The following guest post is by Florencia Coelho, from Argentinian daily La Nacion.
In Argentina, where a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has yet to be signed, LA NACION and three transparency NGOs – Poder Ciudadano, ACIJ (Asociación Civil por la Igualdad y la Justicia) and Fundación Directorio Legislativo joined efforts to produce the first site to open information on the assets of public servants, making their asset declarations available online.
The first stage of the web site contains more than 600 asset declarations from public servants from each of the three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial. Priority was given to data on key positions within each branch as well as data on candidates in the upcoming October 2013 legislative elections.
Each NGO specialized in monitoring transparency and accountability of certain branches, presenting the necessary public information requests and processing the data received.
The information requested was received in print copies; therefore, in addition to entering the data, the teams also scanned the original requests, erasing any sensitive personal information before uploading them to DocumentCloud where they are linked to each asset declaration on the web site.
Teams collaborated with more than 30 volunteers who manually entered the data and cross checked every unit of content in a marathon six-day “check-a-thon”. Throughout the project cycle, the teams worked online using collaborative tools like Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets and Trello.
The database and the web site were designed and developed by LA NACION data and multimedia teams from Lanacion.com. Our Knight Mozilla Opennews fellow collaborated in optimizing the application and search tools. This news application, now in beta, will open data in machine readable formats for everyone to reuse.
The Open Asset Declarations website is being launched in a particular political context. A new law was recently passed which omits asset information on public officials´ spouses and children, thereby reducing the content previously available. Family asset information is vital to depict an accurate picture of the public officials´ wealth and key to any investigation on illicit enrichment.
A “Check-a-thon” last week, comparing paper originals of statements with spreadsheet versions*
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