Cool.
Mayor Annise Parker
Budget Bootcamp, a new city website application that provides easy access to city budget information, is the first Houston Hackathon project to become reality. Budget Bootcamp is hosted on the Finance Department’s website and provides citizens an educational walkthrough of the City’s budget data – both for the recently adopted Fiscal Year 2014 Budget, as well as all adopted budgets since Fiscal Year 2010.
“We’re proud to announce the implementation of Budget Bootcamp,” Mayor Annise Parker said. “Following the adoption of the Fiscal Year 2014 Budget on June 19th, this data visualization provides our citizens a great educational tool for understanding City finances. The Hackathon was a fantastic way to engage citizens and expose the City to new ideas and uses of our data.”
“Budget Bootcamp has something for every budget policy-wonk. Whether you want to break down our revenues for FY14, see the trends over time, or see how the city’s taxpayer-supported General Fund transforms from revenues into department expenditures, this application is a terrific step in terms of financial education and transparency,” City Finance Director Kelly Dowe said. “We’re excited to implement additional Hackathon projects developed over the coming months as well.”
The City of Houston hosted a 24 hour “Open Innovation Hackathon” on May 17-18 at the Houston Technology Center and at Start Houston. The event offered software developers, designers, and data analysts to collaborate on data and software projects. Over 24 hours, Houston’s “civic hackers” pitched ideas, formed teams, and developed innovative new websites, mobile apps, and insightful data visualizations to address community and City problems.
The City is expecting to implement a handful of additional Hackathon projects in the coming months, as well as continuing to invest in the Houston Data Portal that was set up for the Hackathon.
Further details about the City of Houston Open Innovation Hackathon event can be found at the event website: http://www.houstonhackathon.com/
See here for the background. You should click on that Budget Bootcamp link if you want to understand the city’s finances better – the spreadsheet they’ve created really breaks it down for you. Now if someone is working on better bike maps, I’ll be very happy.
Charles, the bikeways are available in a Google-like fashion on GIMS: http://www.gims.houstontx.gov/PortalWS/R.aspx?M.aspx&app=GIMS%20Bikeways
An individual could also download the layer online at: http://data.codeforhouston.com/dataset/bicycle-routes
All it takes is some enterprising young buck to move it over to Google Maps if that’s what you really want.