Moving parts: The Budgetpedia summer of 2017

This is about the budgetpedia project (see budgetpedia.ca) — aiming to make the Toronto budget (and eventually any government budget) more accessible to citizens. We also advocate for open, high-quality and granular government financial data to support engagement, and better creation of added value. We’re entering our third year (started July 2015)

Now that we’ve decided to incorporate as a non-profit (and successfully raised over $700 to pay for that), it seems like a good time to do a roundup of the Budgetpedia project’s ongoing activities. The better to prepare for getting organized after the incorporation. As you’re reading this, consider if there’s something you’d like to get involved with. Everybody needs a hobby, and we’re always looking for volunteers. Contact us at mail@budgetpedia.ca (it’ll get to me).

Summary

Management

• Incorporation
• A Constructive Working Relationship with Toronto Staff
• General Management and Organizational Development
• Operations
• Advisory group

Communications

• General communications, including ongoing support for Civil Society groups
• social media, including updates on ongoing issues and activities
• Support for media: journalists and bloggers
• Related initiatives: Open data; Modern government

Research & Development

• Website development, implementing developed user experience strategy
• Our own open data portal
• The Toronto Annual Budget Scorecard (TABS)
• Research, studies
• Case studies
• Usability for City Councillors and their Offices
• Development of a Data Warehouse

Management

Incorporation

Of course there’s the incorporation itself. There are several reasons for incorporating.

• Place ourselves in the position to attract funding that requires a corporate entity
• Formalize governance, hopefully adding more deliberation, consensus, a higher quality of decisions, and consistency
• Add to our legitimacy. We want to work with municipalities and civil society organizations, and some of these might feel more comfortable working in a more formalized setting than we’ve had in the past.

We’re told that there’s a good chance that after incorporation we should be able to raise $10k to $30k in seed money through crowd funding, and this would put us in a position of getting organized around projects that might attract grant or partner funding.

In the long run, we’re talking about a national scope (as something like the Canadian Centre for Open Budgets — we haven’t chosen a name yet), as this would presumably offer a more sustainable base, as well as many benefits flowing from comparing data from various jurisdictions.

Three volunteers have stepped forward to be founding directors: Chris Graham, Arthur Gron, and Sarah Shoker. We’re still gathering information, and formulating options, in preparation for making decisions on things like membership rules and the Corporation’s charter.

If you’re a professional manager, lawyer, advocate, or campaign manager, and would like to help, let us know.

A Constructive Working Relationship with Toronto Staff

We have a cordial relationship with people in the Toronto Civil Service, which we value very much. But we’ve been given three formal, and one informal reason by Toronto staff (specifically the Office of the Chief Financial Officer) for not creating a formal relationship with us. Here are the formal reasons we’ve been given.

1. Conflict of Interest. To avoid the appearance of conflict of interest, as in any perception of favouritism, we’re told the City cannot make specific commitments to us. This in spite of clear guidelines that conflict of interest does not apply to not-for-profit groups. We’re the poster child of not-for-profit — over one hundred volunteers have helped, and I’m a retired software developer. We’re hoping that incorporating as a Non-Profit will help with this.
2. Can’t take responsibility. In a couple of key cases (review of continuity — re-allocating historical figures to current categories, and review of findings that staffing costs are now about $1B more, after inflation, and after staff growth related to population growth) the City has said they can’t take responsibility for reviewing or helping with those issues. Too much time and accountability, they said. In fact we just wanted some practical advice and guidance.
3. No mandate to make corrections. In the course of our research, we’ve notified the City of numerous errors, deficiencies, and inconsistencies in their data and their records. Few if any have been corrected. The rationale is that if they take staff time to make such corrections, then that takes resources away from City Council mandated activities. Therefore we should seek a City Council mandate to allocate resources to correcting data, records, and repositories. Really? We would have thought that would be covered by professional standards, as a normal course of business. Nonetheless, we would be willing to ask for such a mandate going forward.

