Open Budget Oakland for Austin

[luqmaan]

Concise description:

Open Budget Oakland looks really cool. Let's adopt/redeploy/fork it in Austin.

Link (more details/brain dump/alpha)

http://openbudgetoakland.org/

Who will use/benefit from this project?

People who want to know how Austin gets its money and how Austin spends its money.

Project Needs (dev/design/resources)

The project needs data. If you have any links to datasets this project can use, please respond to this issue.

Status (in progress, pie-in-the-sky)

Just an idea.

[mateoclarke]

I'm having a hard time understanding the data on the Financial Services website. https://austintexas.gov/financeonline/finance/financial_docs.cfm?ws=1&pg=1

Seems like the 2015-16 proposed budget is published as two volumes in pdf format.

Then there is the "raw data" that seems to keep track of what is budgeted vs what is spent, but that only updates as the money is spent. https://data.austintexas.gov/Financial/Program-Budget-Operating-Budget-Vs-Expense-Raw-Dat/g5k8-8sud

@haileypate, any idea when Financial Services will publish the new raw data on the approved budget? Anything we can do to push them towards putting it on Socrata in a way that would facilitate this type of project?

[amaliebarras]

What's the best place to find budget data now @mateoclarke ? Is there a central source? Or is the dataset in the budget party repo the best place to point to?

[mateoclarke]

Hey @amaliebarras, this would be a seperate endeavor from the Budget Party project, but it would cool if they could converge is some way.

The centralized data on budget stuff still lives at Austin Finance Online. I think the goal of this project would be to make that data more interactive and accessible.

[mateoclarke]

[amaliebarras]

Gotchya. Couple more questions to make sure I understand:

So for budget.party did y'all have to dig the data out of that PDF?

Is it still true that there is no dataset that is currently being updated on the budget side of things?