The Contracts Portal by FFunction

The Contracts Portal was developed as a research project for the City of Montreal, as it moves towards greater transparency within its contracting. The city has been actively researching, developing and rolling out many new initiatives and services to ensure citizens have access to information.

The Contracts Portal was one of these research projects and was developed by FFunction to enable citizens to understand where the city’s money goes, how the money is distributed, and who the largest contractors in the City of Montreal happen to be.

FFunction proposed a treemap structure for exploring the contracts, giving users the ability to easily see patterns that would be difficult to spot in other modes of representation. A second advantage of using a treemap to represent this data is that they make efficient use of space. As a result, hundreds of items can be displayed on the screen simultaneously. This is ideal for mapping a whole contracting landscape, allowing citizens to search for the most costly contracts and largest suppliers of the City. Users have many filter options to sort and view the data, allowing for a high degree of flexibility in how the material is presented.