data.bythebay.io: Steve Pepple, Design for Local Government: Data, Services, and Transparency
uh great to get a chance to talk with you guys this morning um so let just do a quick overview here so we're going to tell you a little bit about ourselves and what open goov does and then we're going to talk about some of our challenges for Designing for local governments um talk a little bit about how we use data analysis and data visualization to understand um local government data finances and accounting systems um get into a little bit of a history of kind of how go governments got to where they are today and that goes back to uh paper ledgers and spreadsheets and then more modern databases um and then talk a little bit about how we use data analysis and visualization to come to insights both within our company and with our customers um so I'm Steve Pepple I'm use experienced designer and a developer who lives in San Francisco um I'm interested in working on Civic um Information Systems whether that's a municipal budget or a bus system and designing for those systems so that experts can have a better understanding of the system and then allow firsttime users to have a better experience with that system and hi there my name is Morgan Keys uh I'm also a product designer here at open goov um at open gov uh and uh I've been a designer for about five years here in the Bay Area and uh I focus on our data and platform side of the product so a little bit about open gov so open gov's mission is to transform the way the world analyzes shares Compares and allocates public money and we're building the first smart collaborative and comparative um SAS platform to power how the 21st century um government uh communicates with its citizens um so that's what open gov does we're based in Redwood City um we're going to talk about how our design team like some of the challenges our design team has for working uh with local governments and also how we as a design team collaborate with the data science team at open goov and our data science team is represented today um they'll be uh Matt seal of our team will giv being giving a talk just after us and they'll be talking about um some of the stuff they do with like um natural language processing text analysis projections and outl desire analysis um so when I talk about my job I and the work we do I usually say that you know design is not much different whether it's for government or some other vertical it's really about um as designers were really good about figuring out how complex things work and then modeling those things to users so they have a better understanding of of how a system works whether that's an accounting system or whether that's you know software that you use for uh slide presentation um in the case of local government there are a few differences which is that we need to explain to users like how government works how government spends money um explain some things that I think to most people are pretty like either Bal or just complex that they don't really care to understand how it works um but really you know the the principles of design that we really try to keep in mind is understanding users motivations and goals so that means understanding what are the motivations of a mayor what are the motiv motivations of a city council member what are the motivations of someone who's administrator in government and then for Citizens like you know how do they understand what government's doing for them um it's about testing our product with real users and making sure it makes sense to them and then it's about providing the right information at the right time to both expert users and new users um there's uh I saw this tweet earlier in the year and it was uh something that was present at Davos and I found it really funny um it said what if public infrastructure was funded by the crowd and that's like a good idea I suppose but it's also kind of how our system is supposed to work and to me it was funny not that like obviously the person that wrote this knew that but it we we've come to a point where like what governments do can be so complim complicated and counterintuitive that you know we we lose sight of like the fact that people are choosing like how government should spend money in an Ideal World um so with that in mind um I wanted to you know a lot of our conversations that we have around our office are about like how government is designed and there's actually really some well-designed mechanisms of how government is supposed to work um taxes are a way of contributing to common goods and services um budgets are a way of translating um resources into human purposes and procurement is an acquisition process where whereby there's opportunity for public and private partnership um the problem is that these mechanisms over time that were once welld designed have become broken in in certain ways um they've become outdated they've become complicated um in some cases they've become compro compromised and and corrupt so what we have to do as designers sometimes is sort of reverse engineer the system and you know our goal is to explain these complex things to everyday citizens so that they can give input to their government about how to do better and and what they want um so you know a sort of really simple example is as a citizen I might want to know how is my tax dollar spent um a perfectly reasonable question but also a question that is hard to answer because how governments spend money doesn't way work the same way that how companies spend money or how we manage our personal finances and so I'm just going to cover a couple like ways of visualizing money that are useful both for finance experts and everyday citizens and then Morgan's going to talk about kind of how we've done a lot of Discovery and data analysis to understands how governments currently are doing budgeting doing taxes like forecasting revenue and then how some of that data science and analysis allows us to provide more powerful