Querido Diário': how an open source project is freeing official municipal records
Channel: csvconf
Date: 31/05/2023

Presented by: Fernanda Campagnucci

Full title: Querido Diário': how an open source project is freeing official municipal records for 45 million people in Brasil (and counting!)

There are 5,570 cities and 26 states with the autonomy to design and implement policies in Brazil. Since there is no centralized place to look for the decision-making acts of these entities, the only reliable source of information is the official gazettes (or records), published in a closed and unstructured way in PDF files. The manual work of analyzing this mass of information is virtually impossible. To fill this data void, ​​we created an infrastructure capable of collecting, processing, and openly making this information available. The "Querido Diario" ("Dear Diary" – a witty wordplay in reference to the official gazettes in Portuguese) MVP was launched more than a year ago and has been scaled and improved since then. With the help of a vibrant community, it has collected the entire time series of official diaries, creating a repository of more than 144,000 files, and started collecting them daily.