Xpand IT
Make data more accessible and consumable for citizens, to increase political participation and strengthen democracy.
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Municipal Transparency Portal promotes better municipal management through transparency, which leads to improvements.
The Municipal Transparency Portal was designed to promote and improve transparency, democracy and municipal management within Portugal. It allows citizens to explore more than 100 key performance indicators (KPIs) from 308 Portuguese districts.
Even though government agencies have collected data on local administration for some time, the data has not always been made available, in a consumable format, to the public. The Municipal Transparency Portal contains data gathered from various public databases. As the data was sometimes only accessible in its raw format, reading and comprehending the data was difficult for members of the public.
The organization desired to present the data in a way that is accessible to all citizens.
They needed a new platform that was innovative and would promote data transparency and data democracy for all citizens. Their ultimate goal was to improve municipal management.
Ever since the beginning of the project, Xpand IT, the Pentaho partner in Portugal who implemented the project, provided technical knowledge about the solution.
Hitachi Vantara’s big data integration and analytics solution gathers data from different public databases and publishes it in a simplified way. Additionally, the platform can determine measurable KPIs based on disparate data sets, while providing citizens with the appropriate level of access.
The organization decided to provide citizens with a full picture of the management of their local government, using simple and easy-to-understand filters or indicators. The financial management filters include those related to indebtedness, municipal revenue, and expenditure. The municipal services categories include the main public services with relevant information about municipalities (water treatment, waste treatment, education and housing). Lastly, the municipal electoral turnout category includes information about citizens taking part in local elections, and voting results.
Thanks to the platform based on Hitachi Vantara's Pentaho solutions, Municipal Transparency Portal is able to provide the citizens of Portugal with a full picture of the management of their local government in a simple and understandable way. The country has seen an improvement in public participation; this includes higher voter turnout during local elections. It is now possible to compare municipalities based on similar socioeconomic factors.
The Municipal Transparency Portal picked the Pentaho platform for a variety of reasons. They found it was the best modern, embeddable software platform, one that allowed them to properly visualize and analyze their data. The user interface was simple, intuitive and available on any device. Xpand IT, the Pentaho partner in Portugal who implemented the project, was very helpful in selecting the solution.
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The Municipal Transparency Portal was not a typical BI solution as it required the most complex requirements. Pentaho enabled us to make the Portal easy for any citizen to use while optimized for a large number of concurrent users.
– Ricardo Pires, Partner and Business Intelligence Lead, Xpand IT, Municipal Transparency Portal