ways to tell story to Citizens and better ways that governments can you know analyze what they're doing make better decisions find cost efficiencies so this is a visualization from our product or open goov product and it's a it's a flow diagram of how money has been spent over years or months and um this is a really powerful visualization for a finance director or a city manager because they can see um you know Trends uh of of what's happened in the government maybe they just started the government uh a week ago you know and they want to know what happened over the years and so this is a quick way to see like how both revenues and expenses for that government have changed um you know maybe maybe a department um uh maybe an apartment was overspending from a number of years and then was cut back it's a quick way to visualize that however this is not a great visualization for an everyday citizen they kind of want to know how is my money spent now not what's happened for the past 10 years um here's a visualization that was done by a group in Oakland um it's a collaboration with open o Oakland and um the code for America chapter in Oakland and it's a really cool sanky visualization of how revenues uh flow into uh expenditures or how taxes flow into services for Oakland um so I'd recommend you check out the open Oakland site they have um great visualizations like this but also data that you can hack around with and then here's a couple other examples of visualizations that work well for showing like sizes of money how money is allocated um these are both different types of tree Maps um the one on the right is kind of a more traditional tree map and then there's a circle pack tree map on the left that shows um our federal budget and these are great because they show how much money there is but it also shows how much money is like going to different things and so you can kind of group and organize and um Morgan's going to talk a little bit more about the details of like how we understand the structure of money in a government and some of the hierarchical problems we have and and then how he's worked with the data science team to sort of unpack some of that right great thank you um so yeah I wanted to first off I want to spend a few minutes talking about um some of the uh challenges we encounter when uh trying to do this work um and so just as a reminder so I work on the the platform side which means um we kind of have a public facing side for Citizens but we have an internal side where we have Finance directors or it administrators in the government who are trying to get their data into our system so um first off uh you know accounting and specifically especially government accounting is really complicated due to it's highly regulated nature but also just centuries of historical uh precedent I've got an example up here this is a a general ledger um a general ledger that most of the data sets we receive from governments come in the form of of files that are referred to as general ledgers well what is a general ledger it's It's Kind of a Funny Story the term Ledger is actually an ancient term centuries old which which literally means to lay and it refers to the way a book is laid in the middle of the room and people come and write things down as like a central place of information so you know there's centuries of precedent for how you even refer to things um so the challenge for us as designers is choosing terminology and interaction metaphors that connect with these historical terms but also still communicate uh modern functionality so also uh because we're not the first software company to try and work work on uh with financial data to try and solve these problems uh we have both the advantages and baggage of older Solutions uh over the course of the 20th century uh Finance professionals have worked with uh have viewed and managed oh sorry uh Finance professionals have viewed and managed their data in everything from Green Screen applications to uh Excel documents to you know some bloated Erp system um in fact some of our users may have started out on those green screen applications um so we import data from whatever medium or system uh yeah so uh we import data from whatever medium or system uh you know they use uh often manually whether it's either a PDF uh you know we're having to scrape through it or you know through some complicated uh relational database um so as a consequence of that we see all sorts of uh strategies and formats for the way these users uh store and categorize their data so um what I'm showing you here uh first off does uh who here is aware of familiar with a what a chart of accounts is has anyone heard of that a few people okay so uh a chart of accounts is essentially a system of codes or segments as our users call them uh which are used to tag transactions in a general ledger in a data set um and basically these segments encode metad data and organizational structure into the data um and uh this here is a diagram uh that I created after uh after looking through these coas that we get from our users uh to try and analyze the different patterns that we have come across so far so here um uh you're seeing uh different segments have different patterns and those uh patterns could actually have different interpretations to them so this is pretty complicated process um um yeah but ultimately what these uh what this is doing uh it's encoding hierarchy into the data and so um and each segment represents is a different dimension uh and each Dimension has its own hierarchy um here this is an example from one of our customers these are all of the funds that Addison Texas uh uses and it is categorized into three levels of hierarchy here um this is essentially a taxonomy um and it actually encodes information about how the government is structured um and by uh having these documents you know we're able to use utilize this for better visualizations and insights um you know and the funny part about this is you this is