Our wonderful projects team at Civio, led by Eva Belmonte, has just released ‘Quién Cobra la Obra’ (or QCLO), the most ambitious attempt yet of making Spain’s public contracting data (seven years worth of it) fully searchable, transparent and apprehensible for any citizen.
QCLO offers both bottom up granularity and top down perspective. As some users published on Twitter and other social media, our small non-for-profit Civil Society Organisation has delivered (again, if I may add) a key information resource that should have been ideated and developed by our public administrations.
Suboptimal (and at times blatantly rigged) public procurement processes have been the root of many evils in the poor functioning of our democratic process in recent and not so recent times. All light shed and increased scrutiny applied over this very peculiar gigantic pile of wealth has to be celebrated news.
It is always hard to convey the meticulous hard work that goes into giving birth to a vast data-based resource, but in this case I must emphasise that the gap between anticipated workload (generously co-financed by 250 backers in Goteo) and actual man-hours applied has been quite abysmal.
I hope you try out the tool and find it as useful as we do. As with all ambitious projects, there is still a ton of work that we want to carry out to improve the product, so, other priorities permitting, you expect continued improvements incorporated over time (i.e. additional investigations and data).
Enjoy it, and maybe consider stepping up your support of a solid, independent grassroots initiative with an impressive five-year track record such as Civio!
