BudgetMap: Issue-Driven Navigation for a Government Budget

Abstract

We present BudgetMap, an interactive tool for navigating budgets of government programs through a lens of social issues of public interests. Our novel issue-driven approach can complement the traditional budget classification system used by government organizations by addressing time-evolving public interests. BudgetMap elicits the public to tag government programs with social issues by providing active and passive tagging methods. BudgetMap then facilitates visual exploration of the tagged budget metadata. Through a lab study, we show how the design of BudgetMap helps users develop awareness and understanding of budgetary issues while identifying issue-budget links. We also share lessons learned from a preliminary live deployment.