Play Big Brother with your South African Local Council From the article: Launched by the treasury and the nonprofit civic technology lab Code4SA, and announced in the medium-term budget, the website Municipal Money reveals exactly how municipalities are spending their cash and where it comes from. It lists key ratios that illustrate how well or poorly budgets are being used and categorises these performance indicators into good, average and poor. For anyone intimidated by terms such as “cash coverage” or “liquidity ratio”, the site explains what they mean. I was also interested to see that you could also a side by side comparison of any two municipalities showing all their key indicators. There are lots of additional tooltips explaining the terms (right where you are looking at them). This site really does make it possible for ratepayers to engage in a meaningful discussion with their local councils. A very true message from the Municipal Money website: Municipal Money is our money, spent in our name. As citizens, we should know how this money has been spent and also have a say in how money is spent in the future to better our lives. They also have an API on the site that will allow 3rd party applications to analyse 4 years of data. The site itself is all open source data - just the way governmnet sites should be - see the source code at http://ift.tt/2jAtPq3. See M&G's article at http://ift.tt/2jq0iSm, or if you want to dive straight into the site you can visit http://ift.tt/2jAppPO.
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