CLOSER
Summary
The CLOSER project- democratizing city budgets through local journalism organisations - seeks to enhance the inclusiveness of budgetary policies, increasing the participation of citizens, and to test the incorporation, in local news agencies practices, of the monitoring of public policies, by designing, evaluating and making publicly available a platform for translating municipal budgets into distinct visual news objects.
The solution
At a time of a growing gap between citizens and public governance and of a growing struggle of public institutions to maintain legitimacy, it is imperative to shorten that gap, and the simplification of the communication of public governance decisions is one of the most important factors in accomplishing this.