What is basic your idea of your initiative and what are you trying to accomplish with it?
The main idea is to make public oversight easier in the domain of public procurements and other public/state spendings. That’s why the project name was chosen („Z našich daní“ means „From our taxes“). First thought came from the Fair-play Alliance, where people try to oversee public issues for a couple of years now. They’ve contacted us about this idea, with the concept of this project because in our main project, the Visual Business Register (vorsr.sk), we deal with algorithms to connect people and companies through information from business register. So the main functionality of this system is to connect all companies, where the searched-for person was or currently is involved in and then show in some charts and tables a summary of public procurements, which were won by this portfolio of companies. So all you need to do is type a person’s name and than just browse through all the information in our small dashboard.
How much time did it take to launch the project before it went live?
We used a bunch of code from the Visual Business Register (vorsr.sk) and data of public procurements prepared by the Fair-play Alliance, so the work was about putting it all together and not about creating a whole new thing. And that’s the reason why the launch time was quite short, around 2 months. I think that people are just starting to explore this project (it‘s been launched for just a few months so far), so we have no big traffic on the site, but when we show it to someone the reactions are always the same: „woow, the numbers looks huge in this company portfolio context...“.
Did and how the idea change since Day1?
As I said, project is alive just for few months now, so there were no many changes since Day 1. Recently, we’ve added a new table to the dashboard with the goal to show person’s relations to every included company, mainly the timeline of these relations.
What are your plans for near and further future?
Future plans are mainly about data cleansing and adding some summary information about the whole Slovak public business, like „biggest contractors“ and so on. Maybe we could cover also the other side of the procurements – transparency of the procurement process itself, but for doing that we need much more information.
What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running your project?
Main obstacle is probably bad information quality in Business Register, which we are dealing with in the Visual Business Register project. Another obstacle is the difficulty of getting other possibly relevant data from Slovak government organizations, but that’s another story :)
How do you promote your project?
We mainly inform about new features on our vorsr.sk facebook page (we have only one FB page, because these two projects are so closely related). In a few weeks the Fair-play Alliance is arranging a press conference at which this project will officially go public.
That touches both projects - but how do you want to increase information quality in Business Register?
The only way is to continuously improve our cleansing and pairing algorithms. This is a little bit fiddling work but it is necessary to get better results.
Do you have any community of simple users/citiznes around this initiative? And does media write about you?
I hope such a community will be formed in the future. For now, we are going to present it to the press people, which we hope will be the main user group of zNašichDaní.sk