probably a pretty uh standard visualization for us for this audience you know seems pretty logical way to represent it but it's doubtful that a lot of our customers have ever seen their chart of accounts visualized in this way um so uh you know how do we get to a more modern interface um I wanted to show you this is a fun example of an interface we're building to try and manage those segment hierarchies um there are three columns here representing different levels of hierarchy um and they all relate to each other and uh so as you can see we're trying to deal with precedent uh you know there's a skoric choice here to kind of arrange things into you know spreadsheet like columns uh but we're also trying to make use of you know kind of visualization with the highlighting but also dynamism something Dynamic elements to uh make it a little more efficient um let's skip ahead here so anyways um having these uh hierarchies you know letting users manage them we hope that uh um users will make to make it easier for users to manage these and to we hope that they'll create more hierarchies and be able to create more interesting visualizations and so I'll just leave you with two fun examples of other things we're working on uh on the left here is a um uh uh is an example of a budgeting uh budget projections tool that we're working on where we are you take the uh you take a the government's budget and their first you know uh six months or so of data and we're able to uh you know project out where we think they'll uh Land by the end of the year this of course all uh uh ties back to that chart of accounts the the hierarchy and the structure of the organization is built in there and then on the right side uh we have um uh an example of trying to do we're we're trying to design a feature that uh finds outliar so that you can look for departments and that information is encoded in the COA uh departments who may be over or under spending so that's actually it for that part of it um okay yeah yeah so um one thing to one thing to comment on here is if you could see this interface the real power here is once we've understood the hierarchy and dimensions of chart of accounts and accounting systems that provides us with a lot of power for searching filtering pivoting on that data so that if you're say the head of a department in a smaller City you can see the numbers that care that matter to you as opposed to just the entire accounting system um our customers their biggest one of their biggest gripes about what they have to do dayto day is they spend a lot of time writing queries to really archaic accounting systems and so it's very time intensive to them and the result the output they get back from those systems is not easy to use not easy to share and so if they can drill into numbers they care about that's really powerful to them similarly if you're a citizen you can extract out like some of the complexities of of financing that you know are important but maybe not you know maybe our a little harder to digest so we can look at just say the general fund of a government's accounting system and just look at basic you know say city services that citizens care about similarly we could slice by Capital Improvement projects and show hey these are the projects that are happening in your community and the government government that serves you can show hey we're investing in these particular areas um all of our customers had problems until you know we we provided tools for them to be able to to simplify in that sort of way so that's the power of of a lot of the data analysis and data science we've done on accounting systems and that covers uh most of our talk but we would love to take questions thank you very much Steve and Morgan and now we'll do Q&A thank you yes thank you thanks for the talk um what has been the general feedback from government consumers of your of your products and um what has been the general adoption rate by governments of your products let's see uh I'm trying to think of numbers um rephrase the question the recording uh yeah so the question was about uh General feedback from governments about our product and you know kind of the adoption rates uh I think we're we publicly say how many customers we have yeah okay I think we're over 9950 governments around the country this includes uh cities uh and uh counties and other uh Special Districts um you know so adoption is good we're for a three or four year old company now um so I think um the feedback has been good I mean I think uh it's very exciting especially to finance directors the the professionals at these governments because they they've never really had um a tool like this that allows them to dynamically uh dig through their data so easily you know like I said a lot of customers were building these in excels and so they might have built their own Excel functions to you know pivot their tables or to you know display things in a certain way but now we're giving them a standardized format to uh share their data with the rest of their organization um and also it's an incredibly powerful tool by by using that COA uh it allows them to it allows you to in the same simple visualization to Pivot to virtually any expression of the government's finances so uh feedback has been good yeah in in terms of challenges I think for finance folks this works great but then the broader like for a city manager mayor city council like how can they understand it so one of our challenges to to tell better stories like once we've gotten some of this data into a place where it's a little bit more palatable to a finance person how do they say hey we need to increase taxes or hey we're still cash strap from the recession and communicate that with a broader audience so we're working on tools that provide better storytelling um on top of this data platform thank you very much Steve and Matthew oh no sorry Morgan I'm very sorry Matthew the next speaker who works at the same place thank you very [Music] much w