Queensland Government Finances: How was your money spent?

Truii has just completed a project that increases transparency and accountability in the Queensland Government’s finance data.

Partnering with the Queensland Government (Department of Science, Information Technology and Innovation – DSITI) under an Advance Queensland funded Testing Within Government (TWiG) grant, Truii was tasked with demonstrating how to communicate the flow of government spending using interactive data visualisations. The end result of this project qld.govspend.info is a resource that is designed especially for:

Journalists looking for data to back up their stories
Businesses looking for contract opportunities
Government employees needing information on procurement arrangements
All Queenslanders wanting to know how their tax dollars are being spent.

What we did

To develop the qld.govspend.info site we tracked down 364 files that contained government finance data published in various locations on the government websites. We wrangled this data to produce cleaned, curated versions ready for visualisations. We worked with DSITI to develop personas to represent a range of different users. We explored a large range of potential visualisations and eventually landed on three key representations:

Awards network – this bespoke visualisation allows users to explore the 96,636 contracts and grants awarded by the Queensland Government in 2015-16, as well as generate spreadsheets of refined data to download on the fly.
Starburst chart – we used this hierarchical pie chart visualisation to show the different categories and finer details of whole-of-government income and expenditure, as well as departmental expenditure.
Grants map – we showed how grants funding is distributed across Queensland’s local government areas, measured by total funding and funding per person.