General Resources and Tools - HenrikBechmann/CivicTechTO-TorontoBudget GitHub Wiki

This page is intended to hold references to articles, research reports, website resources etc. that could be used as general references in the design or build process.

open gov canada analytics http://open.canada.ca/data/en/dataset/2916fad5-ebcc-4c86-b0f3-4f619b29f412

Common Language Guide to Municipal Financial Statements http://www.mah.gov.on.ca/Page15026.aspx

Google data studio https://datastudio.google.com/navigation/reporting

How to tell stories with data: http://blogs.ischool.berkeley.edu/i247s12/files/2012/03/InteractiveJournalism_Presentation.pdf

https://plot.ly/products/dash/ (no coding required)

https://www.ontario.ca/page/digital-service-standard Guidelines for online services

https://spreadshare.co/ find and share spreadsheets

https://www.onlineocr.net/ free online ocr service. Tip - only upload the page you really want; otherwise it takes too long.

https://taiga.io/ for project management

http://municipalinnovators.ca/aboutmic platform for municipal employees on innovation

For ui design:

draw.io: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/drawio-diagrams/onlkggianjhjenigcpigpjehhpplldkc?hl=en it allows you to do simple wireframes and flows using the built in drawing tools

For drawing/branding or detailed wireframing you can check out: https://vectr.com/ https://wireframe.cc/ They both work online, are limited in scope and easy to use, and can be shared across users

lastly, for real-time collaboration, theres an amazing new UX tool out called figma: https://www.figma.com/ its meant more for user interface design, but the drawing tools are strong enough to be used for many purposes including wireframing – but the really dope thing about this one is that multiple users can work on the same project at the same time (each user's cursor has their name attached to it so you can see what they're doing)

population synthesizer: https://medium.com/sidewalk-talk/a-first-step-toward-creating-a-digital-planning-laboratory-is-populating-it-beeb87d485f1

password generator strengthen password http://preshing.com/20110811/xkcd-password-generator/

McKinsey podcast

digital + digital identity; citizen lifecycle view; strategy, analytics, transformation; government ‘metabolic rate’; agility

London School of Economics on the need for quality open data

http://ethelo.org/ decision process support tool

material design color tool https://material.io/color/#!

Flourish https://flourish.studio/ looks like it's based on WebGL

http://frictionlessdata.io/ open data standards and tools

https://pdftables.com/ pdf to excel

govt of canada open data consultation report -- very detailed and useful http://open.canada.ca/en/content/what-we-heard-summary-report-open-government-consultations-march-31-july-15-2016?utm_source=referral&utm_campaign=WWHBiPlan&utm_medium=email&utm_content=opengovteam

https://www.placespeak.com/about/ platform for consultations and collaboration

collaborative approach http://www.fii.org/ https://www.uptogether.org/

https://github.com/WZBSocialScienceCenter/pdftabextract extract ocr preprocessed data

WhitestormJS is a framework for dynamic 3D web apps built with Three.js technology.

https://threejs.org/ 3d rendering tool

https://redash.io/ open data viz tool

the elm language

Free troll-fighting software from Google https://www.wired.com/2017/02/googles-troll-fighting-ai-now-belongs-world/

https://www.tensorflow.org/ Google AI

https://github.com/Quartz/bad-data-guide

http://kaggle.com data science support website

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infographic

Competitive Call Awards & Sole Source Contracts

http://www.thesunshinelist.com/ca

http://www.collaborationforimpact.com/collective-impact/

https://github.com/openspending/babbage/ an OLAP Cube light; https://openspending.org/

https://ballotpedia.org/Ballotpedia:About an analogous initiative about politics

Steve Ballmer's USAFacts project: http://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/numbers-obsessed-steve-ballmer-plans-to-make-america-excel-again-with-open-data

https://www.civichacking.guide/ excellent ebook by a civil servant for civil servants

http://www.opengovpartnership.org/

http://www.electrode.io/ react app framework/toolset from walmart; worth a look

http://sayit.mysociety.org/ open source transcription

https://thomaslevine.com/!/socrata-products/#semi-open-data-about-pricing-of-open-data

http://vizuly.io/weighted-tree-demo/ hierarchical visualization example for budget data based on d3

http://opensupporter.org/ developing standard api for cause-based orgs

https://www.ethereum.org/ blockchain app platform

https://blockstack.org/ "Build decentralized, server-less apps by plugging into Blockstack's services for identity, naming, storage, and authentication."

