Show HN: Diofanti.org Tracking government decisions in Greece
diofanti.org
I'm Florents, and I'm a data engineer based in Greece.
I've developed Diofanti.org , an application that tracks public spending and government procurement & decisions in Greece.
Here's the big picture: There's diavgeia.gov.gr (diavgeia kinda translates to "transparency") where all Greek state organizations (think ministries, authorities, municipalities, regions) should publish their executive decisions. There are roughly 20K decisions published daily (Greece has a population of 11M). If a decision is not openly published, it cannot be executed legally. So it is a legal prerequisite. A decision could be a payment from a municipality or ministry to a vendor, a procurement of software licenses, or even a parking permit to a disabled citizen.
Now, decisions are typically published as PDF documents (with all the legal jargon and details), which makes the law happy but doesn't say much to the average citizen; There's also an API, though, and diofanti taps on that to fetch and analyze those decisions and make them easy to visualize and analyze.
So the use cases diofanti supports are like the following: • How much did my hometown pay during the last week? Which vendors are the most frequent receivers? • What are the decisions that my local town makes and that I should know about? • For non-financial decisions, one could go back in time and assess a state's stance on a particular issue. For example, a few years back, diofanti was used to uncover anti-abortion campaigns financed by some state organizations.
As you might expect, it's become very popular among journalists and political (opposition) parties.
The reason I'm publishing this on HN is to ask the following: 1. Do you have any pointers to similar efforts in other countries? 2. Any ideas to make this better ? 3. Forward this to anyone / any organization that you think would like to support financially
Additional material
* Blog post describing the thinking behind this [0] (in Greek, but can be translated easily):
* Demo video [1]
0: https://tselai.com/diofanti-2023.html 1: https://youtu.be/vdpHyxQqyWQ