#openbudgets

[stephendavenport]

Working on state level citizen budgets in #Nigeria. Good work with great partners! #openbudgets #opengov (at Abuja, Nigeria) https://www.instagram.com/p/BvjMzvzAcrA8WSX4K6dfBGvzE0HzCxmYwuSpdc0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=f8gjm3fw0b38

[stephendavenport]

Who loves subnational citizen budgets??? #Nigeria #openbudgets #OpenGov #ogp (at Abuja, Nigeria) https://www.instagram.com/p/BveTXtkgtkOEnEQxYKVCLFbSOkXlA7hq050TbM0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=5gnmpziqp6v5

[stephendavenport]

Citizen budget training in #Nigeria. #opengov #openbudgets #ogp (at Abuja, Nigeria) https://www.instagram.com/p/BveCZibgkHNVhk_yEfgFnlJzv03J9RXYlHya7o0/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=s32dt6ttddsn

[collaborativestudy]

What Does Open Budgeting Mean for Communities?

Matthew Hall

Providing citizen access to public data is a popular trend among city governments, with NYC recently announcing that every check in their register will now be accessible to the public, but do existing efforts at transparent government spending actually engage citizens and give them a better understanding of their communities?  The short answer is not really.  The long answer is: There are two main types of open budgeting tools; transparency tools that are focused on displaying data and participation tools that allow citizens to vote on budgeting initiatives.  There are also two subtypes called “budget in a box,” which means that they are third party standardized solutions that cities usually subscribe to for a fee, and custom applications that are specifically built for a city. Transparency apps mostly miss the mark in terms of civic engagement and overall usefulness.  Transparency apps are about sharing data, making it open and accessible to citizens but do little to provide any relevant indicators to contextualize the data.  For example budget in a box application Budget Vision displays beautiful Mint-like charts showing that the Watertown, MA School Department spends $34.14 million every year but fails to give the slightest indication of whether that amount is sufficient to fund the school system.  

Citizen Budget gives citizens a chance to view government spending from the perspective of a decision-maker and decide the budget for themselves.  Users can manipulate slider tools to raise or lower the funding for particular initiatives, such as “snow removal brigade” or opening “libraries on holidays.”  Citizens can view the financial repercussions of their decisions in a box that shows if they are over or under budget.  The great thing about this app is that is gives citizens a chance to vote on individual initiatives while making them aware of the financial costs.  The problem with these kinds of participation apps is that the city has to first decide to allow citizens to vote on initiatives, which severely limits the amount of participating cities, and even if citizens are allowed to vote the city frames the decisions by choosing what they can vote on and the financial data they are given.  Apps like Citizen budget are great as teaching tools to get citizens into the mindset of decision-makers but they fail to give citizens a full picture of their communities’ financial health and a significant way to affect that health.

Let’s go through a thought exercise to see how these tools relate to citizens.  If a concerned mother wants to learn about the financial health of her kid’s favorite local library, transparency tools like Budget Vision and Look at Cook could tell her the total cost of the city’s spending on books or libraries but that data is not going to help her determine if her particular library is well funded.  A participatory tool like Citizen Budget could enable her to electronically vote on initiatives that may be related to her library, but only if the city decides to allow citizens to vote on budgets impacting her area. Participatory tools can only be used after the city has already decided to allow citizens to participate, if her library’s budget is not open to citizen voting then she will be out of luck here as well. Buzzwords like open, sharing, and transparency sound wonderful but giving people raw data without a frame of reference does little to expand understanding for either citizens or decision-makers.  The adoption of transparency and participation tools signify that governments want to give citizens a better understanding of their communities but current tools are simply not suited to that task.      Another element that existing tools miss is that open budgeting is an opportunity for communities’ to capitalize on the collective intelligence of millions of citizens monitoring, reporting, and analyzing the needs of their community and the government services it is receiving.  Citizens are not just consumers of government services, they are also an untapped resource for making those services more efficient and impactful.   The question here is why do we want people to have access to budgeting/spending information and what do we want them to do with it? -monitor spending and the success of programs to provide a check against waste, corruption, and failure. -monitor the state of public services and properties to determine if they need more/less funding. -suggest new spending programs to improve the community and monitor their success. The bottom line is for any of these open data measures to be meaningful, they have to engage citizens to continuously use them.  Accessibility is not nearly enough, long term monitoring needs engagement.  Engagement means inspiring users to continuously check on the data, so they stay vigilant.  Having watchmen is not worthwhile if they only show up a few times, so how do we engage citizens for long-term participation?

[collaborativestudy]

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?  

