The College of Marin has launched a new Web platform aimed at increasing budget transparency.
College of Marin, which is located in Kentfield, Calif., just north of San Francisco, built the platform through a partnership with OpenGov, a gov tech company that has recently brought similar capabilities to Denton, Texas, as well as the states of West Virginia and Ohio. Dubbed the OpenGov Smart Government Cloud, the platform will enable users to easily track spending at the community college. It’s an identical platform used by all of these government agencies.
“They all have the same challenges around being able to communicate where the dollars are being spent and how they’re making decisions about trade-offs between different areas that they could be investing in,” said Michael Shanker, head of marketing for OpenGov.
The platform, which is online now at collegeofmarinca.opengov.com, aims to increase transparency through a Google-style search bar, as well as an interface that displays information in simple, clear reports. Students, faculty, administrators and the general public are encouraged to browse the spending information within, which can be as broad as a spending initiative or as granular as the exact amount of money spent on classroom supplies.
College of Marin’s decision to launch the platform comes in the wake of local voters passing Measure B, a $265 million bond that will fund a second phase of construction to update its campuses. The first phase of work was made possible by Measure C, which was passed in 2004 and brought the school a $249.5 million bond for improving its facilities.
“As the community’s college, College of Marin invites students, faculty, staff and our neighbors throughout the county to partner with us and provide ongoing input that helps shape the campuses into places that best serve the community as a whole,” said Vice President of Finance and College Operations Greg Nelson in a statement. “The OpenGov platform is another tool that we hope will broaden this participation.”
College of Marin is not the first academic institution to use this platform. Other adapters include the California State University campuses in Chico, Channel Island and San Jose.
Nicole Cruz, a spokeswoman for College of Marin, said university officials expect the platform to be a great benefit to members of the public who are curious about the college’s budget. A secondary benefit of launching the platform, however, will be improving efficiency among the college’s staff.
“Because it interfaces with our financial software, Banner, budget managers have access to tools to create management reporting dashboards, benchmarking and financial projections,” Cruz said via email. “We also anticipate that as the public learns about OpenGov that there will be a reduction in the number of public records requests, therefore reducing staff time spent pulling and providing these documents. It also allows staff to identify, analyze and compare organizations with similar population, budget sizes or geographic location, and navigate their public-facing reports to better understand their revenue sources.”
