Budget: Oak Park
- Project website
- https://budgetoakpark.com
- Services
- Product deployment, data visualization
- Client
- Pro Bono
- Launched
- March 2021
An explorable budget for the Village of Oak Park to make government more transparent and accountable.
More about this project
Budget: Oak Park is a budget transparency tool for the Village of Oak Park, Illinois. It was built by Oak Park Residents Derek Eder (Partner, DataMade) and Alicia Chastain. It is not an official application from the Village.
By extracting data from the Village’s official budgets from 2017, 2019 and 2021, we were able to display and compare annual budgets from 2013 through 2021. The funds, departments and descriptions are as the Village officially reports them and are unchanged by us, with the exception of merging duplicate line items.
Our goal with this tool is to increase transparency around one of the most important but challenging parts of government: the budgeting process. We hope that by making this information more readily accessible and easier to understand, we can bring more informed voices into the discussions and debates around budget priorities in Oak Park.