shaan360 / ny-budget

an explorable budget viz for New York state

ny-budget

An explorable budget visualization for the state of New York

This is based on Look at Cook by Derek Eder and Nick Rougeux at Open City, and can be easily re-deployed to visualize other budgets.

Dependencies

• jQuery
• D3 (for CSV manipulation)
• Backbone (javascript MVC framework)
• Highcharts (charting library)
• Datatables (sortable HTML tables)

How to update this New York visualization

The csv inputs that may need to be updated going forward are:

• the budget numbers (data/budget_raw.csv)
• the budget descriptions (data/descriptions.csv)

When updating either of the above csvs, run the cleanup.py script to generate the finished budget, budget_finished.csv:

> python cleanup.py

The settings in js/settings.js that may need to be updated going forward are:

• endYear (for example, if the last year in the budget is '2015-16', set the end year to 2016)
• activeYear
• projectionStartYear (for example, if the first year of estimates is '2015-16', set this to 2016)
• projectionOffset (if there are multiple years of estimates, set this to -1 for styling, otherwise set it to a higher number for more space)
• inflation_idx
• benchmark

To deploy, push the changes into the gh-pages branch:

> git push origin master
> git push origin master:gh-pages

How to adapt this to another budget

This code can be customized to visualize another data set.

####Data Prepatation The budget data must be a csv that adheres to a fixed format in order for the app to process it properly. Budget column headers include: Fund ID, Fund, Department ID, Department, Short Title, Link to Website, Department Description, and Control Officer. Values for estimates and actuals must be broken down into a separate column for each year.

See examples of prepped data:

• New Orleans
• Cook County
• Macoupin County
• A blank template to populate

If you need to do any preparation on your raw data to get it into the finished format (e.g. formatting dollar amounts, removing whitespace, adding descriptions), do it in a script so that it will be repeatable in the future. See an example script in data/cleanup.py.

####Configuration

1. Put your finished budget csv file in the data/ folder

2. Next, set the configuration variables in js/settings.js

Errors / bugs

If something is not behaving intuitively, it is a bug, and should be reported as an issue

You can also email [e-mail] or tweet @DataMadeCo.

Note on patches/pull requests

• Fork the project.
• Make your feature addition or bug fix.
• Commit and send me a pull request. Bonus points for topic branches.