Civic News

This platform shares #opendata on the Baltimore County budget

Baltimore County Open Budget offers publicly available data about county government spending. "An open, transparent government is an accountable government," said County Executive Johnny Olszewski.

Big data. (Photo by Flickr user janholmquist, used under a Creative Commons license)

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.

Before you go...

Please consider supporting Technical.ly to keep our independent journalism strong. Unlike most business-focused media outlets, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we count on your personal and organizational support.

Our services Preferred partners The journalism fund
Engagement

Join our growing Slack community

Join 5,000 tech professionals and entrepreneurs in our community Slack today!

Trending

What does this VC exec and founder look for in an AI startup? Something ‘inherently unique’

A new model for thinking about how to grow regional economies: the Innovation Ecosystem Stack

Congress is working on a bill to boost public awareness of AI

Can the nation’s biggest cyber hub even handle Craiglist founder’s $100M security pledge?

Technically Media