New viz tool helps citizens to control city budget

L’viv – “So, you mean all data? All in this graph?” – Lviv journalists did not believe their eyes, whilst going through the budget visualization tool that was being presented in the municipality today. Today city budget data in Lviv was morphed into interactive infographs: a fruit of work done by the L’viv municipality and UNDP aiming at simplification of citizens’ access to the data on incomes and expenditure of the city budget, and decisions on dedicated infrastructure projects.

According to the International Budget Partnership, Ukraine ranks 54th out of 100 countries in terms of budget transparency and accountability at the national level, opening only a limited volume of budget information.

The situation at the local level may be seen as somewhat better but not radically so. The majority of Ukrainian municipality websites do contain some information on local treasuries. Yet, it is displayed – at best – as long texts or uploaded text / files littered with nuanced financial terminology, unclear to the ordinary citizen – and with zero interactivity or visualization. Because of this, citizens and local journalists rarely feel that budgeting data is actually open and thus do not take active part in forming or monitoring their city budgets.

The issue of budget transparency and use of public funds has become particularly important in Ukraine after the Revolution of dignity of 2013-2014 years. Demand for openness and accountability of local authorities, especially with regards to the financial issues, spurred legislative approval of these requirements. Thus, the Law of Ukraine “On openness of the public funds usage” was adopted on 11 February 2015 and the Law #2172 with Amendments to Article 28 of the Budget Code of Ukraine regarding access to the information on the budget visualization in the form of open data was adopted on 9 April 2015. This Law, when approved by the President of Ukraine, obliges the owners of data on planning and implementation of the state and local budgets to proactively disclose this information in the form of open data. These changes were also stipulated by basic foundations of the state anti-corruption policy in Ukraine (Anti-corruption strategy) for 2014-2017 years approved by the Law of Ukraine on 14 October 2014 #1699-VII.

Compared to other Ukrainian cities, the issue of e-governance in Lviv has always been among the priorities for the local authorities aiming to facilitate citizens’ access to public services through the usage of modern information and communication technologies. Thus, a number of e-government tools were introduced in L’viv during the past few years. E-applications, online payment for the utilities, possibilities to make online appointments with the civil servants, e-apartment queue, e-queue to the kindergarten, possibility to monitor the movement of the public transport, etc. – all these city initiatives were a good start for development of e-government and e-democracy. As the result, according to the UNDP-supported monitoring "100 cities - a step forward" which assesses implementation of the e-tools as the basis for online administrative service provision (2014), L’viv ranked 2nd among 100 largest cities in Ukraine.

Therefore, the Lviv City Council implemented the “Open Budget” initiative under UNDP support in 2015. "This is another step to maximal publicity of the budget process in Lviv City Council," - says Lina Mykolayiv, Deputy Director of Financial Policy Department of the Lviv City Council.

“The “Open Budget” allows you to visualize the distribution of city resources between different areas. Our key requirement was to make sure that the visualization was simple and easy for understanding by the ordinary citizen. Deeper budget detailing will be our next step”, - explained Andriy Moskalenko, Head of the “Administration of the Mayor” department during the presentation.

UNDP launched the “Open Budgets” initiative in May 2014, when, during the local consultations with community representatives from three pilot cities (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil’ and Zhytomyr) the expectations and wishes were discussed with regards to the data citizens want to know about their city budgets. It was found that most of the residents wanted to know what's behind the numbers and codes of budget classification, and information on the stages of the budget process and their results.

In response to this request, the integrated tool of budget data visualization and demonstration of budget cycle was developed consisting of two components:

· Budget visualization (up to 10 types of visualization for both revenues and expenses of the city budget).

· Calendar of the budget cycle (budget estimation and drafting, public discussion, approval, execution and reporting).

"Given the importance of the government openness’ agenda, UNDP supported development of the open-source visualization tool, which is now available online at http://www.openbudget.in.ua/. At this site, following the simple registration procedure, representatives of any municipality can upload their worksheets with data on revenues and expenditures of the city budget and get the embed code for adding the budget data visualization for their official web site", - said Yuliya Shcherbinina, UNDP Senior Programme Manager, during the presentation. “What is more, the code for the software is also open, thus enabling easy transfer of technology”.

In course of the presentation Andriy Moskalenko, director of the department “City Mayor’s Administration” of L’viv City Council, explained which information the tools showed, and how to “read” and interpret the data. He also informed about the steps which were undertaken by the municipality for further simplification and improving transparency of the budget process.

The “budget visualizer” is now being used by L’viv, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil’ and Zhytomyr municipalities. Other cities have also recently started lining up for making their budget information more accessible and clear to their constituencies.