NEW YORK DIVISION OF THE BUDGET LAUNCHES REVAMPED OPEN BUDGET WEBSITE

The Division of the Budget today announced the re-launch of the Open Budget website (openbudget.ny.gov), with new interactive features that will help New Yorkers understand their budget. Using a graphics-based interface, citizens and researchers will be able to compare budgets year over year and dive in to breakdowns of every fund, or agency. 

This new online budget visualization includes a clean, easy to use interface that displays budget history going back 20 years, includes an inflation adjustment toggle and allows for full downloads of data. 

DOB launched the original Open Budget site along with the FY14 Executive Budget, providing unprecedented access to New York’s budget information.  The website was created to promote transparency and enhance citizen engagement which will, in turn, foster improved government performance. 

The site gives researchers, citizens, business, and the media direct access to high-value data – including large amounts of raw financial data – so these groups can apply their collective expertise to search, explore and analyze budget information, and even develop applications that allow the data to be used for new and innovative purposes. Today’s re-launch presents an improved user-friendly picture of State spending. 

Open Budget is part of Governor Cuomo’s Open NY initiative, a coordinated, technology-based effort to promote transparency, improve government performance, and enhance citizen engagement, which now makes an unprecedented amount of data available to the public – the most in State history and among the top in the nation. Since its inception in 2013, Open NY has quadrupled in size and the number of records published to the platform has more than doubled in the last year alone. The number of state entities participating and the number of data catalog items available on Open NY have also significantly increased since March 2014. Records published on the platform now offer over 1,100 distinct resources from 61 entities containing more than 113 million records.

In August 2014, New York was ranked among the top six states in the country for its open data policy by the Center for Data Innovation, a nonprofit that conducts independent research and formulates public policies to enable data-driven innovation in the public and private sectors. New York is also one of only ten states that have open data policies. The state earned the maximum number of points in each category of the nonprofit’s ranking system: a statewide open data policy; a machine-readable open data policy that applies to broadly to all government data; existence of an open data portal; and machine-readable open data and datasets accessible in the portal.

###