The Austrian open spending portal www.offenerhaushalt.at holds spending and budget data of all Austrian municipalities. The mayors were provided with access data to the portal in order to view the visualisations of their spending data (2001-2015). With two simple clicks, not only the data can be published, but also the interactive visualisations.

Since 2015 a special visualisation of grants and subsidies has been developed for the City of Salzburg that will now be re-used by other cities as well (Linz, Bregenz, Wels, Innsbruck are interested).

The following features are available on the portal:

• Visualisation of the spending and budget data according to political categories (spending areas, such as "education", "health"...) as an interactive treemap as well as the spending history (2001-2013). Budget data for current/upcoming years can be added by the municipalities
• Economic overview of the spending data according to cross-sectional aspects (spending types, such as "personnel costs", "tax revenues"...) including the result according to Maastricht critera.
• Both visualisations are interactive and can be drilled down to three levels (e. g. "Educatioin" -> "Pre-School Education" -> "Kindergarten".)
• Visualisation "Where does the tax money go?" that shows where tax money has to be used from statistically 1.000 Euros of tax revenues of a city.
• Visualsation of the "KDZ Quick Test" - a systematic approach of the financial soundness of the municipality according to 5 sub-indicators
• Download of the data sets accoring to Open Government Data standards (CSV files)

It is re-used by > 915 municipalities in Austria. It could be reused by federal states as well, but they do not want to join the platform so far.

Innovations are funded by interested cities. E. g. the City of Salzburg is planning to show infrastructure investments on a map. The development of this service is funded by the city. Others who might want to join can do so in providing payment.

The base service is free for all municipalities. The cost of operation are covered by other services of KDZ (e. g. Seminars, budget analysis...).

Continuous user support is provided: users are the municipalities. Future developments: visualisation of infrastructure investments on a map (see above) and development of a data portal data.offenerhaushalt.at.

KDZ is a public equivalent body regarding EU regulations. We are an association where public administrations can become members. If this does not qualify enough, the price money could as well be allocated to the City of Salzburg who is a development partner of the platform.

Technology

The solution uses Open-Source-Software: Drupal, D3.js, mySQL. Data is disclosed in Creative Commons AT 3.0 license. The solution will offer DCAT-compatible metadata by the end of 2016.

Architecture

A Web site where municipalities can log in to preview the data visualisations and with only some clicks publish them for everybode to see. The data is stored in a mySQL database and is visualised using the D3.js.

A scalable solution

It is suitable for all 2.100 municipalities, more than 915 have already joined. It would also be usable by other countries, but a lot of know-how regarding financial accounting systems in other countries would be required.

Organisations involved

Unicredit Bank Austria, Association of Cities and Towns, "k5" group of software providers for municipalities have co-funded some of the platform's features. KDZ is the project owner, Interactiv.es the technical solution partner (subcontractor of KDZ). The cities are development partners (especially City of Salzburg), the above mentioned organisations have co-funded features.

Benefits for the administrations

The don't need to worry about transparent spending themselves. They can have "2-click-Open Government" by joining the platform. Spending data will automatically be provided, planned budget data can be uploaded by them.