![]() The FMS manages the city's expenses, revenue, contracts, payroll, and budget, and naturally allows authorized access only. Most cities run an internal financial management system (FMS) of some kind. ![]() (Full disclosure: I'm working with the Comptroller's Office on this release, though most of these plans were laid well before I got there.) The steps the Comptroller's Office took are pretty smart and worth examining. But it's even more important to show that the project is a safe long-term bet, both for those considering adoption and those considering participation in development. Giving other cities a chance to offer the same user interface and API support, at a fraction of what it would have cost to build it themselves, is already good news. But it will at least be an important instance: is the main financial transparency site for the largest city in the United States, a city with an annual budget of $70 billion. I have no knowledge (and do not claim) that this is the first instance of a government agency doing such long-range planning for an open source release. Long before the code release, the Comptroller's Office started a serious planning process to ensure that the code could be easily adopted by other municipalities, supported by other vendors, and eventually become a long-term multi-stakeholder project-in other words, the very model that advocates of civic open source always cheer for but only rarely see happen in practice. Rather, the release of the Checkbook NYC code, planned for this Thursday, is significant because of a larger initiative that accompanies it. After all, lots of governments open source code these days. ![]() This week, his office is open sourcing the code behind Checkbook NYC, the citywide financial transparency site-but the open-sourcing itself is not what I'm referring to. New York City Comptroller John Liu is about to do something we need to see more often in government.
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