Feature Wish List for OpenBudgeting App

[collaborativestudy]

Financial Transparency Tools

Matthew Hall Financial transparency tools could potentially engage and enable citizens to participate in government budgeting.   There are already several applications and organizations dedicated to opening up government budgeting processes by tracking and reporting spending in an easy to read format.  Budget Vision is a great application that displays government spending in a Mint-like, easy to read format.  This contrasts well intentioned but poorly executed applications, such as Roambi that displays spending data from the District of Columbia. DC is open with their spending in that they make it available, but accessibility and usability is another story.  While Roambi is a good looking app that users can download for their phones and take budgeting information with them, it is almost impossible to find without starting at the Chief Financial Officer’s website first - you have to search for “Roambi” on iTunes, not CFinfo (the actual name of the budget information) or budgeting.  Most of the data is also displayed at once, instead of the  progressive format that Budget Vision has.   Apps like Budget Vision also allow users to compare their city with similar cities.  The spending data by itself is not very useful to the average citizen, since it does not tell them if the spending is high/low for a similar city.  Citizens need something to judge the data by and not just data in a vacuum.   One issue that neither of the apps address is motivating participation.  While transparency tools are great for putting the data out there in an accessible format, they are not actually designed to encourage participation from those who were not already looking for budgeting information.  Limited participation is a problem that plagues all open systems, from participatory budgeting in Brazil to Wikipedia.  Full participation is an ideal goal and, therefore, is by definition, not happening.  With that said, it is still vital to design ways to inspire participation and use of these tools. Citizens need a clear motivation to use these tools.  Maybe curiosity will get some people to download the app and look at it a few times but they will quickly loose interest if it is not engaging in some way.  Even if the data is displayed in beautiful graphs instead of boring spreadsheets, most people will not be excited by accounting.  Once again, most people should not be the target audience because it will never even come close to being met, instead the target should be the most people that might use this app.   One way that these apps could engage users is by giving them the capability to interact with this data beyond scrolling through graph after graph.  If the data was location based like Foursquare, where users receive data on the public spaces they are in or service they are using, then the data moves from static to interactive and they can directly see how it impacts them. Location based data would also limit the amount of initial information users see, which would make it more readable and apparently relevant.  When a user first looks at this budgeting information they first must decide what is interesting and worth looking at, when most of the data is displayed at once it can make this initial experience overwhelming.  Limiting the initial data and focusing it on the users’ current location or activity points them to what is relevant, while still letting them decide on what they are looking at.  It would be a serious error to try and highlight what users’ should think is important but by allowing them to choose data based on their location it makes their experience unique and customizable.  Users would also be able to search beyond their current location, especially if they are using a computer based version, to look at data they are particularly interested in. Finding other ways to engage users in this process and have the data work for them as a personalized tool is key to future success.  

[collaborativestudy]

The Crowdsourced City: OpenBudgets in Anti-Rival Cities

Matthew Hall Organizations like google have already made the jump to the networked world, this may be an obvious statement but I mean this in a specific way.  Google gains strengths form its users, the community or crowd builds their organization just by using their search engine.  What this means for Google is that their product is an “anti-rival good,” which means that the more people use their product the better the product becomes (Weber 2004, 78, 154). If you think about it, cities could be the same way.  In their current forms, municipal governments have rival goods, meaning they offer services to citizens, like Tim O’Reilly calls it “vending machine” government, and the more services people use the less capability the city has to offer them.  Services are depleted by their use and this spirals into an unsustainable problem where city services can never catch up to citizen demands.  This paints a bleak picture but if cities can make the leap that google has then they can turn city services into anti-rival goods.

The key to this transformation is universal reporting to create massive collective intelligence.  Google achieves constant reporting by making it the default, so every user reports on what they search for, visit, and link to, therefore, making every individual in their community of users constant reporters on the various locations within their community.  Cities could do a similar thing by engaging their community of users to constantly report on the quality of services, how they use them, what services are required, and in exactly what capacity.  They can also report on whether required services are being provided and in what quality.   There are several social media tools that are already facilitating these functions: transportation routes can be analyzed by geotagged tweets, restaurants and retail usage can be analyzed by foursquare check ins and reviews.  Most of the tools required to transform cities into anti-rival goods are already in common usage, just not for this direct purpose.   OpenBudgeting is not something separate from this discussion, instead it is a part of the same interconnected web of constant reporting, communication, and collaboration.  This is the same as how the government should not be considered a separate entity but instead interconnected with the other members of the community.  A critical aspect of budgeting processes, especially participatory programs, is informing decision makers about the details and performance of projects (Participatory Budgeting, 38).  Crowdsourced reporting combined with citysourced data in collaborative reports would be an invaluable resource for informing citizen decision makers.  Usually in participatory programs the government supplies citizens with the information they base their decisions on, which makes those processes vulnerable to corruption and manipulation.  Crowdsourced reporting by the people who use city services on a daily basis would provide truly open data (both quantitative and qualitative, since reviews could be a large part of citizen reporting) that is more resilient to corruption and manipulation, while also being more accurate and relevant.  It would be impossible for any closed organization to replicate the data gathering attributes of a massive population, just like it would be impossible for Google to gather the quality and quantity of data that they crowdsource from their users.