the project

qld.govspend.info

the client

The challenge

The Queensland Government is an Australian leader in making open data available to the public.

Despite having a huge amount of data available on the data.qld.gov.au website, it can be difficult for users to access the information they want.

For instance, to access the Queensland Government’s departmental expenditure data, a user would have to download 23 separate annual reports, flick through the pdf to find the financial statements and transfer that data to a format that they could work with.

The Queensland Government publishes all of the grants and contract it awards. However, a user wanted to find out who was receiving those awards in a given year, they would need to download over 300 spreadsheets rife with inconsistent data and then individually search them.

The Queensland Government wanted to provide users with a way of easily accessing finance data in an engaging way.

Our solution

Truii created qld.govspend.info, a custom website that allows users to explore Queensland Government income and expenses using a series of novel, interactive data visualisations.

We created a series of sunburst visualisations to represent whole-of-government income and expenses and departmental expenses. These allowed users to drilldown through the hierarchical finance data and answer questions such as ‘How much revenue does the government generate through speed camera fines?’ and ‘what proportion of the government’s total expenditure is spent on health and what is the cost per Queenslander?’

So that users could find out who the Government gives money to, we built a novel network visualization that allow users to query the almost 100,000 grants and contracts records. By interacting with this visualization, users can answer questions such as, ‘which companies receive the most money from the government?’ or ‘which companies receive the most construction contracts?’.

Visit qld.govspend.info