Visualize the Philadelphia School District’s $3.1B budget with this tool

Visualize the Philadelphia School District‘s budget with a tool built by local civic hackers Chris Alfano and Lauren Ancona.

The pair built the visualization, which shows the District’s 2014 budget and proposed 2015 budget, at this month’s EdTech Hackathon with budget data the District released ahead of the event. District representatives said they hoped technologists would use the data to build tools that could increase transparency by making the budget easier to understand.

Alfano, part of the Jarvus dev firm, is the co-captain of Code for Philly, the local Code for America civic hacking group, and Ancona is the assistant director of the Corzo Center at University of the Arts.

The project is beautiful but needs lots of context — like how debt financing compares with other big city school districts or what the $188 million going toward ‘secondary education’ means exactly. For those with some understanding of big budget institutions, it’ll be fascinating.