#somus

Title
Realtime political funding transparency tool

Client
Somus / Petri Kola
http://somus.vtt.fi

Description
A scandal about political campaing funding has been going on in Finland for over a year now. Several politicians have demanded more transparency to the sources of campaing funding. Some have even asked for a realtime system to collect all the information.

The SOMUS project funded by the Finnish Academy has during its first year developed an active dialogue with governmental organizations. The project for example organized Apps for Democracy Finland (http://www.mindtrek.org/2009/democracy_finland) and was successfull in lobbying an official list of free public data (http://suomi.fi/datakatalogi) to Finland.

As we have seen in the failure of the recent electronic voting pilot, closed source in the heart of democratic processes is not a good idea. Even an open source project with strong government or company ownership may not be enough. This project is about making a serious initiative from the citizen side about how funding transparency could be realized.

The service is a Twitter-like real-time application for "broadcasting" political campaign funding data.This means that various actors (political parties, campaigners and organizations) can view and report campaign funding and related data with a very simple UI that works via both web and mobile interfaces. This funding data service is a part of needed funding transparency but also serves the organisations themselves by allowing fast and efficient means for communicating internally.

The service itself needs no fancy tools for analysis of data, but rather simple (e.g. REST-based) API's that others can build on top of. Simple tools for e.g. producing traffic statistics, search, etc. needs to be developed. In line with the contermporary web service ideology of enabling others to build on top of the service, a simple developer guide and examples should be created.

Platform
The platform will be decided with the client

Special requirements
Participation in workshops for defining the service requirements with government and party representatives and SOMUS researchers is required.

There is a growing need for this kind of service also in other EU countries. It is therefore important that the working practicess are such that the groundwork for an international collaborative project is laid.

Immaterial rights
The project will be implemented under TKTL general sofware engineering student project licence. Individual initiative in sharing of information, code and knowledge is encouraged.

Extra information
The project is part of SOMUS project funded by the Academy of Finland http://owela.vtt.fi/blogs/somus/?page...

Interesting.

BTW. Language tag.

@ferrix: tuntuuko, että tossa vois olla järkeä? kehiteltiin toi idea @troppone:n kanssa todella pikaisessa palaverissa juuri ennen ehdotus-deadlinea.