Case Study: City of Boston achieves clearer, neighborhood-level budget transparency with Socrata's Open Budget

Boston Makes Budget Transparency a Top Priority

Socrata partnered with the City of Boston to tackle a long-standing transparency problem: the city’s budgets were buried in multi-volume PDFs that made it hard for residents, reporters, and staff to see where money was being allocated. After a 2014 executive order to boost open data, Boston needed a user-friendly, public-facing way to publish operating and capital budgets and related financial datasets.

The solution was Socrata’s Open Budget — an interactive web portal that centralizes budget and expenditure data, lets users search by department or funding source, and maps capital projects down to the neighborhood level. Migration was straightforward, datasets are updated regularly with spot checks for sensitive information, and the result is clearer financial transparency, fewer information requests, easier cross-department reporting, and increased public engagement from civic groups and residents.

City of Boston

Christopher Dwelley

Performance Manager