Poderopedia launches tool to open government contracts in Chile

[Miguel Paz]

We have a new web application for journalists, citizens, researchers and entrepreneurs interested in doing business with the Chilean government or checking with whom and how does the Chilean government conducts it`s business.

It's called www.comprastransparentes.cl and is a tool for browsing, searching and viewing the purchases made via tender by the Chilean government, allowing people to do advanced searches and queries that can not be done in the Government website MercadoPublico.cl and it`s database.

Compras Transparentes extracts all the information from MercadoPublico, via it`s API and builds on top of it. It gives you the ability to search for all the contracts of a company, the amount, the top ten contracts of a company, the top 10 contracts by Government organization and so on.

Believe us that has not been easy. Despite the siren songs of the world of "open data", the truth is that the data system of MercadoPublico.cl is still quite rough, and this initiative evidence such situations.

This project was developed by Zoohash (a chilean dev company) and Poderopedia, with the support of Hackslabs, a journalism accelerator fund supported by ICFJ, Hivos and Avina.

It`s open source :)

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Miguel Paz @miguelpaz 

Nieman-Berkman Fellow 2014-2015

Poderomedia.org @poderomedia - Poderopedia.org @poderopedia
PoderomediaAcademy #PAcademy - Manual Periodismo de Datos @periodismodata
Hacks/Hackers Chile @hackshackersSCL