Best newbie mashup, sponsored by Digital New Zealand

Tax Receipt 2010 by Amanda Dorrell & Nick Malcolm (Summer of Tech interns with Southgate Labs)

Description and content sources

Tax Receipt 2010 (http://tax.southgatelabs.com)

This simple but powerful visualisation shows how your tax dollars are spent. Enter your income, and the site calculates how much tax you pay, itemised by government department, based on the allocations announced in the budget.

The visualisation is implemented as an HTML5 web application. The design has been carefully constructed so that it works well on both larger screens and mobile devices.

Once you enter your income, a bar graph animation highlights the difference in government spending across different areas.

The purpose of this visualisation is to inform people about how much tax they pay, and how this tax is allocated across the various departments. It's easy to get lost in the large numbers included in the budget data - millions spent on this and billions allocated to that. By personalising this information, and giving the numbers scale and context, it becomes easier to understand.

As it says at the bottom of the receipt: Thanks for shopping with the NZ Government.

2010 Budget Data, published by New Zealand Treasury (http://www.treasury.govt.nz/budget/2010)

Inspired by blog posts from Rowan Simpson (http://rowansimpson.com/2008/06/08/tax-statement/) and more recently Lance Wiggs (http://lancewiggs.com/2010/10/01/show-me-the-receipt-please/)

Judges’ comments

Tax Receipt 2010 is simple in concept, presentation and design but incredibly powerful. It addresses a single question, “How is my tax being spent?” and provides straightforward answers. The information is summarised and presented clearly and simply. The visualisation is powerful because it provides a personal context for the nation’s spending. It’s a great conversation starter around public expenditure.

Tax Receipt 2010 (http://tax.southgatelabs.com)

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