This platform shares #opendata on the Baltimore County budget

Baltimore County is bringing #opendata to its budget.

The county government on Monday launched a new platform that’s designed to improve transparency into how it spends money.

Baltimore County Open Budget is designed to provide detailed information about specific programs and services in a way that’s “unprecedented” for the county, said County Executive Johnny Olszewski.

“An open, transparent government is an accountable government. We can better serve the residents of Baltimore County by ensuring they have access to information about where our money comes from and where it goes,” Olszewski said in a statement.

The platform shows data on budgets for revenue, operating expenditures and capital projects. It also offers a portal to search categories such as department, service or program.

The county is using technology from Socrata, the data platform provider known for civic use that is also used in open data sites from the City of Baltimore and the State of Maryland.

The county plans to continue work on open data. The budget-facing platform, chosen as the spending plan has been a focus in the county and was recently passed, represents an initial phase of an effort to make the info and stats publicly available. The county is planning a larger open data platform, and performance management system.

A team of about 10 people are working on building out the open data platform, and plan to involve point people within each department, according to T.J. Smith, Olszewski’s press secretary.