Jaime Gómez-Obregón is an engineer and hacker dedicated to developing digital tools that give more transparency to public affairs. Because as he himself says, public data is not the same as published data. There is a big difference.
And to show a button: the transparency portal of the Government of Cantabria, from which it is impossible to download the public data of all contracts, and contractsdecantabria.es, the portal that this developer created to download everything. “In 70 seconds”, as I remembered a few days ago in a tweet in which he asked the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, that Spain release the commercial data.
“I just want to live in a truly modern region with a strong and awake civil society”
His project, a whole map of public procurement in Cantabria, allows explore more than 25,000 contracts of the Cantabrian administration and more than 4,500 bidders. A simple search box allows you to find types of contracts or companies with which the regional government has worked. Simple, practical, fast and accessible, transparency in its purest form.
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Beyond a single portal
“In Cantabria we have a recent Transparency Law that obliges the public powers to disseminate administrative information that is of interest to society. However, this is not usually carried out effectively”, explains Gómez-Obregón in the portal you created to overcome those barriers.
¿and why he did it? Not because of “sinister interests”, as he himself says ironically, or because of political issues, a desire to take center stage or a desire to annoy: but because it takes the transparency of the public very seriously.
The truth is much simpler: I just want to live in a truly modern region and with a strong and awake civil society.
So no; I do not participate in any political group, I am not interested in parties and I myself have financed all my projects in pursuit of transparency; with my own resources, time and effort.
I am also crazy about it, I can’t hide it, the paraphilia that I have developed since I was a child for mastering these wonderful machines called computers, and particularly for using them to automate the treatment of large volumes of information: filtering, structuring, transforming, relating and ultimately processing data to turn them into useful knowledge.
Is what some call big data and data mining.
This desire to show what is hidden behind not so transparent transparency portals has allowed us to discover flashy awards at least and that even his work arrived at the Parliament of Cantabria to a debate on an “anti-fraud and anti-corruption” proposition which was finally rejected by 28 votes to 5. But it does not stay in Cantabria, although there it has shown how productive it can be, for example, cross contract awards with electoral lists.
Another great milestone of his crusade for transparency, open data and the fight against corruption in politics and institutions, which he describes as an “endemic problem” in Spain, has been the ladonacion.es portal. A visual and interactive tool that reveals the recent scandals around the Spanish Royal Household, facilitating exploration from a chronological, geographical and documentary point of view, identifying the different actors involved, with a rigorous methodology.
Another great milestone in his crusade for transparency, open data and the fight against corruption in politics and institutions has been the portal that reveals the recent scandals around the Spanish Royal House.
Too has gutted the Official Gazette of the Mercantile Registry to go beyond single posts, discovering which entrepreneurs are the most common, where more companies are domiciled or born or which are the administrators disqualified by the courts, among other information. And this is just a small sample, in a recent interview on Magnet he himself details the challenges he has faced and what is coming.
Right now the engineer is working on an independent audit of public sector mobile applications; has already cataloged about 2,000
Because right now the engineer is immersed in an independent audit of public sector mobile apps. “I have cataloged almost 2,000 and already gathered more than 250,000 user comments. I am doing an analysis big data that I will soon share with my employers, “he explained. Because his dedication to his praiseworthy work is possible thanks, to a large extent, to the more than 500 patrons who support their work on Patreon and full dedication to the development of these tools, after having delegated the general management of the company he founded 16 years ago, ITEISA.
The work of Gomez-Obregon is the demonstration that technology at the service of society and the general interest is a very powerful weapon. His adventures, creations, discoveries and other vicissitudes of his daily life are recounted on his Twitter account, @JaimeObregon.