Crossing the Bridge — Lessons from Panama
Welcome to the third and final part of our interview with Nueva Nación. In the last two sections, amongst other things, we spoke about the challenges of data journalism in a country like Panama, the frustrations of poorly-formatted data, and the threats that those pushing for transparency face. In the final section, we talk to Alfonso and Ana about their favourite success stories, the tools they use in their data journalism, and they impart solid wisdom to budding open data advocates taking their first steps into the world of transparency.
Harsha: What tools do you use to organise or visualise data?
Alfonso: The core of our project is done through a system called CKAN. That’s the main organisational tool. CKAN takes care of organising things and giving each document an individual name and basically, it’s just our library now, so to speak. A place to put all of our data. El Tabulario is our new project. The name comes from the latin word Tabulario, which was a building where the Romans put the Tabulas — the rolls and registries of the census and financial documents of the city — their most important documents. It was a building built to house documents and to preserve them from humidity and fires. Our idea is to build a robust house storage system that can withstand anything, no matter what they have in the outside world. We have a system called CyberDuck which is our mass uploader. We list out all the files we’ve organised and CyberDuck organises and renames them and puts them in the Tabulario. For the distribution system, we use Mailchimp. It gives you data on your users and how best to target them and what they’re liking and not liking and just for the raw data analysis. We have various software programs: Tabula…
Ana: OpenRefine…
Alfonso: I’m using OpenRefine right now because at the end of… You don’t know this Annie. At the end of the week, there’s a list of approvals that the controller’s office had approved and I’ll see it through Tabula and clean it up through Open Refine to see what company has been getting most approvals. One thing is: which company is getting the most contracts and which company is getting the most approvals and why? These are questions you can answer with these tools.
Ana: Aside from just having datasets on datasets, one of my passion projects within this project is a citizen’s page. It’d give explainers — i.e. what is the legislative branch, and then have data on that. So giving information, which might include that the legislative branch passes x amount of laws a year and so on. This is data that doesn’t fit into a .csv as such, but it gives some information on the government so that your ordinary citizen can have a better understanding of how things work. That’s something I’ve been working on. If anything, you can see that between the two of us. We try to figure it out and do it day by day. But the good thing is that we can both depend on each other and there’s a lot of trust in this partnership.
Harsha: What is a story you’ve done that has given you satisfaction and a story that wouldn’t have been possible without data?
Alfonso: For me, because I’m an economist geek — one of the topics I love covering is the national debt, because the national debt must always be paid through tax. That’s the fundamental economic concept behind debt. But the problem is that our citizens are not quite aware of the causal relationship. They don’t understand that high debt necessarily and not optionally means high taxes eventually. Obviously higher taxes combined with a corrupt government is the perfect recipe for disaster. Basically we put out a series on the national debt, because our past government was of the mindset that it is possible to grow the country through debt. And I mean it’s true if you do that in an organised, methodical and almost obsessive and compulsive manner it is possible to use future cash for present investments in a way that you will match in a definite way: future demand with future supply. It is possible, but our previous administration was so reckless with its management of the public treasury, that they spent billions of dollars on projects that were never completed and which were enormously important for the development of the nation. For example, we increased our debt holdings by a hundred percent. The past administration doubled the national debt and one of the projects they promised was called Cold Chain, a system of warehouses distributed all around the country with specially bought trucks that move the food across so you can sell food at a low cost. It’s an idea that made sense. And we got into debt for it because it was never built. Half of it was built and who cares, because it’s not put into operation. Here we are, in a billion dollars debt for nothing, paying interest on getting nothing. To me, that’s the definition of national idiocy. For me, it’s very satisfying to publish this death series and to slowly but surely increase people’s understanding of the fact that by paying two or three or five percent on capital or no returns that you’re pretty much living in a bad economic state.
