StateScoop: “Four years ago, Christina Ho led an effort through the U.S. Treasury Department to help Americans track the federal government’s spending of public funds. Now, she’s left government and embarked on a new project: aggregating data from the country’s more than 30,000 municipalities to help citizens shape local policy. On Monday, Ho launched a beta version of her latest project, PolicyInsights. The open source platform collects annual census information, budget data and performance metrics from local governments. Users can then compare the data from two locations side-by-side. The platform seeks to arm citizens with actionable information — in part gathered through crowdsourcing — that can be used to mold local policies. Ho was inspired to create the program when she discovered just how difficult it was to navigate the sites of individual municipal governments.  “They create them from their perspective,” said Ho, in reference to municipal websites. “What’s missing is the citizen. We want to empower people to objectively evaluate the data, but also to improve the quality of questions that they pose to their local governments.”