Fundación Ciudadana Civio

This is our first investigation (but it won't be the last...) into public procurement. The initial launch was planned for the end of 2015 however due to the difficulty of obtaining and analyzing relevant data, this was postponed significantly. This project has seen us analyzing, for the first time, the contracts awarded for public works via the State’s Official Gazette (Boletín Oficial del Estado or BOE in Spanish) between 2009 and 2015. In the face of numerous difficulties and obstacles placed by governing bodies in accessing key data, this journalistic investigation has been able to reveal detailed information about 8,058 contracts, which total €38,828,000,000 and has identified which construction companies receive more contracts and from whom. We have been able to shed light on this critical area, a nucleus of corruption cases connected to urban planning and the illegal financing of political parties in Spain.

The project's website grants access to detailed information about 8,058 construction contracts published in the BOE and awarded to 2,489 construction groups. Following analysis of the data, we were able to reveal that 7 out of every 10 euros in contracts for public works awarded from 2009 onwards vía the BOE went into the coffers of just 10 large construction companies. We also presented a snapshot of public works in Spain along with a photo gallery of the so-called “superobras” or large-scale projects, and their current status.

The project is also accompanied by a set of training materials, the result of everything we've learnt throughout our dissection of Spanish public procurement. From now onward, we are following new lines of investigation and advocacy, which will be carried out throughout 2017 and beyond. Shortly after publishing this report, we learned that the reform of the Public Sector Contracts Act (LCSP in Spanish) was to be urgently drawn up, without passing through the Congress Plenary. Since then, we have been meeting with the main parliamentary groups to request amendments of some very specific aspects of this law, and we plan to keep up the pressure. Any changes we achieve in improving transparency and promoting independent control in this area will have a direct impact on the general public. The full report including our proposals, is available here.

¿Quién cobra la obra? was mentioned 24 times in the media over the last two months of 2016. 12,100 unique users consulted our contracts database and read the reports. We also presented the methodologies we used and the difficulties we faced at the Transparency Camp 2016, in Amsterdam. In 2017 we will present new research on public procurement and we will continue to push for improvements to Spanish legislation, bringing it into line with European standards at a minimum.

This is a free and open source tool for the creation of interactive visualizations of networks and nodes, allowing you to tell stories with them. It also facilities the analysis of networks, and requires no technical knowledge whatsoever. If you're interested in journalistic innovation, the visualization of data or tools to communicate complex information in a simple way, Onodo is made for you. A Civio project in collaboration with Eurecat, and funded by the social innovation program CHEST with the support of the 7th Framework Program of the European Commission. The design of its user interface is thanks to La Personnalité,and the visual identity, look and feel of the project were created by The Woork Co.

Development of this tool began in March 2015. An alpha version was made available to a small number of users in May 2016 and, at the end of that month, we carried out an initial test run with potential users during the Democracy Lab, a social innovation and activism event organized by D-Cent. Onodo was finally made fully available for public use in July 2016.

Since then, over 2,000 users actively use Onodo including more than 20 media outlets (e.g. El País, Correctiv!, RTVE Lab, eldiario.es or Cinco Días), social, academic and private organizations. In 2016, over 150,000 unique visitors used the tool or checked the visualizations. Onodo has been used to map Brazilian and Ecuadorian political candidates, entities implicated in corruption scandals, to visually explain the decision making processes of the European Union, highlight influences in literary and cultural studies, demonstrate the ownership of Mexican media outlets, the board of directors of the IBEX 35, examples of ‘revolving doors’ in Spain and even to map characters from TV series.

In 2017 we will introduce updates to the tool, including a 'storytelling' mode.

This is a Europe-wide project to improve transparency in public expenditure and access to budgetary data. Its purpose is to provide journalists, civil society organizations, NGOs , citizens and public entities with the tools, data and stories they need to promote and improve fiscal transparency. It is funded through a grant from the European Commission under the H2020 framework, where Civio participates together with Open Knowledge Internacional, Journalism++, Open Knowledge Greece, Bonn University, Fraunhofer IAIS, Open Knowledge Germany, Transparency International and Vysoka Skola Ekonomicka of Prague.

Our role in OpenBudgets is to develop an open source platform that allows public entities to carry out participatory budget queries and to facilitate their use in a number of pilot projects with local and regional entities. For the development of this prototype, in 2016 we have collaborated with several cities that have carried out participatory budgets (Mexico DF, Chicago, Paris, Madrid and Torrelodones), we consulted numerous experts and we conducted surveys with potential users. The results of our preliminary research are available to the public. The OpenBudgets consortium held meetings in Prague, Thessaloniki and Brussels, the latter being sponsored by the European Commission to evaluate the development of the project, both internally and through independent assessors.

Civio also held a workshop for journalists at the Madrid Press Association (APM) on how to understand the budgets of public bodies, how to find stories within these and, as a case study, how Spanish political parties are funded by public sources.

In November we launched the first prototype of our participatory budgeting tool, which will be one of the components of the OpenBudgets, platform, alongside other fiscal transparency tools and training materials. Since then we have been in discussions with 3 Spanish governing bodies to put these pilot experiments into practice, which will happen in 2017.

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During 2016, the provision of transparency services to local authorities - based on Where do my taxes go?, an open source tool that we created for Aragón Open Data - has been non-stop. So much so that it is far and away the most utilised platform in Spain for local and regional authorities to efficiently communicate their budget management to citizens.