It’s a complex issue. It’s not simple to explain, because one thing is understanding, the other thing is internalising. And it just has to be constant. And it can’t be condescending. I know my readers are smart, they just haven’t taken the time to read on this issue in particular. But it’s a very interesting path, this ‘I understand that you’re smart but you don’t understand me, and this is important and you’re not paying attention’. Somewhere in middle is being adequately patient.
Harsha: What’s your favourite story Annie?
Ana: My favourite story is something Alfonso wrote. In Panama, we have a carnival every year and in the carnival they bring in these huge tankers and use water to spray everyone because Panama is very hot. The tradition is a long story. When it was written, the carnival was taking place in a period of very low rain. There was a heavy drought, people were up in arms as to whether or not the water should be used — whether it was right to use it or not. We found data on how many water leaks in pipes that the government needs to tend to. It turned out that the water that gets wasted through those leaks was exorbitant, especially compared to the water that would have been used for the carnival.
Alfonso: By a factor of a thousand.
Ana: Exactly. By studying that contrast and by saying ‘we’re so angry with the water wasted for the carnival, but the real issue is this wastage’. This was a unique approach to a conversation on this, and it dove into what the actual structural problem was and where the citizens should pay attention to and what the government should do. Should we put a bandaid on this by not using water in the carnival or do we talk about water being wasted every single day, because of the pipes the government isn’t taking care of. That was one of our first data stories and Alfonso did a good job on that.
Harsha: What advice do you have for people trying to do something similar to the work you do?
Ana: So much advice! I don’t even know where to begin. But i think the first thing would be to know your scope. Have a clear idea of how far you’re willing to go with this and be aware that this is going to be an enormous undertaking. Also to make sure when asking for a dataset you then make that dataset available for all. It’s always going to be a big undertaking when you deal with a force that wants to do the opposite. In a lot of cases, unfortunately in the global south, there’s a trend in governments to not necessarily be as open as they should be. I’m not saying everyone, but that’s the general trend. Have a good idea of what you’re up against and have a good idea of your networks and what your scope is — what it is you really want to do. Really understand what you’re trying to accomplish using this data. Me and Alfonso were clear that we’re not interested in opening data for the sake of it. You can have a .csv up on your computer and it can sit there, but if those numbers were actionable and those numbers can have real world results, that’s a lot of work for doing something for the sake of it.
Make sure that whoever you’re working with is in tune with your goals. Journalism as a whole is a tough business. People don’t really like journalists. That’s why so many of us are killed. Don’t make life difficult for yourself, make sure you work with a team that holds the values of openness, democracy and transparency close to their heart. And it’s tough — you want to scream, you want to break things, you want to quit. It’s really worth it in the end. So keep pushing through the adversity.
Alfonso: I will give a little practical advice. If you’re starting a new journalism outlet, my main advice is that the trend is that TV has become the radio and social media has become the TV. One of the main reasons that established journals are having trouble getting readers is because they were built for a world of TVs and computer screens. Yet right now people are getting information from their mobile devices. The main concern of journals should be mobile devices and how to present data there. If someone is opening a journal and opening a print, I would laugh. You cannot be printing in the 21st century. That makes no sense. Maybe some boutique papers could pull that off. It seems that that industry is dying.
If you’re working on open data, keep a very precise and accurate ledger of all the documents you have and all the information that is contained in them. It happened to us. First we collected all the data and then we started going through it and realising what was in there and organising it. I would like to go back in the past and kick myself in the ass. Every time we looked at the data, I should have put it to a ledger describing what’s in it, so that now I don’t have to sit through these enormous number of documents to see what’s in there. Even if you have one piece of data, make sure you organise it well, so when you start getting new data, you know where things go and how they can fit together. That’s practical advice.
Harsha: Thank you so much Ana and Alfonso for talking to me about this. More power to you.
For more on Ana and Alfonso, and Nueva Nación, see their website here, or follow them on Twitter @agMendezPty & @AlfonsoAGP.
Open & Shut is a project from the Small Media team. Small Media is an organisation working to support freedom of information in closed societies, and developed the Iran Open Data portal.
Cover image by skp, story edited by Tom Ormson.
