesn't allow citizens analyze the data to see relationships between political interests and politicians.