Look at Cook: A Budget Visualization for Cook County, IL

kakarott999 — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:28:11 -0800

A budget transparency visualization for Cook County, IL (Chicago's county) displaying all county departments broken down by fund and control officer from 1993 to 2011. Done as a collaboration with Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey.

It all started with a question: "Have you ever seen anyone do good work displaying a government budget in an easily-understood way?"

We'd seen the Federal Budget visualization done by the New York Times and I was a fan of the Death and Taxes poster, but neither of them let you really dive in to the data. We decided that we would make our own, and we would do it with a data set we had just gotten our hands on: the Cook County budget from 1993-2011 (with the approval of 12th District Commissioner John Fritchey).

After some lengthy brainstorming and the discovery of several amazing jQuery libraries, a designer friend and I put this together in about 6 weeks. The data is all stored in Google's Fusion Tables and anyone can download it.

Each year in the visualization is broken down in to departments (such as the Police Department, Social Services, Highways, Building and Zoning, etc) which are then organized by Fund (Public Safety, Health, Corporate, etc) and also by Control Officer / Elected Official.

So dive in and take a look! There's a lot of data in there and a lot of stories to be told with the data (quick tip for you power users: each page has its own unique URL, so you can share what you find). Tweet at me if you notice any bugs or have questions on how we built it.

By: kakarott999

kakarott999 — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 09:51:14 -0800

here's the data on Google Fusion Tables

By: kakarott999

kakarott999 — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:34:12 -0800

We did an interview with O'Reilly Radar on this. Here it is.

Comments on: Look at Cook: A Budget Visualization for Cook County, IL

Look at Cook: A Budget Visualization for Cook County, IL

By: kakarott999

By: kakarott999