The motivations behind Budgetpedia

Let’s try to get focussed. There are so many options.

There are of course lots of motivations for creating Budgetpedia.ca. Some 100 people have been involved in the journey of developing our website since July of 2015. And we have interacted with many more who have personal interests. It’s probably fair to say that most people in Toronto have some interest in the budget.

For most that we have talked to, the budget plays a support role in broader community or personal interests; their passions such as issues related to the disabled, fairness, immigration, the workplace, children, community resources, and so on.

Local motivations

We think that most people who are civically engaged are interested in policy, priority or management issues related to their neighbourhoods. Some have broadened those interests to Toronto-wide services like transit, housing, poverty, or parks.

Here are just a few examples:

Public motivation funnels to Budgetpedia motivation, to support those public interests. And local issues require local data to support them. So to learn how the City organizes its local accounting data, we obtained the City of Toronto list of cost centres. It turns out there are about 13,000 active ones. Cost centres are centres of responsibility and reach to the very front-line of municipal service delivery, where the civil service meets the public interest like those above. So it only makes sense to put cost centre data together with local issues to support informed discussion. This provides the basis for one of the key motivations of our Budgetpedia group:

• We want the City to publish, as open data, on an ongoing basis, annual detailed financial, staffing, and performance data for all cost centres of the City. We call this granular geocoded cost centre data.

Then we at Budgetpedia want to use that granular data to support local concerns.

All this data needs its own support to be used effectively, so related education material (such as data literacy and budget literacy material), and visualization tools are being considered as well.

Here are some examples of cost centres:

Municipal concerns

A few people, such as staff at City Hall, or larger civil society organizations personnel, have city-wide philosophical or political interests as well, such as the place of property tax in the municipal fabric, or the quality if our political process. (Some of these were identified through the investing in Toronto process). These include

• discipline of balancing available resources and goals
• management issues: focus on efficiency and effectiveness; less red tape; focus on specific clear strategic priorities; link between priorities and spending
• outsourcing vs internal improvements and synergies
• open data, open government, analytics for greater transparency, engagement, and accountability (this is Budgetpedia’s direct interest)
• expansion of the public good

Insights into priorities (levels of funding) and trends in City budgets can support those interests. Also comparisons to other jurisdictions can help. These support areas are therefore also in our plan, motivated by a desire to support quality enterprise decisions through good analytics.

Global motivations

Then there are motivations that come from global concerns, such as

• Population explosion
• Climate change/extreme weather
• Food/water insecurity
• Driverless cars
• Artificial intelligence disrupting jobs
• Income divide
• Immigration issues
• Trump/America

These motivations generate intensity and urgency, and all have local consequences. We really have to get on with preparing to adapt to these.

Finding partners

Bureaucracies have their roots in a time from a couple of centuries ago when the following values provided stability and integrity:

• systems over people
• process over outcomes
• compliance over innovation

That was before the onset of the digital economy, and modern management methods like agility, collaboration, open data, open government, and digital platforms. Now we both need to, and are able to, turn those values on their heads:

• people over systems
• outcomes over process
• innovation over compliance

There are modern ‘islands of excellence’ emerging in the Toronto civil service, but it’s too slow in many quarters.

Thank goodness for the millennial generation, who seem to hold something close to the modern version of those values, and who will soon inherit our civil service.

In any case another of our motivations is to find partners who share those modern values with us.

But let’s get going with all this. We have so much to do.

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