Preparing municipal financial data for political budget discussions, for use in the administration and for citizens in data visualizations and making it openly accessible was the subject of a municipal OpenBudgets pilot project of the Kommunale Datenverarbeitungszentrale (KDVZ) Rhein-Erft-Rur, Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems IAIS and the municipalities of City of Bonn and Merzenich. An initial pilot phase has been underway since mid-July 2018 with the aim of adapting existing open source software components to analyze public revenue and expenditure. In the inter-municipal pilot project, a separate instance based on the open source web platform OpenBudgets.EU (OBEU) was installed in the KDVZ data center as the basis for the tests. The web platform was to support the project with numerous freely selectable visualization options as a tool for identifying patterns and trends in public budget data and presenting them in an appealing way. One aim of the pilot project was to adapt and expand the existing upload packager specifically for municipal budget data. This should make it easier for local authorities to publish data. Due to the very different municipal data structures, budget data for publications previously had to be prepared manually for each individual publication. Another aim was to make these prepared data sets available for further use in the sense of open data. In a further development, the number of freely usable data visualization tools could be expanded or the entire database could be automatically made available in machine-readable form for other applications.

As the project progressed, new technical hurdles for the productive use of the OBEU web platform emerged, which would have entailed additional higher financial development costs. It was not possible to find development and support partners or funding bodies that would have ensured stable and scalable operation of the OBEU web platform. The project partners therefore decided to suspend the pilot operation until further notice and not to take it over into productive operation, which was originally planned for the long term.