Developing
a website to make government records, especially financial records,
transparent can be a monumental and expensive task. That’s why I’m
impressed by the pains taken by New York City to make its innovative
Checkbook software available to all.
In
January, 2013, an open source platform based on New York City’s
Checkbook NYC 2.0 was introduced on YouTube by Comptroller John C. Liu.
The
application is available now to any state or local government. It
enables the public to search easily from a dashboard and review
government spending in real-time.
Government
contracts and underlying sub-contracts are absorbed and integrated into
the website, so overspending can be observed as soon as it begins.
Karl
Fogel of Open Tech Strategies, LLC wrote, “...the release of the
Checkbook NYC code...is significant because of a larger initiative that
accompanies it. Long before the code release, the Comptroller's Office
started a serious planning process to ensure that the code could be
easily adopted by other municipalities, supported by other vendors, and
eventually become a long-term multi-stakeholder project...”
“Most
cities run an internal financial management system (FMS) of some kind.
The FMS manages the city's expenses, revenue, contracts, payroll, and
budget, and naturally allows authorized access only. New York City's FMS
just exports its non-sensitive data fields on a regular basis to
Checkbook NYC—the export is filtered so that any sensitive data never
even goes into the public-facing Checkbook system.”
New
York’s Comptroller asked FMS vendors “...to contribute in-kind
resources to Checkbook maintenance and development—especially to smooth
the Checkbook deployment process. That way you'd lower the bar to
Checkbook adoption for many cities at one stroke, and at the same time
get multiple vendors involved in the code base.”
Rebecca
Williams of the Sunlight Foundation reported, “...in addition to the
spending and expenditure information most similar platforms display,
[NYC’s Checkbook] includes information about other essential financial
datasets (including budgets, revenue, contracts, and payroll), as well.”
“...this
might be the first instance of city officials proactively and
premeditatively building civic applications with the intent of having
other cities -- and cities with varied software vendors at that -- use
and contribute to making that software better.”
We should encourage adoption of Checkbook NYC 2.0 in state agencies, counties and municipalities throughout the country.
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