Open Budget

[elburnett]

Open Budgets: Visualize Your City

What problem are you trying to solve?

City Budgets are being released in the middle of a pandemic and economic recession. Amid a rapidly changing public health crisis and the ongoing systemic oppression of black people and other minorities, the understanding of local budgeting is crucial to all members of the city.

In less than 140 characters explain your idea?

Help people understand budgets; how they work, key dates and terms. Provide transparency to the community about how and where money is spent. This is a wiki with basic terms and outlines of the budget process, not limited to writing. It can be adopted for a coding project, but the current design is to host on GitHub as a wiki and to create graphics. We take inspiration from the Maine Ballot site on its ability to understand Ballots.

Who will benefit from your project? Can you tell their story?

Ex: As a [Person in community] I want to [Do Something] So I can [Benefits].

As a parent, I want to understand how to advocate for a well funded education system so I can be sure that my kids and community are taken care of.
As an activist, I want to know how to get my city budget to reflect my community's priorities of less policing and more public health so I can feel safe in my community and not under fear of violence or death.
As a City Councilor and elected official, I want my constituents to understand how the city process works so we can meet the needs of the whole city and increase understanding and citywide buy-in for tough decisions.
As a city staffer, I want the public to be aware of the constraints the city is working with so I can do my job effectively.
As a member of society, I want to know how I can help my neighbors who are struggling.
As a small business owner, I want to know how the city and its decisions will affect my livelihood so I can plan for the future.

What other resources/tools are currently serving the same need?

The City of Portland website and budget documents.
Portland, Maine Budget Documents

Budget Party from Open Austin: https://austinbudget.party, https://github.com/open-austin/budgetparty
People Budget by Code for Miami: https://github.com/Code-for-Miami/peoplebudget
http://arlingtonvisualbudget.org/
https://github.com/goinvo/Visual-Town-Budget

What other OpenMaine projects have tried this? What can we learn?

OpenMaine made a visual budget of Portland, Maine's budget in 2017, redeploying the Arlington Visual Budget Data
Retrospective
This project was novel. It did not get widespread publicity. Joey Brunelle, Rob Korobkin, and one other volunteer created the project in 2017. There were some numbers that were difficult to get in accurately. The manual entry was a lot of manual grunt work to get it, but relatively easy to code.

Is there any data, research or code available for your current idea?

https://www.portlandmaine.gov/201/Budget-Financial-Documents

Are there any Drawbacks to choosing this path?

It's hard to research and understand! We have to learn how the budget process, which is pretty complicated.

What would success look like?

The project is a way for people to better understand and advocate for needed municipal changes.
It is lightweight and replicable.
Metrics: 67,000 website visits in Portland (the same as its population; a very lofty goal.)

What help do you need now?

Doing validation interviews.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Validation: Stakeholder and User Interviews
https://methods.18f.gov/discover/stakeholder-and-user-interviews/

Please remember to find us at openmaine.org and sign up for our Slack, etc. And feel free to email us: hello@openmaine.org