Begin With a Meaningful Project - The US Federal Budget

09 Aug 2015

I wanted a meaningful project to kick off my Adopta.Agency work, something I have been wanting to see done for a while. When the White House released the budget, I worked to make machine readable, and I was pleased to find a list of spreadsheets available for the most recent budget.

There is a lot of data continained within these 58 spreadsheets, regarding how our government works. I feel pretty strongly, that for us to better understand our government, we need easy access to this data for visualizations, storytelling, and other daily aspects of how our society works.

As with all Adopta.Agency projects, I am starting with making the data available via CSV and JSON files, via Github--building on the existing spreadsheets available. Next I am publishing APIs for quicker access to the historical data.

Finally, I will be pushing forward my own work, and encouraging conversation around this dataset, and hopefully make it easier to use, and have a bigger impact. I will be telling the story along the way, on this blog.