From the Twitter bio : Meie Raha visualizes Estonian budget so that it would be understandable to everyone.: From the website’s about page : What is Meie Raha? Annual state budget is a complicated thing. The official Budget Bill is made up of long tables that do little to explain how the taxpayers’ money is spent. Meie Raha — Estonian for “Our Money” — shows major income and expenditure articles at a glance, structured by government functions. Interactive visualization The visualization shows two sides of the equation — income (mostly taxes) and expenditure by category. The size of bubbles is proportional to the size of budget items. This simple visual helps to compare the sums. One can click on a bubble to see cost articles within each budget heading. Or try dragging the outline of a bubble to see how manipulating different sums results in the balance of the budget. Ideally, every budget needs to be balanced, so the changes you make on the spending sides should be balanced on the income side!
Tools (3)
Open Budgets is a website committed to municipal, regional, and national budget transparency through encouraging the uploading, visualizing, and analyzing of budgets by a range of stakeholders, such as government agencies, journalists, activists, NGOs, and your average citizen. Open Budgets operates on four main components listed below from the tool’s About page): “A semantic data model” : Municipal, regional, and national budgets from any country can be securely uploaded by government agencies for public access. “Libraries of visualisation, data-mining, and comparative analysis tools” : Citizens can compare budgets for trends and visualize differences. “A feedback and citizen engagement interface” : Citizens can discuss and provide feedback for any budgets that can be accessed by government agencies or other users. Additionally, Open Budgets is open-source and available on “Github”:https://github.com/openbudgets. “Engaging user groups” : The creation of Open Budgets was based on collaboration with data journalists, NGOs, policy makers, and other citizens to ensure that it is usable and accessible by a number of actors. Information about Open Budgets’ technical structure and how the site operates can be found here . Open Budgets is a collaborative software developed by nine partners: Fraunhofer IAIS (Germany), Open Knowledge International (UK), Open Knowledge Foundation (Germany), Fundación Ciudadana Civio (Spain), Transparency International (EU), University of Economics, Prague (Czech Republic), Journalism++ (Portugal/Sweden), Open Knowledge Greece (Greece), and University of Bonn (Germany). Project coordinators are based in Germany.
Open Finance is a suite of applications that visualize any municipal or state budget in order to better enable local citizens, government leaders, finance professionals, or anyone else to view and understand the government budget. In the Open Finance suite are three applications: Open Budget is an easy-to-use app that publishes the operating revenues, operating expenses, and the details of your capital budget onto a branded website. You can use it to quickly answers key financial questions about operating and capital budget revenue streams and allocations. You can keep the experience up-to-date by showing your budget versus actuals throughout the year and replacing static reports. Visitors on their desktops, tablets, and smartphones learn about government priorities and impacts on their lives and neighborhoods. Open Expenditures allows the public and internal stakeholders to easily understand and explore checkbook-level detail of spending. You can keep the experience up-to-date by automatically publishing new data to Socrata platform. Visitors will be able to learn about spending and contracting in their department and find specific, detailed answers to a wide variety of questions. Open Payroll publishes payroll information onto a branded website that answers common questions about government spending on personnel. Visitors receive instant answers to common questions, including total size of the payroll, highest-paid employees, highest-paid departments, median pay, and more. Data visualization techniques include bar graphs, pie charts, heat maps, and histograms that can show both overall financial data and specific versions for departments or sectors. More information is revealed by scrolling over various points in the graphs, charts, or maps. Datasets can also be downloaded in a number of formats for further analysis, discussed on the site’s threaded comment feature, accessed via SODA and OData, embedded on other sites, and printed. Using the Open Finance suite of applications, governments are able to use its budget visualization tools to create financial reports, internal reports and updates, and custom forms for FOIA requests and policy analysis. Open Finance is used in over 10 municipal and state governments in the United States. Their websites are linked at the bottom of the tool page. Open Finance is developed by Socrata, based in Seattle, Washington.