"Hack the City" – a hackathon for budget visualisation at the City Hall of Budapest

28/02/2022

Making the budget of the Hungarian capital more widely known can also help to increase citizens' civic engagement. But presenting in a clear way what, how and for how much money the state and local government do with our taxes is quite a challenge. 

The budget visualisation hackathon "The numbers speak, do you understand? - Hack the City", organised by the Municipality of Budapest and the Budapest Entrepreneurship Development Public Foundation on 25-27 February 2022 provided an opportunity for young people to visualise the figures of the capital's budget in a way that is easy to understand and accessible, while also creative and eye-catching. 

The competing teams of developers, IT specialists, creative professionals, economists and sociologists had their work cut out for them, as they had to understand not only the logic of the budget itself, but also the structure and time-frame of expenditures and revenues, in order to come up with a visual representation of it all.

One of the members of the jury of experts evaluating the applications, was BI senior researcher Petra Edina Reszkető, who was asked to give expert support based on her experience in the development of our previous project "Our Money" and the related website (in Hungarian). The winning teams' work will be further considered for utilization by the City Hall team.

You can find a video in Hungarian about the hackathon here.