About this site

After actively encouraging the Isle of Wight council to openly publish their data for over six months, OnTheWight came up with the idea that it should be as easy as possible to look through.

Happily OnTheWight met up with and chatted to wightgeek who fancied the challenge and was inspired by the great work done by Adrian Short, who came up with the idea of the original Armchair Auditor site.

Once inspired, the code was completely hand-written by wightgeek using Ruby on Rails.

All the data here is open data. It's free for you to use and republish, including commercially, under the same terms as data.gov.uk

Why Armchair Auditor?

Great phrase isn't it? On 5th June 2010, Eric Pickles, Communities & Local Government Secretary, used it in his speech announcing that councils should publish their spending data:

The swift and simple changes we are calling for today will unleash an army of armchair auditors and quite rightly make those charged with doling out the pennies stop and think twice about whether they are getting value for money.

If this site is used by the media, or a publication, it must be referenced in any report.

Data source: IW Council Transparency

Image: Alexander Drachmann under a Creative Commons license.