Show me the Money

What it is

Show Me the Money from Sidekick Studios is a small experiment that uses smart phones to try and make public spending data more accessible and interactive.

The app has been built on Layar and uses augmented reality to make spending easier to understand and through the phone's camera view, shows users how money is spent in relation to the immediate physical environment.

Practitioners are able to geo-tag spend data for public buildings or places (e.g. how much is spent on the local library or sports centre) and the information is presented as price tags on the screen of the phone. This not only makes spending data more accessible, but by displaying it is a new and engaging format also makes the information more local and immediate.

How the idea developed

Show me The Money was developed as part of the Your Local Budget programme run by Nesta in partnership with the Big Society Network and PB Unit, which sought to develop approaches to participatory budgeting.

Sidekick Studios received £10,000 to build the app which they developed and tested in partnership with the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead and developer Adrian Short. The biggest challenge the team encountered when developing the initial prototype of Show Me The Money were accessing and the geo-coding the financial data that is presented through the app.

Latest news (as at 3 September 2012)

Further details about Show Me The Money can be found on the Sidekick Studios website and a beta version of the tool is freely available to users.

This prototype has subsequently been refined and adapted through HypARlocal, an innovation for community good from Talk About Local that Nesta is also supporting. This is working on an experiment to bring hyper-local websites into the world of augmented reality.

Want to know more?

Adil Abrar, Founder & Chief Sidekick - adil@sidekickstudios.net