Offener Haushalt

The central task of a parliament is to draw up and debate a budget. This essential political process decides which activities the state can carry out and which services cannot be provided. Budget data must be published by law. Unfortunately, budget data format is not standardised, which means that booklets with more than 1000 pages are printed and slowly deteriorate in the town hall or placed as PDF files on the corresponding websites. As a result, an essential aspect of political work remains closed off to many.

This is where our OffenerHaushalt.de project comes in: we want to answer the question of how much money the state spends on what, in detail. With our platform, the complex data of different households on federal, national and local level are graphically opened up and made accessible in open file formats. In this way, the information can be evaluated, visualised and compared with other sources.

Our goal is to make households accessible to as many communities as possible, and to visualise them. This allows citizens to see and understand the finances of their community more easily. Furthermore, we try to improve the understanding and comparability of the data through relations, e.g. per inhabitant or employed person. In this way, we hope for more political participation, a higher political understanding and an improved political dialogue. In addition, everyone, whether citizens, journalists, civil society or academics, can analyse the data and use it for public accountability.