Over the course of 2016, we have assisted dozens of local and regional authorities, in establishing and implementing the platform, and initiated the project with a further 10, to be continued throughout 2017. This is a significant increase on the 2015 figures in terms of implementation. We have helped implement the project in two autonomous communities (the Region of Murcia and the Balearic Islands) and in municipalities such as Barcelona, Santiago de Compostela, Castellón, Pinto (Madrid), La Vall D'Uixo (Castellón), Polinyà (Barcelona) or Arona (Santa Cruz de Tenerife). Further, the foundations were laid for several other examples of Where do my taxes go? which have been launched in 2017, such as Madrid, Canary Islands and A Coruña, among others. And in many of these cases, we guided and helped the government teams to present these initiatives to the public. We also presented the public sector's progressive implementation of Where do my taxes go? at the International Open Data Conference in Madrid, to an international audience.

The naming of Where do my taxes go? – Pinto as Good Practice of innovation, transparency and innovation for other entities of the public sector by the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP) was an important milestone last year. The project for Pinto was the first one we carried out with the updated Where do my taxes go? software.

Find all of the projects undertaken to date here:

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• More than 816,000 unique users browsed our projects in 2016, to learn more about public administration and take a more active role in society, accounting for a 25% increase over 2015. More and more citizens, organizations, entities, social movements and public officials from all sectors are joining the public debate that we continue to promote, based on evidence and the free access to data.

• We have participated in and influenced regional, local and sectoral processes of adaptation to transparency. As a result of our recommendations, the regulatory recognition of public access to information is being expanded and strengthened through best practice, to the benefit of thousands of organizations and individuals. Our recommendations for municipal transparency have been taken on board publicly by various groups, some with governmental responsibilities.

• By the end of 2016, 14.7 million citizens (compared to 5.5 million in 2015) were able to verify which policies every single euro of their taxes is spent on, thanks to our efforts to make local authorities’ management of public budgets more understandable, via Where do my taxes go? Our first such collaboration, with the Government of Aragón, is one of the cases highlighted in the report Making budgets attractive: best practices from governments’ financial transparency portals. Through OpenBudgets, we have taken a logical step towards helping public bodies to not only make their budgets transparent but also participatory. The results of this project will be seen in 2017.

• At the end of 2016, the government launched the 'express reform' (and urgent reform that doesn't need to be approved by Congress) of the Law on Public Procurement, a key move to put an end to corruption. And when they did so, thanks to everything we'd learnt from ¿Quién cobra la obra?, we were prepared. Thanks to our recommendations and meetings with the main parliamentary groups, our proposals were practically adopted in full in the amendments of different parties, which will be voted on and incorporated into the law in 2017.

• Now more than ever there is discussion in our public institutions about how to publish the budgetary execution in the most detailed way possible, how to make the activities of pressure groups (lobbies) more transparent, as they start to come under regulation, how to publish the work and meetings schedules of senior officials, as well as the entire "legislative footprint" (the journey laws take and how they change at each step), of the absence of transparency in the public procurement of medicines and vaccines, and of the necessity to reform the Law on Pardons, amongst others. Our contribution to this discussion throughout 2016 was invaluable. When we launched Quién manda in 2013, there was little talk about the importance of being able to learn about the work and meetings schedules of senior officials. Some, even from within the field of transparency advocacy, questioned these demands. Today, it's in the spotlight. Our perseverance in requesting this information from the Executive and the Legislature since 2013 is valued and was taken on by the Transparency Council in a recent recommendation. Several regional and local regulations, along with some of the main electoral programs at the last general elections, have also taken our proposals on board.

• The Board of Congress approved the adoption of measures to publish visually and in detail the House's budgetary information with the aim of providing citizens with the useful knowledge of how allocated money is spent. Following our recommendations, such measures were requested by the spokespeople of the party Unidos Podemos-En Comú Podem-En Marea to the Committee on Budgets.

• The civic aims of our initiatives are fulfilled when we are able to release data to the public, and effect social change with these.The best example is, for another year running, The Pardonometer.After four years monitoring the granting of pardons, data revealed that the Government is now using this privilege with more caution. Social pressure is effective and, as detailed within this report, Civio's work has played an important part in this. The Pardonometer has been used in classes by the University of Barcelona, the Catholic University of Murcia and the European University of the Atlantic. On the other hand, our data on the price of hepatitis C drugs served as the basis for this IS Global report: Hepatitis C: The New Battleground for Access to Essential Medicines. Likewise, data revealed by Medicamentalia allowed the Ukrainian agency Interfax to denounce the difficulty Ukrainians face in purchasing essential medicines not so much due to their high prices as the low averages incomes in the country.

• In 2015 we denounced that the Senate was applying instructions to its website’s search engines (the robots.txt file) to block certain searchers' access to senator's files, and to various parliamentary initiatives. This instruction was used, for example, to ensure that via search engines such as Google, it wasn't possible to find out which public representatives have links to private companies, as declared in their personal files. In 2016, following publication of this information, the Senate stopped blocking the indexing of this data.

• Our greatest victory, however, has been to close 2016 yet again with a positive balance, a team which is growing stronger, the motivation to face new, larger challenges in 2017, and the confidence to commit to our donors and followers, ensuring we live up to their expectations.

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