I’ve just sent in my application for the Knight News Challenge.

DépensesPubliques.com (PublicExpenditures.com) aims at making a city’s finances more transparent and accessibel to every citizen. I’ll develop it in collaboration with Jeff Mignon. Here’s the project description to be read on the NewsChallenge website:

DepensesPubliques.com makes public finances transparent. Transparency means accessibility, of course. It also means understanding. Starting with municipalities, we’re going to mine data and add layers of automated and user-generated context that will add value to this financial data.

A clearer view of his/her city’s finances will give the taxpayer more elements to argue and make a more educated choice on Election Day.

The front-end will give the user not only the cost of an item on the public expenditures list. It will also provide examples of projects of equivalent value and the price other cities have paid for such items. The goal is to illustrate concepts such as opportunity costs and efficiency.

Far from indulging in populism, we’ll carry out serious journalism. We will provide context and explanations to each item, by crossing data, by asking users for details or by sending a journalist in the field.

The first step will be to unlock access to about 40 Go of accounting documents and put them in the open, on Google Docs or Document Cloud, for instance.

Not only will our efforts pressure public officials to become more transparent, it will also encourage our fellow journalists to demand more public information.

Second, we will build a semantic engine that will turn accounting charts into computer-readable data.

Third, we will provide a front-end to display the data. We will build a CMS where users will be able to enhance, and contribute to, the data sets. More importantly, we will build an API to allow local news media to use our data.

Imagine an article about a mayoral promise of doing this and this. If the outlet printing the story is able to automatically display a box with the financial details of the project, it makes it easier for the journalist and the reader to keep public officials in check.

Read the rest and share your thoughts on the Knight website!

Here’s a (ok, terribly designed) mock-up of the front-end in French: