Purpose

This is an exploratory conceptual prototype - August 29, 2015 - Henrik Bechmann

The idea is to explore the ramifications of the budget presentation guidelines below

Note: there has been a bias toward operating budgets thus far, although in many if not most cases capital budgets hold greater interest for a lot of neighbourhood groups

Finding: the ramifications are big, and imply a fairly massive crowdsourcing administrative effort to implement

Key Abstraction: Program Budget Item

A standard approach to budget item presentation in the civictech alternate budget portal

A budget program item can be at any level of budgeting; budget items are nested drill down item Budget Presentation Guidelines

Presentation Guidelines

These ideas arose from a civictech toronto budget workgroup Tuesday August 25, 2015, to minimize barriers to citizen engagement

• clarity: abstractions, common terminology, visualizations
• consistency: information about all budget items are presented with common structure and terminology
• currency: information kept up to date
• context: comparisons to provide insight into priorities and meaning in relation to ‘value’ goals
• culture: connecting offerings to user interests

Standard Contextual Framework

The standard contextual framework idea was derived from the guidelines articulated above

The idea is to apply a consistent framework to presentation of budget items at both high (general) and low (detailed) levels

The framework categories are intended to be stated in natural language more than management science, hence minimal

some framework items could be inherited from higher level items

Standard sections

• planning
• finances
• operations
• feedback

planning

• value proposition (explicit or inferred)
• mandate (explicit or inferred)
• domain (scope)
• history
• authorities (in legislation, policies, and procedures)
• constraints (compliance requirements)
• risks
• priorities (internal)
• issues (analyst notes)
• sources
• see also
• contacts
• comparisons

finances

• components (detailed line items)
• containers (roll-up line item)
• time series (annual)
• sources
• see also
• contacts
• comparisons

operations

• oversight management
• internal services
• staff (hr)
• constituents
• resources (non-staff)
• constituent access
• maps
• activities
• sources
• see also
• contacts
• comparisons

feedback

• reports (presented to committees)
• commentary (civictech)
• opinion (arguments)
• discussion (public)
• sources
• see also
• contacts
• comparisons

#Key Abstraction: OLAP Cube

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLAP_cube