Collaborative Study Lab
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Guidelines for Budgeting Transparency:
Matthew Hall
OpenPlans
The following is a guide to best practices for municipal governments to publish their budgeting/spending data to citizens. These practices should be seen as the basic foundations for government-led Gov 2.0 efforts for civic improvement and not a comprehensive guide to all information and communication technology (ICT) facilitated approaches. This article focuses on transparency efforts, so does not include social media engagement practices. Since many governments have limited resources to devote to Gov 2.0 efforts, this is a list of low intensity methods for jump starting civic innovation. -
Does Budgeting Transparency Increase Understanding?
Matthew Hall
@Hallm13
Does budgeting transparency increase understanding? In a previous post we discovered that sharing the results of budgeting processes, as in spending/budgeting numbers, does not significantly contribute to citizen understanding. Raw spending data is meaningless to citizens without some sort of context to show what those numbers actually mean for their communities. So, how does the city make sense of spending data? When the city decides on spending, what factors do they consider and what information sources are they looking at?
Budgeting decisions are amazing complex, with small changes having repercussions throughout the budget. While open government advocates, like myself, want to include citizens in this process by making them more transparent and participatory, how is that participation going to create civic value without informed contributors who understand the consequences of the decisions they are making? -
Query: What features would you want for an OpenBudgeting App?
If you could build an application to increase municipal spending/budgeting transparency and citizen participation, which individual features would it have?
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Why We Need Location Based Budgeting Data:
Matthew Hall
Is open data good because it makes us feel better or because it makes us live better? Are we motivated to make government spending more transparent because we feel that it is morally right to open data to citizens or are we motivated by the belief that greater transparency and participation will improve governance? Answering this question is important because it informs the design of open government tools and processes. Many of the recent attempts at making government more transparent by offering citizens a digital look into government’s balance sheets ultimately fail to engage citizens with meaningful data. Open data programs such as, Washington D.C.’s budgeting dashboard, offer citizens a disorienting view of all of the city’s spending data. My question is how are citizens supposed to know whether or not the numbers they are looking at are good or bad, not whether they are accurate but whether they signify successful programs. Also it is very difficult for a citizen to look up personally relevant information. Meaning, if they want to know how much the city is spending on their local park, they are out of luck because they can only get data for all city parks. These types of tools send the message that data should be accessible but not usable. If citizens had usable data that would actually inform them of the financial state of their community services then government would benefit from the collective intelligence of thousands upon thousands of monitors constantly reporting on the state of those services.
Location based budgeting data gives citizens uniquely relevant data that changes based on their current location, therefore, giving them a tool for active monitoring and participation. It also curates data based on users’ check-ins and preferences, so that they can monitor only what is important to them. Filtering spending data based on interest and location engages citizens and take advantage of the benefits of modularity within collective intelligence.
Modularity means splitting up a large task into smaller pieces, so they can be managed easier, and then reassembling them once they are finished into a massive solution. The task of monitoring all of a city’s data is truly massive, so the modularity of filtering data based on an individuals interests and location breaks down the task into a manageable amount and, since every individual will have slightly different interests and locations, all of the city’s data can be managed. Instead of trying to enlist citizens to mostly monitor data that is not even relevant or interesting to them, filtered data asks them to monitor what is most interesting to them making it more likely that they will be engaged and continuously participate.
Location based budgeting data engages citizens by giving them a usable tool to actively participate in governing their community.
