Project Title:DepensesPubliques.com makes public finances transparent
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:$760,000
Expected amount of time to complete project:2
Total cost of project including all sources of funding:$760,000
Describe your project:DepensesPubliques.com makes public finances transparent. Transparency means accessibility, of course. It also means understanding. Starting with municipalities, we’re going to mine data and add layers of automated and user-generated context that will add value to this financial data.
A clearer view of his/her city’s finances will give the taxpayer more elements to argue and make a more educated choice on Election Day.
The front-end will give the user not only the cost of an item on the public expenditures list. It will also provide examples of projects of equivalent value and the price other cities have paid for such items. The goal is to illustrate concepts such as opportunity costs and efficiency.
Far from indulging in populism, we’ll carry out serious journalism. We will provide context and explanations to each item, by crossing data, by asking users for details or by sending a journalist in the field.
The first step will be to unlock access to about 20 Go of accounting documents and put them in the open, on Google Docs or Document Cloud, for instance.
Not only will our efforts pressure public officials to become more transparent, it will also encourage our fellow journalists to demand more public information.
Second, we will build a semantic engine that will turn accounting charts into computer-readable data.
Third, we will provide a front-end to display the data. We will build a CMS where users will be able to enhance, and contribute to, the data sets. More importantly, we will build an API to allow local news media to use our data.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?Faced with an increasingly difficult advertising market, eroding readership and cronyistic local elites, the local press in France is having a hard time playing its role of Fourth Estate.
Some individuals have tried to enter the market. Their high production costs and their limited geographic target area keep them from making a real difference in the local media landscape.
In areas where local coverage has all but disappeared and where no content is available online, we will give taxpayers the means to check on their local administration’s deeds.
It will improve their understanding of local governance and give them a basis upon which to start a discussion and to strengthen their community ties around a debate on local finances.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)Very few projects combine databases and journalism. I believe Holovaty-like data-collection ventures successfully tackled the issue of processing massive amounts of data at the hyper-local scale. But how many people go to EveryBlock and find it useless? Too many.
We need to make the data interesting. DepensesPubliques.com will not be about crowdsourcing (although it will be used). It will not be about handling databases. Nor will it be about covering local town hall debates.
It will be about giving sense to the datasets. It will be about making the story interesting for the user. So far, to my knowledge, no web-based program is able to serve both data and meaning in a compelling way.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?A young journalist and entrepreneur, Nicolas Kayser-Bril’s been pioneering database journalism in France for the past 3 years and is probably one of the only developer-journalist in Paris. Most importantly, dedication to making information available to the public drives him to keep pushing projects that foster accountability among elected officials.
Jean-Marc Collavet will be the link with local city halls. He has been a local journalist, then editor-in-chief, in local outlets for the past 20 years. He knows all about local politics and public finance.
Jeff Mignon, who is sponsoring the project from New York and will advise on business development, has extensive experience of web ventures. He was part of the team that created what is maybe the most successful single-purpose news website: QuelCandidat.com (Which Candidate). They created a quiz that gave voting suggestions to the user based on his/her preferences. They garnered over 2 million UU in the month leading to the 2007 presidential election.
Such dedication to keeping the focus on the user is the difference that will make DepensesPubliques.com successful.
Finally, the semantic technologies we’ll develop aim at making it easier for journalists to dig meaning out of a dataset. The difference with other semantic projects, lies in the limited area we’re tackling (public finance). The ontologies we’ll use will be small enough to be well-understood by the computer program (e.g. there are way less concepts in local public finance than in international affairs).
