Open FI$Cal, the Financial Information System for California's transparency spending website, is rolling out today.
FI$Cal is the integrated financial application responsible for tracking and budgeting in California's individual departments. And Open FI$Cal takes the information, entered by departments that have been enrolled, and releases it to a dashboard for the public to view.
“Open FI$Cal is starting as a pilot, with data from a handful of departments. By July 2019, the site should contain data from all departments that use FI$Cal for their accounting,” the department's Strategic Communications Manager Amy Norris told Techwire in an email.
The data will change over time, as departments update and reconcile the information, but the data could be up to two months behind.
“We’re excited about the potential of open financial data to improve how we interact with the public,” Joel Riphagen, senior advisor at FI$Cal, wrote in the email. “It will encourage innovation by allowing others to build on top of the data we release, reduce the cost of government data sharing, and improve citizen understanding of state spending.”
The site brings California closer to national standards on financial transparency," the email stated.
