Demo Budget
Getting public budgets online
Government budgets are perhaps the most important indicator of public officials' priorities and intentions. They are also useful guides to the legislative, regulatory and implementation processes. And this is why budgets are so often contentious and sometimes closely guarded by authorities.
In the Internet era, more and more government information is appearing online. Getting public budgets online in a way that can be used by Web developers is an important step for the future. This means that governments should provide the data of budgets in an open format that can be used effectively by anyone capable of writing a computer program. To date, most public budgets online are in an electronic document format, which makes it difficult to actually use the data—document formats are for printing documents, not for using data. But we are rapidly moving beyond the document era, because of the Internet.
The importance of open data
If budget data is made accessible online in an open, non-proprietary format that contains enough information for the data to make sense, computer programmers and Web developers can produce ways of looking at the data that can be useful to both citizens and government officials. Moreover, open data can even increase efficiency within government, such as when data needs to be shared across agency boundaries. Data plus public APIs—"application programming interfaces"—allow developers to create new programs that enable new insights, such as when data is mapped to Google Maps.
An increasingly important feature of accountability and openness in government is the ability to "connect the dots," or to see patterns of activity across diverse sets of data. Examples include connecting voting records with campaign finannce data, or budget earmarks with lobbying expenses.
A future goal for government finance is what accountants call "full cycle" accountability, which would transparently connect public budgets with public spending data, and open up the legislative appropriations process, especially during the phase known as "budget markup," when legislators modify a budget by introducing new line items or eliminating expenses. With the Internet, this can be done in close-to-real-time, meaning within a time frame in which budgeting decisions can be monitored by the public.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World-Wide Web, has recently asserted that open data is the future of the Internet. You can watch a 16-minute video of his February 2009 TED talk on the future of the Internet by clicking here.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Governments all over the world can help set new standards of trust and accountability by becoming guarantors of reliable, complete, accessible and useful data. Given the many recent examples of broken trust, failed institutions and ethical lapses, this pursuit of new accountability tools online is one of the most important movements in the world today.