Civic Tech Toronto: influencing budget process and transforming engagement

Community involvement is a balancing act of remaining aware of movement changes, evolving your contribution and most importantly, resolving current community needs. All the reasons and more for contributing to projects and guest speaking for Civic Tech Toronto. This diverse group of coders, policy makers and civic improvement enthusiasts understand the importance of knowledge exchange, open data and technical tools to build a better system starting through weekly hacknights.

Civic Tech Toronto hacknight #70 commences the same with an inspirational presentation of a project’s success, an open invitation to engage with the new product and the imperative request for user input. Basically, here’s this wonderful thing we have made, please try it out and tell me what you think with the option of show us how to make it better, dive in.

Henrik Bechmann, project lead, launches Budgetpedia v0.1 “to make the Toronto budget more accessible; to support informed debate about the Toronto budget”. Bechmann invites everyone to this community website to explore the narrative of a high level data set. Providing citizens with real insight through collaborating three main sources Annual Summary Budget, 2011–2016 City of Toronto published data and auditor statements, fuelled by multiple voluntary contributions and hours.

The initial version 0.1 serves as a starting point for community to work with the City of Toronto to open more granular data and for team members further development of user experience (UX) to improve civic engagement, support open government objectives and improve outcomes. Civic Tech participation overall offers free consultation and technical development for projects, and open learning, creating a rewarding night of practical involvement and influence.