The informal reason we’ve been given, through back channels, is that the quality of the data is too poor to release. This actually resonates, nor is it surprising. These operations are done privately without much scrutiny, and over time with little or no consequence for inaccurate bookkeeping. We believe that open data is in fact the best way to improve the quality of the data, as publication of any data focuses author minds.

If you can help us establish great working relationships with City staff, please let us know.

General Management and Organizational Development

With all these activities, we’ll have to pay attention to recruiting and organizing personnel, particularly in preparation for running funded projects.

If you have been through a startup phase and can help, please let us know.

Operations

There are a number of ongoing operations, such as database management, website management, City activity monitoring, contact management, meeting management, repository management, on-boarding, and various other administration tasks which need ongoing attention.

If you are a practiced organizational support person and would like to help, please let us know.

Advisory Group

It’s always good to have expert, professional advice.

If you can help organize an advisory group, please let us know.

Communications

Communications, including ongoing support for Civil Society groups

Every civil society group needs structured communications, and we have none at the moment, except for a bit tweeting and a few Medium articles. In particular we want to make ourselves available for consultations with civil society groups which have an interest in budget matters.

If you are a communications specialist, and would like to help develop a communications program, please let us know.

Social media, including updates on ongoing issues and activitiesSupport for media: journalists and bloggers

This is the ongoing work of keeping our subscribers and the public up to date on the activities of Budgetpedia, and updates on the issues that we encounter.

If you have an interest in managing communications between budgetpedia and the public, please let us know.

Support for media: journalists and bloggers

One of the key ways we’ve identified of providing support for budgets is to provide narratives. And what better way to provide narratives than by leaving it the professionals? Bloggers and journalists. In the long run, we’d like to engineer content on our budgetpedia.ca site for permeability. We’d like bloggers and journalists to easily embed charts and other content into their own articles, and to allow readers to return to our site through those embeds. In the short run, we’re open to any ideas that will make our site more helpful to writers.

If you are a journalist or blogger who can help us sharpen our support for writers, please let us know.

Related initiatives: Open data; Modern government

Our project would work best if Toronto had an established Open Data culture, and Modern Government (digital, open, collaborative). Broadly speaking, neither are yet true, though there are many signs of progress.

If you would like to represent Budgetpedia in the various City Open Data and Modern Government initiatives, please let us know.

Research and Development

Website development

We spent six months from about December 2016 to May 2017 considering user experience strategies — and we’ve come up with directions that make a lot of sense, and are in fact pretty exciting. They revolve around the idea of humanizing the numbers.

The main aim in the long run is to provide a platform which allows people to tell their stories, and find like-minded people to work with on passion projects. But we’ve decided that’s out of reach technically and financially in the short run. So for now we’re going to focus on making the presentation more engaging.

This involves what we call anthropomorphic numbers (we know, that may not technically make sense), by which we mean making the numbers interesting, or humanizing the numbers. So for example charts should be accompanied by things like a few related social statistics, performance indicators, images, and narratives. Every presentation should also have context, such that users can find closely related, more in-depth material for further research.

For the website’s next iteration, we’ve identified four areas to work on.

• The home page should be recast to reflect the fact that we’re here to present information that people can relate to and use.
• A new help page should provide sufficient background information, and data literacy to allow users to make best use of what they encounter on the site. A glossary, and ways of navigating around taxonomies (classification schemes) of budgets and statements would also be helpful, as well as the usual frequently asked questions.
• A new find page should allow the user to get to their area of interest as quickly as possible. There should be a search bar, and ways of finding things through taxonomies (as described above), as well as the ability to progressively, and efficiently, narrow searches.
• A new focus page which is the result of the user’s search. There could be a few, dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of these. This is the page that the user has been after. It should have a good concise (standard) presentation of key information about the subject, as well as ways of going deeper and broader as needed. The idea is to give people resources to check facts, or even formulate arguments. As mentioned before, a combination of charts, related social statistics, performance indicators, images, narratives, histories, and contextual information and links, should be used here.

Oh, and we’ll likely create a separate website for the new corp. We have openbudgets.ca reserved.

We’re looking for website developers, including all scrum positions: ui designers, developers (front end react js, Wordpress, D3; backend hapijs, mongodb, mariadb), testers, scrum managers, project admin, documentation).

