Tel-Aviv Court orders the municipality to publish its budget in Excel format

[Fabiano Angélico]

Vejam que interessante a decisão de um tribunal israelense:

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The Tel-Aviv district court issued a ruling yesterday ordering the TLV municipailty to publish its budget in Excel (or similar machine readable) format, beginning with the 2011 budget, and to do so when the budget bill is submitted to the city council, and again when the final budget is approved. This in contrast to the PDF form in whcih the budget is currently presented in the municipality website.

 

The story begins a year ago when the opposition in the city council asked the muncipality to get a copy of its budget in a machine-readable file (XLS, CSV or the likes). The municipality refused, based on two claims - 1. that the law does not oblige them to do so and that the publication of the book itself and the PDF file meets legal requirements; 2. that the old mainframe systems the municipality is working with do not have this option and doing so would require unreasonable resources.

 

The reason for the request in the first place was that the opposition wants to allow local activists to more easily process the budget data, present visualization of items in it, explore it with graphs, comparisons between different items and different years, etc...

 

The opposition faction approached the Movement for Freedom of Information which took the municipality to court. After the first session, the judge asked the municipality to consider committing to pubilsh future budgets in the required format. 30 days later the municipality responded that it will present in 2011 a query system that will allow site surfers to search for items in the budget but still refused to release the full file in XLS or similar format. The Movement for Freedom of Information objected this proposal, claiming that it leaves too much power in the hand of the municipality which will determine in the new systems what queries and reports are offered.

 

A second court session was scheduled for yesterday. The night before the municipailty informed the court that it is willing to publish the budget in the required format, "thanks to technological developments that made it possible to export the data", and asked that therefore the procedure be repealed. The truth is that these "technological developments" were our pressure on the Ministry of Treasury that caused them to publish the state budget in XLS format, creating a precedent that made it clear that the municipality will loose in court. We asked to get a ruling in spite of the municipalities announcement, and the judge accepted our request and issued a binding ruling that orders the municipality to do so, saying that their "mysterious technological developments seem more like an understanding that the legal basis for their argumentation was rather weak" and also ordered them to pay us 10,000 NIS ($ 2500) in expenses.

 

Roy Peled

FOI Movement, Israel

 

[Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva]

On 06-07-2010 09:59, Fabiano Angélico wrote:
> The truth is that these "technological developments" were our pressure on the Ministry of Treasury that caused them to publish the state budget in XLS format

Interessante, mas pouco ou nada adianta o dado ser "aberto" mas o
formato fechado.

--
Rodrigo Rodrigues da Silva

PoliGNU - Grupo de Estudos de Software Livre da Poli/USP
GNU Project

[Eduardo Leoni]

pouco ou nada adianta publicar dado em Excel??? Eu odeio Excel tanto
quanto qualquer outro aqui. Há um porém. Excel é um formato fechado,
mas é "conhecido". Há dezenas de softwares livres ou não que conseguem
ler este tipo de arquivo.

A corte determinou que os dados fossem publicados em "Excel (or
similar machine readable)". Acho uma decisão muito boa. Não vamos
deixar o ótimo ser inimigo do bom :)

-eduardo