Budgets are usually pages and pages of boring text and even more pages and pages of boring numbers. Until Obama came and changed the game. The final 2017 budget that President Obama is presenting to the US public has for the first time been explained with copious annotations on Genius. And for the second consecutive year, the budget data has been released to Github and Socrata for developers and data journalists to roll around in.
Every year, President Obama writes a message introducing his budget. This year, you can read his budget message like never before — with graphics, videos, and stories from Americans who wrote to the President about the policies laid out in the budget.
It still has pages and pages of boring text and numbers. But tell me, isn’t this the coolest budget you have ever seen? The interactive possibilities are off the charts, and it should be interesting to see what people do with it in short order.
Of course, you can read through the entire budget the old fashioned way, on the Budget.gov website (yes, reading plaintext on the internet is the new fax) without any interactive thingamajigs getting in your way.
