Create a game out of the city budget

[fileunderjeff]

New Orleans has an neat game called Big Easy Budget Game. It's a great way to learn about municipal finance, and how tax dollars are allocated. What if we built something similar for Houston?

[TommyJW]

I like this, and we could generate a brief synopsis of what happened to the city after the proposed budget changes. This way people can get a sense of how their money is spent, and if it gets spent differently what kinds of good and bad consequences would be possible.

[buck]

Open Austin has a pretty successful project called Budget-in-a-Box, which is an app that lets residents suggest adjustments in the budget, limited to +/- 15% I think.
http://www.austintexas.gov/online-form/budget-box
open-austin/project-ideas#70
https://www.newamerica.org/weekly/edition-161/factoring-schools-calculus-city-budgeting/

As a related project, the City of Austin produced some budget videos. 2015 and 2016 are available on Youtube, e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERqJEiZVeBk

And that got my attention. I really like that video, for one reason: After the live intro from the city manager, that video is composed of stock animation, stock clips, voice over, and text. That suggests to me that every city could have such a budget video produced "automatically" from an input set of budget numbers and some limited scripting to text-to-speech, or with a human narrator.

I recently contacted the person in Austin city government that knows how that video was made. She estimated Austin spent 150 hours of work doing that video, from scripting to shooting missing clips to producing the final video in their in house studio. That is amazing! Extremely few cities could ever fund 150 hours to make their own video (in their own studio!), but civic hackers could write a "budget video production app" that transforms budget data into a customized city budget video, promoting easy fiscal transparency. Citizens could produce their city's video even if the powers that be have no interest in the transparency.