Budget Online

1. Congressman Reads his Email, Script by Bob Blakley

Act One, Notes from WAAA2007

Use Case

We want to take the truly enormous Annual Federal Budget and present it in a manner that can be understood by a wide audience of both professional and lay readers.

The US Federal Budget is a document that is on the order of six thousand pages long and with hundreds if not thousands of individual items within it. It is a matter of public record, but it is not normally in an accessible format.

We also want to show the budget in context, illustrating who sponsored entries and the contributions paid to that sponsor that might have influenced the entry. Finances underly all of politics and the federal budget lays at the very core of political finance.

A well-illuminated budget, and increased visibility of the actors and influences that go into creating that budget, will provide valuable research tools for politicians, the media, and citizens who wish to understand or influence some aspect of consequence of the budget.

Capabilities

(what actions the user of the system will perform)

• Store, index, and display large, complex documents
• Search for relevant information within these documents (and associated commentary)
• Track changes in selected parts of the documents
• Associate additional information with sub-sections of the document (e.g. sponsors, funding organizations, internal commentary, external documentation or commentary)
• Search and View associations, with traversal in both directions of links (so given a document entry, who sponsored it, then who funded that sponsor, and then which other sponsors might have been funded by that group).

Applications

(the programmatic elements needed to fulfill the capabilities)

• Database -- structured to hold large documents that have been broken up into tiny pieces, where each piece is an atomic statement that may be indexed, commented upon, and tracked separately.
  • Import & Version tracking off of external databases
• Association UI -- create and view associations
• Internal Search Tools -- to find items of interest
• External Search Tools -- to find sponsors, contributions, etc