http://www.local.gov.uk/productivity/-/journal_content/56/10180/6357119/ARTICLE local government association in england -- digitization

http://www.internationalbudget.org/ International open budget partnership

open graph protocol to support sharing: http://ogp.me/

http://communitydata.ca/ community data program, for statscan data

https://hackdesign.org/ design tips

city subject thesaurus

https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ test site for mobile attributes

https://amara.org/en/ caption and translate videos

http://www.sociuspro.ca/index.php

Citygram for collecting and notifying about open data

http://tabula.technology/ for extracting tabular data from pdf

https://pdftables.com/ (paid service)

https://www.civicdashboards.com/ (by opengov.com) a compendium of data available to provide context to civic budget and financial data.

http://editdata.org/ edit json and csv data

https://letsencrypt.org/ free ssl certificates

Development Seed for high-octane use of open source tools, including prose.io

http://nicolas.kruchten.com/pivottable/examples/ for analytics

AAA Protection tool (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) http://lemonldap-ng.org/welcome/ (through Marc Lijour

Shiny (through Brian Neil) - basically a wrapper around R

Jupyter: (docs, example) (through William Lachance) including jupyter notebook. Tools for data massaging and presentation.

Plotly: https://plot.ly/javascript/ (through William Lachance) - basically a wrapper around D3

open plans, now closed http://openplans.org/ used by http://ideas.pbnyc.org/page/about

A whole list of tools from the good folks at openoakland:

http://openbudgetoakland.org/tools-projects.html

budget related standards

http://openbudgetoakland.org/what-we-do.html

New civic tech (budget modelling) app by the lead singer of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

Richard Hydomako's Toronto Capital Budget Matrix (done for open data book club)

Open North's 2015 annual newsletter.

Ontario's public budget consultation site.

Great article in spacing magazine about potential improvements in toronto budget presentations. Lots of links to examples of sources for inspiration. Thanks to Leon for the reference!

https://www.socrata.com/ A commercial open data company

https://www.socrata.com/solutions/socrata-for-finance/

Building approaches: microservices pattern; also Martin Fowler on microservices](http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html)

This might have the advantage of helping to break development into small relatively independent pieces suitable for a volunteer environment

Nov 11: Alex Todd shared his link on Trust Enablement. Relevant to budget processes, which have multiple trust issues (back-room dealing; window-dressing; resource-grabbing and the like)

Nov 10: Global Initiative for Financial Transparency

Nov 3: Github repo for nyc checkbook app: https://github.com/NYCComptroller/Checkbook

Oct 15, 2015: Google Visualization Tool API: https://developers.google.com/chart/

Donald Savoie, Canadian author and expert on public administration

September 15, 2015, from Asher

A timeline maker: http://timeline.knightlab.com/

September 9, 2015, posted by Henrik

Hartford Connecticut uses Balancing Act for budget input

Open North has created a budgeting tool for municipalities called Citizen Budget (github) see https://regina.citizenbudget.com/ for example

Asher points out that the R Language supports visualizations of statistical data, including this gallery

September 3, 2015, posted by Henrik

(from Matthew) an international class report on open budget data, found here.

Note point 3 of the recommendations, to Ryan’s point: the presentations should be “citizen readable” as well as “machine readable”. A big part of our discussions here.

Highlights:

  • a model of financial management information systems on page 11
  • a chart of open data best practices on page 17
  • samples of data visualization starting at page 40

September 3, 2015, posted by Henrik

The City's new FPARS (Financial Planning Analysis and Reporting System) system has a Public Budget Formulation Tool (PBF) which was apparently rolled out in 2013. This deserves investigation as an input source.