Code4Sac, Sacramento’s Code for America chapter, announced Thursday its volunteers have built and launched a new website with apps to visualize and explore the city of Sacramento’s budget.
The new website, openbudgetsac.org, is built from data about Sacramento’s proposed 2015-16 budget that the city published on its open data website, http://data.cityofsacramento.org. The data previously was available only in PDF format, Code4Sac said.
Code4Sac’s new website includes a diagram showing how revenue flows in the city, a “tree map” showing the size of each city department’s budget, and a “budget explorer” app that enables users to input detailed search queries. “The City of Sacramento spends nearly $1 billion annually to deliver services and fund government operations,” the website says.
“A project like this demonstrates the value of the city reaching the ‘next level’ of openness with its information, in which information is not just shown to the citizens, but also entrusted to them to do with as they wish. Participatory democracy is enhanced when the citizens have the tools to explore and understand the workings of government,” said Code for Sacramento volunteer Joel Riphagen.
