---
redirect_from: /2014/02/open-up-your-citys-finances-on-open-data-day/
title: Open up your city's finances on Open Data Day!
authors:
- Anders Pedersen
---
<a href="http://opendataday.org/">Open Data Day</a> is coming up on February 22nd with events happening in <a href="http://wiki.opendataday.org/2014/City_Events">cities across the world</a>. Are you interested in the recent budget passed in your city council or curious about the expenditures of your local school board? Then be sure to get involved and make use of the OpenSpending platform and <a href="http://community.openspending.org/">community</a> at Open Data Day. <br> 

Help open up your city's finances by publishing them on <a href="http://openspending.org/">OpenSpending</a> and producing elegant visualizations that show where money goes. OpenSpending makes it super-easy to turn an Excel (or even PDF) file of local city finances into something browsable and searchable. Community members have already added more than 100 city budgets to OpenSpending and plotted them on this <a href="http://apps.openspending.org/maps/">map </a>. It also enables you make clear and beautiful visualisations of your local city’s finances in seconds making them understandable to everyone.

Just follow these 3 simple steps:<br>

<p dir="ltr">1. Find the data - locate your local city or municipal data

<p dir="ltr">2. Prepare the data - turn it into a single clean spreadsheet in Excel, Libreoffice or Google Docs (and then export as CSV - just “save as”)

<p dir="ltr">3. Upload to OpenSpending and visualize
<br>
If you need more information we've got the full <a href="http://bit.ly/openspending-data-guide-gdoc">step-by-step guide for you</a> even in six different languages.

With a bit of data cleaning and a quick upload you will for example get this neat visualization of the Moscow city budget for 2014:
<iframe width='600' height='400' src='https://openspending.org/moscow2014/embed?widget=treemap&state=%7B%22drilldowns%22%3A%5B%22vedomstvo%22%2C%22Program%22%2C%22Podprogram%22%2C%22CSR%22%2C%22vidrashodov%22%5D%2C%22year%22%3A2014%2C%22cuts%22%3A%7B%7D%7D&width=600&height=400' frameborder='0'></iframe>
<br>
Will you be working on budgets or spending at the Open Data Day?
<br>Let the OpenSpending community know by sharing the news on the <a href="http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/openspending">mailing list</a> and connect with us on the IRC <a href="http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=openspending">freenode channel #openspending</a>.

To learn more about where the Open Data Day events are happening check the <a href="http://wiki.opendataday.org/2014/City_Events">Open Data Day wiki</a>. The Open Data Day wiki also offers some excellent guidance for you can <a href="http://wiki.opendataday.org/Main_Page">organise an event in your city</a>.

If you need inspiration for your event <a href="http://blog.okfn.org/2014/02/07/what-are-you-doing-on-open-data-day/">check this list of exciting Open Data Day activities</a>, which have already been planned.

