Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
1–10 of 19 posts
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#2Neat. To get started, try entering "UJP" in the top box, and hitting the button. Then translate that field, or let Chrome keep doing it for you (that's a handy feature). You can dive into companies and even individual transactions, though I haven't seen any itemized receipts yet :)
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#3I'll have to go and ask my Slovenian co-worker about this tomorrow. Sounds interesting.
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#4With all the doom and gloom of the economy, naysaying, sky-is-falling, world-is-ending discussion (much of it warranted), it's nice to see that we're still progressing - as a global society- towards freedom and transparency.
Bonus points for this progression being driven by technology.
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#5I'll have to go and ask my Slovenian co-worker about this tomorrow. Sounds interesting.
Ask him. He'll probably know about it. It's the biggest news in Slovenia atm.
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#6Good stuff, but only as strong as its weakest link - what's reported to the government, and corruption can creep in at many levels. But this is a great step.
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#7Much needed in the U.S.
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#8I gush about Slovenia all the time. During my 3 years living in Europe, it was probably my favorite place to travel to . . . absolutely gorgeous country and great people . . . also really darn innovative, smart and open (as illustrated by this project).
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#9One project I always wanted to do is create a publicly searchable database which mined connections between public officials and their financial interests.
It would kind of be like a Facebook which the users had no control over their profiles. All known associates of an individual would be linked together in a giant social network. An algorithm would flag conflicts of interest. This should make it easy to see problems with connections a step away from a public official rather than just high profile associates or close family members.
Automated alerts would trigger when individuals within a public official's group are arrested, convicted of a crime, etc. Much like Google's algorithm identifies "bad neighborhoods" of web site links, you could instantly see if a particular public official was surrounded by questionable or explicitly corrupt characters.
Most importantly this could be used to generate an easy to understand corruption score, making it simple for the public at large to understand how corrupt the individual is. Once a particular politician or official scored past a certain point they may become an outcast, finding potential campaign fundraisers and advocates avoiding them.
The migration of eyeballs away from television and old media is going to have a profound impact on the democratic political space. Imagine if a political candidates advertisements delivered via Google also contained a corruption score next to them, much like how e-commerce stores on Adwords display user ratings.
Re: Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor
#10One project I always wanted to do is create a publicly searchable database which mined connections between public officials and their financial interests. It would kind of be like a Facebook which the users had no control over their profiles. All known associates of an individual would be linked together in a giant social network. An algorithm would flag conflicts of interest. This should make it easy to see problems…
If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at some of the projects put together by the Sunlight Foundation (http://sunlightfoundation.com/projects/).
In addition, their developer section (http://sunlightlabs.com/) is full of APIs and datasets for dealing with government transparency data.