Our own open data portal

We have collected quite a bit of data, some if it hard to find elsewhere. Obviously we should have our own convenient, well-organized open data portal. The Cobbler’s children 😉

If you can help us organize an exemplary open data portal (“budgetpedia.ca/open”) please let us know.

The Toronto Annual Budget Scorecard (TABS)

Get it? Keeping “tabs” on the City! The idea is to provide an annual platform to collect what we’ve learned about the City of Toronto’s budget. We currently plan to publish the first version March 2018, after the 2018 budget is passed (February), and before the next budget cycle starts (May).

We want this to be a professional, formal, scorecard. Current plans are to begin with a fair comparison to budgets of other comparable cities. There are lots of other topics though, including open data standards, accounting standards, best practices, public consultation, and more.

We’re looking for judges, professional researchers and communications people for this.

Research, studies

The main feature we’ve been asked about, consistently, throughout the project, is granular, local and specialized data. General budget information, and overall trends are interesting and useful for context, but people’s passions are typically centred around detailed issues.

So far our project hasn’t managed to form a structured relationship with the City (but we continue to try and hope), though we have found many friends within that civil service. So we’re limited to being opportunistic when it comes to acquiring the data we want to have.

For example most of the data currently presented at budgetpedia.ca/explorer has been ‘scraped’ from pdf documents. Some of it (particularly staffing data) has been extremely hard to find. And much of the data has issues (deficiencies, inconsistencies, errors).

For more detailed data, we’re chipping away at it. The Toronto Public Library has provided us with a detailed chart of accounts used by that agency, which gives us a great start at understanding the detailed accounting structures used by the City (many questions remain in terms of comparisons to other agencies and divisions). We have obtained a list of City cost centres (about 13,000 of them). We are still trying to obtain the accounting classification scheme for these (that’s proving to be surprisingly difficult).

On the subject of accounting standards, there are a number of issues. The main one we’re currently investigating is this: it turns out that some, but not all, agencies and divisions with capital projects, allocate capital staffing costs to operating budgets. In at least one case the operating staffing count includes the capital staffing count (“for consistency” we’re told) while the operating cost excludes staffing costs. It’s confusing, inconsistent, and just plain wrong. In particular it makes understanding operating budget details impossible in certain cases.

An accounting PhD candidate finds all this fascinating enough that she’s volunteered to get involved in our research as part of her dissertation. This is a godsend. It should help us improve the research framework such that outcomes will be constructive for all.

Plus there’s the Province’s Financial Information Return data to parse, the City’s FPARS (Financial Planning, Analysis, and Reporting System) system to analyze, and in the long run we’d like to see a public API to the FPARS system.

If you’re an accounting professional, or a research professional, and would like to help, let us know.

Case studies

The devil is always in the details. Until we have systematic access to City cost centre cost element data, one thing we can do is examine specific cases for which others have collected detailed data.

The best example of this that we know of is data collected by CELOS, which has collected a couple of decades worth of data about Dufferin Grove Park, and the Toronto’s Parks, Forestry, and Recreation division. We’re looking forward to presenting this data, and expect the richness of that data to provide guides for future research.

If you’re a professional researcher or investigative journalist and would like to help, let us know.

Usability for City Councillors and their Offices

We’ve done a little research on usability issues for councillor’s offices, and the early word is that budgetpedia.ca has to be able to answer councillor constituent questions to be used by councillors. This means educational (budget literacy) material, and detailed, granular data to respond to constituents detailed requests. We would like nothing better than to support this, but the pre-requisite is getting access to detailed budget and financial data from the City.

If you can help establish working relations with councillors, please let us know.

Development of a Data Warehouse

We’ve started detailed design of a data warehouse to hold financial, budget, and performance data from any government. What’s unique about this is that we have to allow for building data hierarchies in pieces, like puzzle pieces.

If you are a data warehouse specialist, we’d love to hear from you.

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Henrik Bechmann is the project lead of budgetpedia.ca. The opinions expressed here are his own.