Hello HN,<p>I'm Florents, and I'm a data engineer based in Greece.<p>I've developed Diofanti.org , an application that tracks public spending and government procurement & decisions in Greece.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>As you might expect, it's become very popular among journalists and political (opposition) parties.<p>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<p>Additional material<p>* Blog post describing the thinking behind this [0] (in Greek, but can be translated easily):<p>* Demo video [1]<p>0: https://tselai.com/diofanti-2023.html
1: https://youtu.be/vdpHyxQqyWQ