David Kane's blog

Last May, after the intitial £6 billion cuts to publicly funded services were announced, we launched "Crowdsourcing the Cuts". This was an exercise which aimed to gather intelligence from our members and other parts of the VCS on what was being cut, and what impact it was having on them and their beneficiaries.

Pensions have been in the news recently, with articles in Civil Society and Third Sector based on an Acevo survey that indicate

You've always been able to look at a list of our members on the NCVO website, but given all our work on open data over the last year or so I wondered whether it might be possible to supplement the alphabetical and geographical pages with something a bit more structured.

Something that we get asked for a lot, but that wasn't in this year's Almanac, is the regional distribution of charity employees.

I recently re-discovered the Charity Commission's Register of Mergers, which is separate to the main register of charities.

In one of my first blog posts, almost a year ago, I wrote about the possibilities of e-accounts for registered charities. Now I've tried to put those ideas into practice.

A little while ago I promised to release some of NCVO's data, to put some of the principles of open data into action.

The first dataset is our work on classifying charities.

We're starting to think about our data on charities and the next Almanac, and we've been working with colleagues at the Third Sector Research Centre (TSRC) to think about how we can make sure our estimates of the income and spending of charities are as accurate as possible - and more importantly that we know how accurate our estimates are.

Just a quick post to draw your attention to conversations going on at Arbitrary Constant.

[update: we've now launched the successor to crowdsourcing the cuts - a collaborative initiative called Voluntary Sector Cuts.]