Opendata.ch association visualises the Canton of Bern’s 490-million savings package

PRESS RELEASE OPENDATA.CH ASSOCIATION (PDF)

Bern, 5 July 2013

A week ago, the Bernese cantonal government presented the review of services and structures (ASP) 2014, with which the Canton of Bern aims to save up to 490 million francs a year and around 600 jobs. To make the massive savings package easier for the public and politicians to understand, the Opendata.ch association has visualised the financial and staffing savings as an intuitive Open Budget application at be-asp.budget.opendata.ch.

Financial figures in large public-sector documents are often too abstract for taxpayers, and even politicians, to form a concrete idea of them. To make the dimensions of the Bernese government’s enormous savings package easier to grasp, members of the Opendata.ch association have visualised the planned savings on the basis of the 142-page “Bericht des Regierungsrates an den Grossen Rat vom 26. Juni 2013 – Angebots- und Strukturüberprüfung (ASP 2014)” and published them as a dynamic Open Budget web application at be-asp.budget.opendata.ch.

In the application, the financial and staffing savings can be displayed per year and per directorate, and the savings in both pot 1 (measures recommended by the government) and pot 2 (measures not recommended by the government) can be shown. All measures are also listed in a table. Clicking on the circles and table entries shows detailed information from the report.

All the work was carried out on a voluntary basis by the software developers Thomas Preusse and Oleg Lavrovsky and coordinated by Matthias Stürmer.

Contact

Dr Matthias Stürmer, Board of Opendata.ch, Bern City Councillor
matthias.stuermer@opendata.ch, +41 76 368 81 65