Explore the NYC budget, see what earmarks there are, who they're from and who they're for, and get a better sense of how the city works
Opening up government data has been a big theme on the web over the past couple of years' and an interest of ours for a lot longer. So we were very pleased to be approached by Media Mezcla—a New York based agency for whom we've occasionally built prototypes of product ideas—about a site detailing earmarks in the New York City budget.
Since it was going to be integrated with their Campaign Engine software, the site had to be developed in PHP and the timescale was tight, so we settled on the CakePHP framework which closely resembles Ruby on Rails. That resemblance came in handy as we had a number of ActiveRecord-based ruby scripts running behind the scenes managing the data import, and so there was only one conceptual model to manage.
The majority of the time on the project was spent behind-the-scenes managing that data import. We built tools to parse the data from disparate sources (chiefly Microsoft Word documents and Excel documents) and turn them into a clean database. The site was a big hit with the end client, and has even been featured in their campaign advertising:
(Please note that, not being New Yorkers, we're not nearly informed enough to take a position on any candidate in that race and this doesn't constitute an endorsement)
Given the timeframe and the client's scope we weren't able to develop all the features we might have liked. In particular, more visual representations of the data and geographical features beyond a search by borough were discussed but didn't fit into the time available. But with the data all gathered together, it shouldn't be a huge task for a keen local developer to grab it all back out and use it in a whole variety of ways.