In 2022, IGPA launched the Digital Government Initiative with a convening a state and university officials. Contributors included University faculty and administrators, along with esteemed members of state government. The Initiative will promote success stories in data sharing between the University and the State, seeking to replicate and expand them. It will also seek to identify barriers faculty and state officials have experienced and formulate strategies to remove them.

Open-source sharing of data is the future of transparency and digital governance. It fully uses the Internet for distributed and efficient collaboration through the git method of control, which allows users to see every change to a project since its creation. Additionally with the work that the Fiscal Futures team has done in creating explained and reproducible documents, this project has the potential to reach wider audiences and grow beyond what is capable of any standalone team. The novel dataset released by the research team consistently tracks the functions of spending over time using revenue and expenditure figures provided by the Illinois Office of Comptroller. The Comptroller’s data includes all revenue, appropriated and nonappropriated, within general and special funds, as well as all expenditures and transfer values for each fiscal year. The data behind the Fiscal Futures Project is now publicly available at the Fiscal Futures Data Depository on Github.