This is a nice visualisation but it's not clear to me what the purpose of it is - other than the immediate "WOW look how much is spent on Police + Prisons!" that struck me. Or is it simply a "check it out, I know what comprises Philadelphia's budget...".<p>I'm a total outsider so I admit it's entirely likely that this means something to folks living there. But either way it would be nice if there was a little blurb on what he's trying to say or some attempt to explain what the budget would look like if he was elected. As it is this is simply "Look at this budget, just look at it".
Here are two similar ones:<p>Obama's Budget Proposal (from 2010):
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/02/01/us/budget.html</a><p><a href="http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/" rel="nofollow">http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/</a>
Neat. Was some tool used to construct this, or was it done manually?<p>What may not be obvious to people initially when they look at it, is that when you see the label "Department of Finance" on the gray rectangle that is actually the label for the gray rectangle plus the green and orange ones adjacent to it -- the different colors represent the expenditure classes described on the "About" page. It would perhaps be clearer if there were thick black lines separating the items (instead of just a thick line of the background color) and zero separation between the colored rectangles representing the breakdown by class within an item (which currently have thin lines of the background color separating them giving the impression that they are separate items).
If you want to make some budget visualizations of your own, let me link this site we've been working on:<p><a href="http://openspending.org/help/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://openspending.org/help/index.html</a><p>It's powering a variety of budget sites, like <a href="http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/" rel="nofollow">http://wheredoesmymoneygo.org/</a>, <a href="http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/" rel="nofollow">http://bund.offenerhaushalt.de/</a> and <a href="http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/" rel="nofollow">http://cameroon.openspending.org/en/</a>. People can just go an upload their own data quickly - OpenStreetMap for money :)
Philadelphia needed someone to put this together... it's amazing that with open data, a campaign can help create something of real and lasting value in the course of their pitch.<p>gov 2.0 <3
> $1,062,921.12 PANASONIC TB19/2GB/TOUGHB<p>The prisons department needs a lot of toughbooks. How many toughbooks do you get for a million dollars?
You can see the salaries of individuals, at least within the police dept. Is this normal for US cities? I've seen situations where public servants earning more than a certain threshold (eg 100kpa) had their names & salaries published. Doing so for everyone down to crossing guards seems like an unnecessary breach of privacy.
Neat. I'd add a legend for the colors and some kind of detail for the lower-right corner tiny stuff that kind of seems like it might as well not be there.
also, interesting he doesn't have anything to say about the incumbent. <a href="http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-controller-butkovitz.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.philadelphiacontroller.org/biography-of-city-cont...</a><p>Is there a term limit or something? They're both dems.