What makes a cannon between the roles of the Basque Government?
I live in Cantabria, but transparency has no limits. Hekimen, the Basque media association, invited me to talk about a previous project on institutional transparency. And then, speaking with you, with the media and with journalists, the idea emerges of addressing the issue of distribution of institutional advertising. It became a challenge for me, linked to social responsibility, because I want to make these opacity of organizations visible.

This matter is regulated in the CAPV by Law 6/2010 on advertising and institutional communication. How do they comply with this law? The
Basque Government sends the report of the previous year to Parliament annually and it is published by Parliament. The truth is that some memories are not on your website and I have had to get them through other ways, even if it's public information.

This 2010 law is drafted very openly and imprecisely. Basically the papers are scanned, a PDF of over 150 pages is created and sent by e-mail to Members. It's the least they can do.

The law only requires transparency and the government to publish data. They do disseminate data, but with a small mouth. Being transparent is something else.

Is it transparency to broadcast a PDF a year?The PDFs published
by the government are not based on a database, they have quite a few mistakes and are made by hand. In fact, the publication of this type of data in 2023 in the PDF macur [“twisted” in Spanish] is very subtle. We've created this tool to shed light on these very complex data. Moreover, it seems to me that the Basque Government itself does not have the data as provided by our tool. No, at least, structured analytically.

I would like to understand our tool as a proposal for improvement. It's for politicians to put the stacks, the media as well, and make better use of this data. This work has nothing to do with one political colour or another. On the web, I don't think about the distribution of money, that's not for me.

Publishing memoirs on the use of millions of public euros with such abrupt mistakes seems not to be very serious.
"Data quality" is quite low. Sometimes they are poorly made, without much love and interest. For example, when I find an advertising campaign assigned to the NDA, I don't have to know what those acronyms mean. After reading more and asking, she realizes they are talking about Álava News. Or, in the same sense, sometimes they use The 40, other Principal, another forty, or just 40. In the case of Hamaika Telebista, I also do not know how many forms they have written: 11TV, 11 TV, Amaia, 11 TV... There are many and many such defects.

But there are also more abrupt mistakes. Apparently, memories are written first in Spanish and then translated into Basque. And for reasons I don't understand, they search for words and replace them directly with their Basque words. So when you see the letter and you get "y". And so I found a media outlet called Etaoutube, rather than Youtube. Or the Entertainers medium has been put into Entremaetaores.

These are mistakes made by human beings, but they show a poor quality of the source data, and that the internal procedures for collecting and processing all these data in the Basque Government are somewhat bitter.

It looks like nobody reads those memories.
Yes, that is the saddest thing. Otherwise, we would have found many errors of this kind. How many reports and memories will governments produce and distribute, because that is what the law says, and then nobody looks at it?

Coincidence, causality, inertia...?I have
tried to solve part of the problem, creating a public, free and open source instrument to structure and analyze that information. As you are doing, and I also believe you are the first and only ones, you can use the tool to ask these kinds of questions, even to answer. Of course, what matters is the distribution of public money, but I leave that analysis to society.

In spring we will see if our work has influenced us. The law requires the Basque Government to publish a new report with 2023 data. There are only two options. One, publishing as before, rejecting all contributions made. I believe that this would be a pride to ignore the proposals for improvement. And two, let the government change its position and present the memory in a fully open format.

Are there standard models or is it something to be right?
No, everything is invented. Any open and structured format serves to publish public information. And in case of doubt, go to the on-call computer. It's not hard. I wouldn't get into technicalities, JSON format or a relational structured database ... It is not a technical matter, but a political will.

Transparency does not seem to be among the priorities of public bodies.
This subject is full of sucks and smokers. I've been participating for 15 years in conferences, presentations, symposia, etc. to explain the importance of open data and transparency. I've been approached by CEOs, politicians, entrepreneurs -- and everybody says yes. I’m sick of seeing “national strategies”, “letters of rights”, powerpoint and abstract appeals, but very little progress has been made in recent years. He speaks yes, but no. It is hypocrisy of political language and deafness with which most of us demand: public data must be open, transparent and accessible.

Finally, it establishes good practice.
We cannot always complain, we must applaud what is right.

Of course, the United Kingdom Government is one of the international benchmarks, its Canadian counterpart is also doing very well, but if we look at it as close as possible, for example, I very much like the work of transparency in Aragon and, above all, that of e-government. There they have a team specialised in improving the interfaces that citizens use when we act with the administration. They have done very good things.

In general, public administrations do not publish more data, clearly out of fear. You don't tell them in public, but you notice them in private. They fear the law, they fear scandals, they fear going too far, they fear being the first to publish. So we need to help those people not be afraid. Because it is more scandalous not to publish anything but to publish public data and show some scandal.