Net expenditure. Gapping. Anticipated liabilities. Unless your career has taken you in the direction of finance, these terms probably don’t mean much. Corporations hire accountants and financial analysts so that the rest of the staff can focus on their own areas of expertise, without ever having to balance a book.
When it comes to municipal finance, however, accounting and operations are two sides of the same coin. Toronto is home to the politically passionate: residents who follow city news faithfully, debate issues with their friends and neighbours, and vote accordingly to nudge their neighbourhoods in the right direction. Beyond voters, there are residents who engage in civic processes directly, putting considerable time and energy into advocating for the issues they care about in front of city council. In spite of this level of spirited involvement, there is a part of the decision-making process that remains largely in the shadows. For all the campaign promises of improved community housing, city council debates about poverty reduction strategies, and demonstrations about shelter closures, if the department responsible for the construction and maintenance of subsidized housing doesn’t receive the funding it needs during budget season, the end result will be the same as if there was no conversation at all.
The municipal budget is municipal governance. Everything else is politics.
Toronto’s city budget matters and should be open to everyone. This was the belief that Budgetpedia was founded on. Long before incorporating as a non-profit, Budgetpedia started as a volunteer-run open data project that aimed to visualize the sprawling tables of budget data released by the city each year, thereby making it accessible to more residents. As the small team considered how to move forward with the next incarnation of the website, they knew they needed to be smart about what they were building. Being a volunteer-run organization with limited resources, creating something that wasn’t useful to Torontonians would be a waste of time and effort they couldn’t afford. By speaking with civically engaged residents directly and basing their design in user research, the question changed from “How do we visualize budget data?” to ”How do we help people understand and participate in conversations about Toronto’s budget?”
It’s a tricky question.
Budgetpedia’s research shows that users feel like they should know what’s going on with the budget, but are frustrated in their efforts to find information about it. When they looked up reports on the city website, they struggled to make sense of walls of jargon-filled text and vast tables of numbers. They imagined budget literacy to mean that one could scan an expense table and understand the state of the city in a mere glance. To the average resident, the budget is something reserved for “numbers people” — a special elite who are somehow wired to take in figures and output meaning effortlessly. Our non-expert users recognized the importance of the budget, but they doubted their ability to ever understand what the numbers meant for them or even the conversations surrounding the budget.
And yet, the same people who don’t consider themselves “numbers people” are able to make complex budgeting decisions on a regular basis. Personal budgeting choices require a wealth of background knowledge that most learn intuitively as they navigate through life and gain experience. When it comes to our own bottom line we all manage to become “numbers people.”
If anyone can learn how to manage their own budget, there must be a similar onramp to city finances. To understand what it takes to build such a ramp, deconstructing how we learn about personal budgeting is a good place to start. Let’s use rent as an example — a standard part of everyone’s budget when they learning the basics of living alone and managing money.
Tradeoffs
We pay close attention to the amount of rent we pay because it has a direct impact both on our enjoyment of our homes, and on the rest of our budget. Choosing to rent an apartment that costs $300 less each month might mean that we could take a trip to Cuba, or more responsibly, pay off our student loans. At the same time, that bargain apartment might be in such disrepair that all the vacations in the world couldn’t undo the stress of the bedbug infestation you unwittingly moved into. Spend $1900/month on an apartment, and you may have little left over for anything else.
Debates about the budget are fuelled by similar tradeoffs. Every initiative and service requiring funding must fight for a piece of the pie. In order to understand and participate in conversations about the budget, residents must recognize this tension. To convey this, Budgetpedia presents visualized versions of raw budget data. These charts and graphs show numbers in proportion to each other so that the idea of a tradeoff can be understood at a glance.
Narrative
Anyone who has rented in downtown Toronto in the past six years will know that an apartment listed for $400/month will almost surely be below ground. By the same token, we can expect that an apartment going for more than $1500/month is likely to have laundry on-site and functioning appliances. Our understanding of what level of quality we can expect at each price point is based on experience, and these experiences are remembered as stories. Humans are hardwired to retrieve facts embedded in narratives more easily than figures detached from experiences. Whether it’s memories of sitting on a sunny porch with friends, or an acquaintance’s horror story about an unending battle with black mould, we remember the numbers associated with these stories easily because they help us make decisions in the future. Once we have internalized the relative values tied to $400/month and $1500/month, they help us better understand the implicit meaning of a statement like “You have to downgrade from $1200 a month to $600.”
The numbers that live in the city budget are likely far removed from the narratives experienced by most; the city operates on a much larger scale and involves different kinds of resources than a personal budget. For that reason, $12.5k spent on transit infrastructure is meaningless unless it is embedded in a story about the city and how that spending will impact the spaces we live in. A 16k cut to the social services budget isn’t likely to be meaningful on its own, a while 16k cut to the social services budget that resulted in the closing of two women’s shelters has greater significance. As we hear and care about such narratives, we start to build a collection of stories that help us understand the relative costs of city operations and projects. Budgetpedia aims to become such a collection, where stories about the budget’s impact on the city can be found and shared. With Budgetpedia’s help, every story written about city hall will be supported by visualized budget data.
Context
Back to our rent example. Even if we understand why we need to make wise decisions about rent (tradeoffs), and are able to judge what level of quality we will receive at different price points (narrative), in order to make a truly savvy decision and find a beautiful apartment for a reasonable price, we need a deep knowledge of how the system works. There are two types of contextual knowledge that can help us. The first is knowledge of the abstract forces and rules that act on the system, such as inflation. We might remember living in a decent $500/month apartment ten years ago, but unless we take inflation into account, we’re likely setting ourselves up for disappointment. Market forces such as inflation usually cannot be learned intuitively or by experience and rely on some sort of outside education to be widely understood.
The second type of contextual knowledge involves understanding the rhythms of the system and knowing when the best opportunities to act will appear. Depending on the price bracket in question, September sees an influx of students coming into the rental market and is not a great time to move. On a broader scale, knowing that the market is over-supplied with empty apartments might help us snap up a decent one for a low price, while the opposite situation may cause us to wait a little longer until the market collapses. Again, this type of knowledge is less likely to be learned by experience or through narratives and might require some research if they’re to come up in conversation.
Like the rental market, the city budget has its own internal logic. In order to fully grasp conversations surrounding the budget, residents need to understand how all the parts move together to create outcomes. How do capital expenditures one year impact operating budgets the next? What’s funded by property taxes, and what’s supported by direct fees? Since these types of knowledge are more difficult to learn passively, users are going to require some help building a foundational understanding. Budgetpedia will have this information readily available and searchable. Similarly, providing clear information on when and how residents can participate in the budget decision-making process will help them put all of their newfound knowledge into action.
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In many cases, when someone believes a topic is beyond their ability to understand, they simply haven’t been provided with the tools and context required to make sense of the information. Budgetpedia started with one tool — visualizations that embed individual figures in the budget as a whole, so that the concept of a tradeoff is self-evident in the way the data is presented. But visualizations alone aren’t enough. A comprehensive budget tool must also aid bloggers and news writers by disseminating the stories they write about the budget, and provide their readers with the information they need to understand them. Budgetpedia’s users are passionate Toronto residents who petition for better transit, write letters in opposition to ill-considered developments, and tweet to keep their libraries open. With Budgetpedia’s help, those passionate residents, “numbers people” or not, will be instilled with the confidence to talk about the budget and see their initiatives through to the end.