Oakland’s city budget was public. But for most residents, it was not truly accessible.

The information lived in nearly 20,000 rows of spreadsheet data. Anyone who wanted to understand where the city’s money came from or how it was being spent had to work through a format built for administration, not public participation. The data had been released, but a meaningful conversation about it still required a bridge.

Open Budget Oakland grew from the belief that we could build one.

I joined the project as a founding member focused on narrative communications and awareness. Our team brought together developers, GIS professionals, nonprofit participants, and city officials. We worked in collaboration with organizations and initiatives including Socrata, the Open Data Initiative, the City of Oakland, and the Participatory Budgeting Project. We were trying to solve a technical problem, but the reason for solving it was deeply human: residents should be able to understand and discuss decisions about their shared resources.

Together, we developed an interactive web application that translated dense financial data into charts, visualizations, and contextual information. Instead of opening an enormous spreadsheet, a resident could move through budget categories and explore public expenditures at increasing levels of detail. Over time, the project also incorporated discussion capabilities, making room not just for seeing the information but for talking about it.

The project took shape during an early period in Oakland’s civic-technology community and was later incorporated into OpenOakland, the Code for America–affiliated organization forming around the same time.

From the beginning, the aim was larger than creating a polished visualization. We wanted residents to understand the budget well enough to discuss it with one another, city council members, and city staff. The project worked with community organizations to learn what people actually wanted to know and with Oakland’s Budget Office to obtain usable data. It also sought to give people tools for conducting their own analysis rather than asking them to accept someone else’s interpretation.

That distinction is important to me. Technology does not create better government simply by existing, and a chart cannot resolve disagreements about public priorities. But a well-designed tool can remove a barrier. It can help someone enter a conversation that once felt closed to them, see where the real tradeoffs are, and ask a more informed question.

My work focused on the part of a civic-technology project that lives beyond the code. I helped coordinate a cross-disciplinary team through development and launch and helped shape the story people would encounter around the tool: what it was, why it existed, and why they might want to use it. Public data only becomes civic infrastructure when the public can find it, understand it, and trust that it is meant for them.

Open Budget Oakland was one of the clearest early expressions of a question that has followed me throughout my career: how do we make a complicated system understandable enough for more people to take part? In Oakland, we began with a spreadsheet. What we were really working toward was a more open door into public decision-making.

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