We are working with Indigo trust exploring data that gives insight into who has been funding whom. The project, called 360 Giving, is a 5 year project with an ‘ambition for open philanthropy in the UK’. It is currently in the early stages:

• work has started towards a standard for publishing philanthropy data
• and some sample data sets have been collected.

We're continuing this initial work by road-testing the data format:

• we've been re-formatting the available data according to the draft-standard
• and analysing, and visualizing the resulting data sets.

Besides helping to polish the draft-standard, we hope to demonstrate the benefits of publishing open funding data, and to get buy in from funding bodies. We suspect that these organizations might see publishing their data as a costly and complex chore, rather than as a liberating way to benefit from the insights available when there is data from accross the phhilanthropic sector.

To address these issues, we're working with Tim Davies to make the data-standard easy to use (like publishing a spreadsheet). And we're planning to:

• publish our stories of converting the data, together with the scripts we used.
• do some basic analysis of the resulting cross-funder data to demonstrate cross-cutting insights
• visualize the results and tell the stories to point the way to more useful ways this open data can be used to improve grant-making effectiveness.

We think this will help funders choose to participate in an open-philanthropy-data community.