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Bringing transparency to the Goverment spending!
Hi there!
The goverment of the Basque Country (an autonomous territory in northern Spain) spends millions on the media. The Parliament wants to audit this spending, but all they get from the goverment is a 200+ page PDF report once a year made with Microsoft Word. Such as this one.
These memos —which, combined, exceed a thousand pages— are a dense string of every media campaign details. But it is faux transparency, as it sheds no light upon the actual accumulated spending on each media outlet!
So it sounded to me like a mad hot challenge to reunite these PDFs altogether, parse them all, and bring them into a structured data source, then build a tool so everybody in the country (not just the members of the Parliament) can explore this spending in full.
I have devoted a fairly large amount of time to this challenge, but here it is in case you feel like glancing at it and share your feedback:
gobiernovasco.marketing
The source code is available in GitHub.
On the technical side, it is a simple dependency-free, fully static, data-driven tool for analysis. It's based on W3C's native web components, so no use of React or the alike. The data source is a JSON file that is sent to the client on startup, so the search and typeahead suggestions happen instantly.
Finally, this project is not actually a business, but a free tool aiming for greater transparency in the public spending— although I am funded via Patreon by fellow citizens sharing these same ideals.
The goverment of the Basque Country (an autonomous territory in northern Spain) spends millions on the media. The Parliament wants to audit this spending, but all they get from the goverment is a 200+ page PDF report once a year made with Microsoft Word. Such as this one.
These memos —which, combined, exceed a thousand pages— are a dense string of every media campaign details. But it is faux transparency, as it sheds no light upon the actual accumulated spending on each media outlet!
So it sounded to me like a mad hot challenge to reunite these PDFs altogether, parse them all, and bring them into a structured data source, then build a tool so everybody in the country (not just the members of the Parliament) can explore this spending in full.
I have devoted a fairly large amount of time to this challenge, but here it is in case you feel like glancing at it and share your feedback:
gobiernovasco.marketing
The source code is available in GitHub.
On the technical side, it is a simple dependency-free, fully static, data-driven tool for analysis. It's based on W3C's native web components, so no use of React or the alike. The data source is a JSON file that is sent to the client on startup, so the search and typeahead suggestions happen instantly.
Finally, this project is not actually a business, but a free tool aiming for greater transparency in the public spending— although I am funded via Patreon by fellow citizens sharing these same ideals.
👋 Join WIP to participate
Search seems buggy to me after trying multiple times. Great initiative.
Thank you for your test, @wiprobert! Could you please further explain what issues did you face? For example, what searches have you tried, whether on mobile or in desktop, and what did you get versus what did you expected. That would really help me address it!
On a macbook, chrome browser: The 'scroll to result' action does not seem to work. Perhaps best to directly show the search bar and result, above the fold?
Instant follow. This initiative is amazing, and I wish more people used their tech skills to expose governments like this.
I just need to brush up on Spanish before being able to use it, though.
Thank you, @cat! Yeah… being the data in Spanish and the Basque languages, it made no sense to craft the UI in English. However you can still search for "radio" to get contracts awarded to a bunch of stations, or "green" to reveal campaigns related to ecologism. 🙃