Civic Tech Toronto Hacknight: September 29

Workgroup: Toronto Budget Project
Participants: Henrik Bechmann, Emily Fan, Medina Abdelkader, Marc De Pape, Matthew Gray, Jeremy “B”

We had a robust discussion about the place of user community consultation in our process, agreeing that optimal would be to
– form a partnership for the project with Better Budget TO (if possible) for budget process and policy insights, and community connections, and with them, to…
– organize a workshop of representative users for strategic planning and refining (aka help to pick a product for the next year that can be created within our resources, say 40-80 person days of dev effort)
– out of that process hopefully identify a few people (4-6 or so) who are keen to help our dev project on an ongoing basis by providing clear and specific feedback on the emerging product as it develops. This group should ideally have a team lead.

Matt and Medina have developed a presentation for the Better Budget folks later this week.

Henrik and Emily (Emily is one of the devs) considered an idea relating to the Budget Explorer option (https://github.com/HenrikBechmann/CivicTechTO-TorontoBudget/wiki/Strategic-Product-Proposal#budget-explorer) that emerged from the rich discovery process that the group has undergone so far. The idea is to create an abstract budget item object (in code) which can display information about itself automatically once chosen, and which allows the user to drag and drop arbitrary budget item objects into a workspace, resulting in automatic comparisons. Analogous to selecting a few models for purchase for automatic comparison.

We’ll see if this notion converges with the outcome of the user consultation process.

In general, the team, the process, and the clarity continue to develop nicely.