The Taipei City Government yesterday launched its “visualized budgets” platform, which aims to give the public an idea of the budgets the city has planned for the next year and weigh in on proposed budgetary items.
The Web site displays groups of circles of various sizes, with each representing an agency under the city government.
“People can tell how many budgetary items each agency has by the number of circles in a group. The bigger a circle, the larger the budget for a project is,” Taipei Department of Information Technology senior specialist Peng Sheng-shao (彭盛韶) said.
When a user hovers over a circle with their mouse pointer, a box containing details of budgetary items emerges.
These details include how much capital has been added to or cut from a project compared with the budget it was allocated in the previous year.
These information boxes are made more entertaining on the site’s “default” page, where they also contain random conversions users might find interesting.
For example, the budget for sewage system maintenance, NT$149 million (US$4.55 million), is equivalent to a 149.7-minute space trip for one person and the budget reserved for the Department of Government Ethics, NT$9.06 million, is about the cost of 300,000 cups of bubble tea.
Users can also provide input by leaving comments for each budgetary item or voting on them by choosing whether they agree or disagree with it, want it deleted or do not understand it.
Commenting on the interactive platform, Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) credited contributors to g0v.tw, a Web site launched in 2012 by a community of computer programmers to monitor central government budgets.
“There is only so much a government can do, but there are no limits to what the public is capable of,” Ko said.
He said the system will help people understand government budgets, which are often complicated, and might inspire other municipalities to take similar measures to make their budgets more transparent.
The platform can be accessed at budget.taipei.
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