The OpenBudgets.eu platform offers several applications that are tailored to the needs of administrations and public officials. From easy-to-use budget visualisations to performance comparisons between cities and participatory budgeting mechanisms, a wide spectrum is available. This is an overview of the available tools and their function.

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Upload & Explore

Upload & Explore are essential and important parts of the OpenBudgets platform, as here budget and spending data is imported, visualised, and analysed. You may choose to upload your own dataset using the ‘Upload’ button, or you can dive straight into the existing datasets by clicking ‘Explore’.

Explore

The explore view shows you the datasets that have been already uploaded to the platform. Selecting ‘view’ will open the OpenBudgets Viewer, with instant access to a series of single-click visualisations that you can customise and embed. ‘Analyse’ will open the suite of data mining algorithms you can run on the dataset, allowing for more advanced insights into your data.

Upload

Clicking on ‘Upload’ offers two ways to transfer data into the platform:

To upload a dataset you have on your harddrive, choose OpenSpending Packager and follow the instructions on the next page to upload and describe your dataset. LinkedPipes is an ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tool primarily targeted at advanced users and domain experts that allows users to create individual pipelines for specific use cases in which data needs to be sourced, e.g. from a URL.

For support requests, please use Github.

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Microsite

The Microsite is a slimmed down version of the Viewer that has been adapted with customization and social interaction options. It is meant to be deployed by administrations on their websites. Refer to the Github page of the Microsite for deployment instructions and support requests.

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KPI (Key Performance Indicators)

KPI allows cities and public administrations to publish and compare data using indicators such as investments, subsidies, and taxation per resident.

The detailed display of the information allows for a significantly improved understanding of a city’s’ financial health, its income and expenses, as well as many other aspects that otherwise are difficult to discern without extensive research. A city will thereby become more accessible and transparent to its inhabitants through unprecedented openness.

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Participatory Budgeting Tool

The Participatory Budgeting Tool an open-source tool for public administrations to use when consulting their citizens about how to allocate the budget and approval. It provides public officers with the instruments to gather and effectively manage user feedback, enabling a greater degree of citizen involvement, engagement and participation in the budget decision-making and implementation processes. Public administrators can, among other tasks, create different proposals and categories, or add several tags to better identify proposals., you can let your electorate become decision makers in the budgeting process. A demo of the tool showing its functionality is available. Contact Civio for further details.

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The Good, the Bad, and the Accountant

This game is intended to elucidate the occurrence of corruption through price price rigging and other tactics related to the day-to-day business of a public official. It is an accessible and entertaining way to gain insights into a complex circumstance and is intended to inspire journalistic and civil investigations into the subject matter.