We proudly present our new web portal — www.mojnovac.me – the very first visualisation of the state budget in Montenegro prepared by the civil society.
One of the main principles of our work is the belief that the budget is not a technicality that should be left to the auditors and accountants, but the ultimate expression of the government’s priorities and embodiment of public policies. Therefore, we want to contribute to better understanding of the budget and its availability to citizens by making the budgetary data only a click away from those who want to know more about it.
Data scattered over various websites, buried in a bunch of tables and locked in scanned PDFs, unsearchable and without explanations, cannot be of great use to citizens.
This is why we decided to “unlock” the data – to convert official documents into a searchable, citizen-friendly database that will allow anyone to quickly find an answer to budgetary questions at a single place.
This was the thinking behind designing My Money, a portal where you can find out:
- How the state budget is collected, how is it spent – economic classification of the budget down to the most detailed publicly available level, with comparison by years.
- How institutions spend their budgets – you can easily find the institution of your interest and its budget by years, with specific data for different budgetary programs and budgetary items.
- Which projects make up the capital budget – what has the state promised to build, reconstruct or at least design and plan.
On the web portal, you can also find the Budget Glossary, as well as the Budgetary Library – collection of all the important legal acts regulating the budgetary system, including the integral annual budgets and year-end reports.
My Money contains more than 70 000 budget items and covers the period of seven years – each single number from seven budgetary cycles found its place on our web portal.
We hope this tool will make life easier for all of you dealing with budget issues in your everyday work, or empower those of you that are yet to deal with budget. Whatever you do, the trail of the money must be the basis of each argument when analysing, implementing, monitoring, criticising, praising or changing a public policy.
My Money was prepared and launched within the project “Promoting financial accountability in Montenegro”, financially supported by the British Embassy in Podgorica. We promise that we will continue to update the portal, improve it and enrich with new data.
Send us your impressions, comments and suggestions at info@institut-alternativa.org.
P.S.
We claim that our visualisation is simple and clear, but just in case, take a look at the short tutorial – the roadmap to key components of the web portal:
