[euopendata] Open Government data in Portugal

[ricardo lafuente]

Hi,

On 08/31/2011 02:28 PM, Jonathan Gray wrote:
>    * Might you be interested in writing a brief guest blog post on
> these developments for the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog
> (blog.okfn.org), to be cross-posted on ePSIplatform.eu?

Most definitely! I'm pinging you off-list for details.

>    * Can you or any of your colleagues come to the Open Government Data
> Camp in Warsaw to meet others in the open data community from around
> the world? More info at: http://ogdcamp.org/ There's also an EU Travel
> Bursary here: http://bit.ly/eubursary

We're applying today! Thanks for the heads-up!

:r

> On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:34 PM, ricardo lafuente<bollecs at sollec.org>  wrote:
>> Hello lists,
>> [apologies in advance for cross-posting]
>>
>> I've been lurking in here and thought it would be appropriate to let you
>> know what's been going on in the Portuguese open data front. I noticed that
>> Portugal is usually one of the very few EU countries missing from most open
>> data initiatives.
>>
>> Around September last year, a group was formed in the city of Porto -- named
>> Transparency Hackday Porto -- to break with the apparent non-existence of
>> any open data efforts in this country*. We hosted several hackdays in a
>> hackerspace, including one two-day hackathon (joining the global
>> transparency hackathon initiative), where we focused on parsing and
>> normalising data on the Portuguese Parliament.
>>
>> One project that began on that hackathon and is now in Beta is
>> http://demo.cratica.org, a frontend to access this data. There, we focus on
>> MP info and Parliament transcripts, providing a simple and straightforward
>> interface to allow anyone to go through it. We got wonderful feedback,
>> especially regarding the contrast with the official Parliament site, where
>> it's rather hard to reach Parliament transcripts (and they're not indexed by
>> search engines).
>>
>> Sadly, we're using HTTPS meaning that Google Translate can't get through
>> (we're discussing about changing that). However, here are a few links so
>> that you can see what's where:
>>
>> List of MPs:         https://demo.cratica.org/deputados/
>> MP info:             https://demo.cratica.org/deputados/4166/
>> Transcript calendar: https://demo.cratica.org/sessoes/2010/
>> Session transcript:  https://demo.cratica.org/sessoes/2010/6/17/
>>
>> There are still many glitches and details that we're working on, but you can
>> see the gist of it -- our main concern was to reduce complexity wherever
>> possible, and provide a straightforward design that makes it easy -- and
>> dare I say, interesting -- to read what's going on in Parliament.
>>
>> Oh, and the Demo.cratica code is free software (AGPL), and we'd be delighted
>> to help in porting this application to other countries. It's all done using
>> free software as well.
>>
>> There is also another great project by an accomplice of this group based in
>> Lisbon, this time around public state spending:
>> http://www.despesapublica.com/
>>
>> Right now, the Transparency group is off for holidays, but we're beginning
>> to cook other open data projects. If there's anyone on this list interested
>> or involved in open data projects, we'd love to hear from you!
>>
>> Cheers,
>> Ricardo Lafuente
>>
>> * There were a few, but most initiatives have been inactive for a while, and
>> we're not aware of active efforts as of today. Drop me a line if you know of
>> any!
>>
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