NYC Opens The Books, And The Source Code, On Checkbook 2.0

Last week, New York City Comptroller John C. Liu unveiled the Checkbook NYC 2.0 website and announced that the source code for the financial transparency website would be available to developers on GitHub,  which will allow other government organizations to use Checkbook to build similar sites.

Checkbook NYC illustrates how the city government spends its nearly $70 billion annual budget. Using a dashboard that combines graphs and user-friendly tables, the site displays up-to-date information about the city's revenues, expenditures, contracts, payroll and budget.  It also offers that information programmatically via APIs.

Built on the Drupal open source content management platform, Checkbook NYC's data warehouse contains more than 50 million financial transactions, according to REI Systems, which worked with the city to develop the system. [...]