[open-government] Open Government data in Portugal

Tue Aug 30 20:34:57 UTC 2011

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!