(You can also access the full page for the City of West Lafayette 2015 Preliminary Budget with information from 2014-08-04.)

Tomorrow’s August City Council meeting will include Ordinance No. 25-14,  An Ordinance Setting The 2015 City Budget And Setting The 2015 Tax Levy On Property And Tax Rate.

This data is usually contained within a database and exported as a table.  The budget forms are online in this format on the City’s web site.

As we know, looking at tables doesn’t always provide the clearest picture.

Over the past several months, I have been learning more and more about various civic hacking projects around the globe.  One that I found incredibly exciting was Open Budget Oakland.

I thought they used their own software, created under the Code for America group, however, upon further investigation, I learned that their lovely tree map visualizations were provided by OpenSpending.

With this recent budget announcement, I decided to get the City’s data online and accessible in this format.  Sadly, the only data that is on the City’s web site is in PDF form.  Upon doing some more research, I learned about an amazing piece of FLOSS called Tabula. As their web site states, Tabula is a tool for liberating data tables locked inside PDF files.  And liberate it did.

After exporting the data from Tabula, I made a few corrections (column headers contained extra spaces which caused problems in OpenSpending) and we were all set to go.

The result is at the top of this post.

Sadly, there currently isn’t a way to backup the navigation on the tree map, but it appears that Open Budget Oakland has this worked out and we are in communication as to how they made that happen. In the meantime, please refresh your browser.

We plan on having a public dialogue about the budget process using these new data visualizations at the West Lafayette Public Library in the coming months. Please check back for more details.