Data & Stuff // Neil Houston

For those who aren’t aware what cablegate is, then in brief it’s a set of diplomatic transmissions.

The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington DC. 15,652 of the cables are classified Secret.

The Wikileaks team had performed some analysis of the data. Around where the cables had been sent from, and what classification given to them. As well as looking at what the most popular ‘tags’ for the cables were. Unfortunately their analysis that they placed on Tableau Public was removed, see here for the Tableau Statement.

This seems a bit odd, considering the analysis was at a summary and statistical level. For instance, there were X number cables sent by Y. Though not revealing the actual content of them, which is obviously in some cases secret, or classified. This is in contrast to the analysis I performed of the Wikileaks Afghanistan War Diaries. Which shows both a summary level, and further detail about the confidential files. This analysis is also hosted on Tableau Public.

So take a peak at the analysis I performed and placed on Tableau Public (the links click through to the Tableau Public versions).

Cables by Origin

Tags Used

Last week I commented on the proposal that councils would have to publish their payments made to suppliers that were over £500. You can see my full thoughts, here – Local Data – Payment Publishing Response.

This week, it appears that Adrian Short, has taken the data released from Royal Borough of Windsor & Maidenhead, and produced Armchair Auditor.

This is a website that simply takes the CSV information provided by the council, pulls it into a database, and allows you to examine it by Directorate (Services), and Supplier (Company paid for delivering a service). It is quite nice and easy to use, and you can simply see that, for instance, Capita Business Services Ltd were paid 15 times, totalling £52,493 between Sept 2009 and March 2010, the average amount of each payment was £3,499.

It also highlights the fact that the Supplier Master may give you a bit more information than you currently have. As Capita are shown as:

• Capita Business Services Ltd
• Capita Education Resourcing
• Capita Education Services Ltd
• Capita Software Services
• Capita Training Ltd

So it looks like these are related businesses, indeed seperate companies, but the ultimate beneficial owner maybe ‘Capita Group PLC’. It also shows that payments were made to Capita Education Resourcing and Capita Education Services. These may actually be one company, and just different divisions within the company structure. If you had a full supplier master, it’s likely that these different suppliers will have an indicator to show that they are ‘related’.

A quick check at Companies House doesn’t actually show a result for Capita Education, nor some of the others. For instance Capita Education Resourcing is a trading name of Capita Resourcing Ltd, likewise this may be the same for Education Services.  Companies may be trading under many different names, all of which are actually present as different suppliers in the system, therefore the actual company may be receiving more funds from the council than you presume at first thought.

All of the above was found through a quick play with Armchair Auditor, it shows the strength of the tool at being able to get to the data quickly, and concisely as well as being able to direct someone to your findings with relative ease.

Whilst at the same time, we can see the challenge at understanding the data, especially when you start to look across councils and try and answer questions like ‘How much is supplier X getting paid for services bought by councils across the country’. I’ll discuss approaches for how you might deal with that situation another day.

For now, I’m going to look at the work Adrian has done, and see what else might be interesting within it.

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