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Making Government Budgets Understandable
In 2011, Cook County, Illinois released Look at Cook, a budget visualization tool designed to answer a question that residents everywhere ask: where exactly does our money go? The tool transformed dense government financial data into an interactive, accessible display that allowed anyone to explore how the county allocated taxpayer dollars across departments and programs.
Shortly after its launch, the team behind Look at Cook, developers Derek Eder and Nick Rougeux, took an important additional step. They open sourced the entire application, publishing the code on GitHub under a permissive MIT license so that any other jurisdiction could deploy its own version.
Why Budget Visualization Matters
Government budgets are among the most important public documents produced at any level of government. They represent the concrete expression of policy priorities, translating political promises into actual spending decisions. Yet for most residents, budgets are effectively unreadable. They arrive as hundreds of pages of dense tables, often organized by accounting categories that make sense to financial professionals but mean nothing to the general public.
This opacity undermines democratic accountability. When residents cannot understand how their government spends money, they cannot meaningfully participate in budget debates or hold officials accountable for spending decisions.
Budget visualization tools address this problem by presenting financial data in formats that humans can actually comprehend:
- Interactive breakdowns that allow users to explore spending by category, department, or program
- Year-over-year comparisons that show how spending priorities have shifted over time
- Budget-to-actual comparisons that reveal whether departments are spending more or less than planned
- Proportional displays that make it intuitive to see relative spending across different areas
The Technical Approach
Look at Cook was built deliberately using free and open tools. The front-end functionality ran on jQuery, a widely used JavaScript library, while the data was housed in Google Fusion Tables, a free cloud-based data management service. This technology stack meant that the tool had virtually no hosting costs and could be maintained by developers with common web development skills.
The simplicity of the technical approach was itself a design decision. By avoiding proprietary platforms and expensive server infrastructure, the team ensured that other jurisdictions could adopt the tool without significant technology investment. A small county with a limited IT budget could deploy Look at Cook just as easily as a large metropolitan area.
The Power of Open Sourcing
Publishing the code under an MIT license meant that any government could take the Look at Cook codebase, replace the data with their own budget information, and launch a budget transparency tool for their jurisdiction. The permissive license imposed minimal restrictions, allowing both government and private sector users to modify, extend, and redistribute the software freely.
This approach demonstrated several principles central to civic technology:
- Build once, deploy many times. A single development effort can benefit dozens or hundreds of jurisdictions.
- Reduce the barrier to transparency. When the tool is free and the technology stack is simple, the only requirement for budget transparency is the willingness to share data.
- Enable iteration. Open source allows other developers to improve the tool, add features, and fix issues, creating a better product for everyone.
Adoption and Impact
Look at Cook inspired a wave of budget visualization projects across the country. Jurisdictions at the city, county, and state levels deployed their own versions, each customized to reflect local budget structures and design preferences but all building on the same open source foundation.
The project also contributed to a broader conversation about what government transparency should look like in the digital age. Simple PDF documents or spreadsheets published on government websites technically qualify as transparency, but they serve only the small minority of residents with the skills and motivation to analyze raw financial data. Interactive visualization tools like Look at Cook made transparency meaningful for a much larger audience.
Lessons for Civic Technology
The Look at Cook project offered several lasting lessons:
- Start simple. The tool was effective not despite its simplicity but because of it. Complex tools are harder to build, harder to maintain, and harder for other jurisdictions to adopt.
- Use open tools to build open tools. By building on freely available technology, the team ensured that their openness extended all the way down the stack.
- Make adoption easy. Clear documentation and a permissive license reduced the friction for other jurisdictions considering deployment.
- Data matters more than software. The most sophisticated visualization tool is useless without quality, structured budget data. Look at Cook succeeded partly because Cook County was willing to publish its budget data in a format the tool could consume.
The Look at Cook open sourcing remains a frequently cited example of how civic technology can spread from one jurisdiction to many, multiplying the return on a single investment in public interest software.