Making public procurement public.
Enabling Open Government through Open Data
THE PROJECT
We are true believers in the open data movement.
GastoPublico (Public Procurement) is our modest contribution: a citizen tool for visualizing the money spent by the Spanish administration in public procurements.
The site was our contribution to Desafio Abredatos 2010, a Spanish development rumble promoting the usage of available open data.
We built:
- Information Architecture
- Visual design
- Front-end development
- Back-end development
- Data processing and analysis
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THE CHALLENGE
The main challenge of GastoPublico was the time limitation: teams participating in AbreDatos rumble just had 48 hours to provide a working application!
Additionally we found out that accessing public information on government websites can be really hard. We found out some really cool ways to finally parse really complicated websites. Check the video for more! -
THE SOLUTION
The team started working on Saturday morning and wrapped up on Sunday at midnight. With 6 hours of sleep in turns we designed, programmed, parsed and had fun all weekend! Take a look at the video we took while parsing data.
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THE RESULTS
No... we didn’t win the AbreDatos rumble, but we had a really fun time!
We hope the result of this weekend of hard work will be the seed of something much more ambitious. We’ll be delivering a much more robust open government platform in the future together with our friends from Voota.
HIGHLIGHTS
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Geocoding of public contracts
Using multiple Geocoding techniques we managed to geocode the location of up to 50% of the public contracts. Always trying to get the data as "geospatially" close to the user as possible.
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Map clustering navigation
With more than 15,000 geocoded contracts we had to implement a K-means clustering algorithm.
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User participation
One of the main objectives of GastoPublico is to generate awareness and debate around public procurement. We tried to play nicely with existing social websites.