What

Local Transparency is an independent, civic project. It builds small, verifiable tools that help residents understand local public questions — starting in Noblesville, Indiana.

Every figure a tool displays traces to an official source, and every step of the math is shown and published as open-source code. The goal is not to tell anyone how to vote or what to think; it is to make the numbers behind local decisions checkable by anyone.

This project is not affiliated with any government body, school district, or campaign. Tools estimate; official records govern. Corrections and questions are welcome through the project's GitHub repositories.

How

Using public data and modern engineering tools, we are building repeatable, deterministic ways to aggregated, process, and ultimately share data about our communities. For the School Referendum tool, tax data is sourced from the Hamilton County ArcGIS API, the knobs that dictate how the calculations work for a specific school system is set of values in a configuration file, so that we can present the same level of information for other Hamilton Country Indiana communities without too much more effort. We're providing the items that do the calculating as an Open Source project at github, so that what we're presenting is also transparent.

Why

Trust and transparency are currencies in short supply these days, and even in our local communities distrust has been fostered by both leaders across the spectrum, from local to the national level. There are some things that are incredibly nuanced in our society that can not simply be broken down into a mathematical formula.

Still, having access to the actual numbers behind a problem or a question, and having access to the same information and reasoning makes having honest discussions about challenging issues a little bit easier.

That's our why. Provide contextualized information based on publically available data and methodologies. The tools we build are in an open source project, where if someone thinks there is an issue with how we've built something, we can hold that conversation and work toward a fuller understanding for everyone involved.

Who

Local Transparency was created by David McNelis, a resident of downtown Noblesvile, Indiana. He is the cofounder of https://www.noblecloak.com

Thats it, today, at least. I look forward to adding collaborators to build tools and increase the general utility of what I'm trying to build here