I think that's a very good question. As David was saying, this is all new. In our budget world, we've always produced budget reports, usually in PDF; they're nice to look at, but you can't do much with them. If you wanted to use the data, you'd have to then be a programmer, scrape it and do some type of work, and then do a lot of work to actually then mash it up and work with it.
There are two sides of the visualization approach. One is to make the data very easy to use, so you can use the data from the budget to explore different ways and ask sensible questions about your local community or about your government. I know the federal government is a bit more arm's length, but there's a lot of important information—Statistics Canada, of course, budget information, and performance aspects, and so on—and there are large decisions being made with lots of money, taxpayers' money. At the municipal level, there's a lot of engagement around what's also happening in the local community.
Visualization is a way of seeing what's happening across the city in different wards—different kinds of requests, different kinds of variances, and different kinds of things happening in the different communities—and people can start to then grow together and work together to help solve those community issues. So visualization is a much easier way and allows sort of a ready-made way of helping you understand the data better, versus in the past, where you would have to be someone who would have to actually construct all that yourself.
One of the things we're hearing over the last few years, and more and more, is about the ability to mash it up and look at it very quickly, but with not a lot of computer science or detailed needs. If you think of teenagers and people doing school projects or people who want to be engaged at that age, where we want to bring young people in, if they have to have a computer science degree, that's not going to be very easy for them to be involved. What we've seen is young people involved from schools and new civic engagement links, because people can do it easily.
So the concept of getting the budget out there, because it is so fundamental, also allows people to see that the government is now delivering on its promises and being able to cut those costs or improve services and offer better services, perhaps better services from that direct input from the clients.