The candidates for president in Argentina are already immersed in the complex electoral race with focus on arriving to the Casa Rosada by the end of 2015. A good exercise for voters is to explore as a wayback machine and review the political past of each candidate, and get more background beyond their promises or public statements.
LA NACION launched by the end of 2014 “The Political Maze 2015”, an interactive tool for visualizing the political path made by the major candidates and crosses between them in different political parties during previous elections. Seguir leyendo →
LA NACION continued in 2014-2015 with its effort to use data as new raw material for journalism and to contribute to open data in Argentina while reporting or as a way to activate demand of more public information, in a country still without a FOI Law.
After another year of training and consistency in the data project of LA NACION, opportunities of new projects appeared. We continued reporting from datasets built from scratch and then transformed, opened and shared by our team in print, online and social media.
VozData is a collaborative tool to convert public documents trapped in closed formats into a structured database. Information proccessed is suitable for general audience understanding and for journalists to analyse and report. The application was inspired by The Guardian “MP´s Expenses” and Propublica´s “Free the files”.
VozData´s first initiative was Senate Expenses (Argentina), divided in 3 different periods. Over the course of a couple of months, LA NACION digitized more than 10000 PDF. Team work was fulfilled by 1000 volunteers. Data obtained was published online in real time in the form of rankings of recipients and type of expense. The platform also includes ranking of users that review and classify documents.
At the end of each data project, LA NACION´s data team reviewed representative samples and published the dataset in open data formats for download (CSV, XLS, etc). The Code driving Vozdata was open sourced by OpenNews Fellows and named Crowdata.
CIVIC OPEN COLLABORATION: Partnering with NGO’s and Universities, and general audience!
Students of Universidad Torcuato di Tella – Masters in Journalism during a civic marathon al LA NACION
During May 2014 we started a campaign to try to finish “the stack of PDFs” of the first set of Senate Expenses during #SemanadeMayo that is a patriotic week and culminates May 25th. This historical day of 1810 is well known with a phrase “El Pueblo Quiere Saber” “People wants to know”. So we decided to organize what we named “Civic Marathons” for opening data using Vozdata.
We made banners for social media and got shared via LA NACION & LNdata twitter and Facebook accounts. Seguir leyendo →
To follow the behavior of legislators in Congress at Argentina is not a simple task, so an interdisciplinary team of journalists, designers and developers at LA NACION, created a news app called Congresoscopio that allows all citizens to explore in detail the parliamentary performance of individual MPs.
Until now, this information was inaccessible or published in no particular order and/or closed formats, so, from now on, citizens may use this application as a new source to learn more about the behaviour of those that represent us.
For topical reporting on Congress, we have an aggregated tag to monitor parlamentary action and when each law is passed (often during the night), we report about the particularities regarding the new legislation and make a process to convert a PDF with each vote to an interactive data visualisation that will be embeded in the reporting. An example of how this work can be seen in this example of a law passed recently regarding trains in Argentina.
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1. “START” page
With an interactive graph that simulates a chamber with the current layout in Congress, you can browse position to position in order to access information from each of the MP’s.
The candidates for president in Argentina are already immersed in the complex electoral race with focus on arriving to the Casa Rosada by the end of 2015. A good exercise for voters is to explore as a wayback machine and review the political past of each candidate, and get more background beyond their promises or public statements.
