A New Year

January 3rd, 2017. CivicTechTo and Budgetpedia

The Meetup was held at U of T’s  School of Public Policy & Governance (thanks for hosting!). Approx. 70 people in attendance with lots of new attendees, many U of T students checking it out.

For the New Year the presenter was Elena Potter from CivicTech giving some encouraging stats about the Meetup;
hitting the one year mark,
1400 members on Meetup and 600 on Slack,
largest turnout was 80 people,
CivicTech members spoke at conferences, municipalities and universities,
45 presenters (half women).

Budgetpedia Minutes

In attendance; Alex, Rob, Jim, Henrik, Arthur, Ian, Eric

The majority of the meeting was regarding the user experience testing of the site.  Last meeting 6 people went through UX testing.  Resulting suggests turning off options switch, as too many options are displayed.
There was also some discussion about forking  on Github, separating out the graphics and the database.
The inclusion of search-able links to all the graphs produced would help with search engine optimization.
Henrik suggested perhaps reorganizing the site by concepts the public would be interested in.
The real challenge comes to identifying real users, as well as finding and including more granular data.

After the UX discussion Rob proposed better documentation of the project through the production of ‘Team Guide’, that would have all the FAQ such as history, mission statement, vision statement, and team leaders. This was followed by thoughts on how to make the site ‘actionable’ for users.

Some Further Thoughts

There is a bit of running in circles to start the new year concerning what direction to go. This I feel is mainly in trying to determine which users we are trying to appeal to. So far three different users and with them visions of the site exists.  Even though great overlap exists about the final outcome, choosing the user to appeal to will shape the direction of what is needed to produce and who to market to.

This site is for municipal employees.  Budgetpedia can inspire the city on how to run more efficiently by combine all department information into one location - this would allow for easier analysis of the budget.  At the minimum prevent the city from purchasing costly, proprietary, financial software.

Budgetpeida is for social activists to research facts, and help create narratives around complex social issues through the use of data.

Budgetpedia is for the general public, for ordinary people, to quickly scan the city’s budget.

It's going to be interesting to see which of these visions prevails.