Python, Government, and Contracts: providing a tool to investigate corruption

Froilán Irizarry Rivera

https://2019.northbaypython.org/schedule/presentation/13/

In the two years after Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico there has been a sharp increase in investigative journalism on the island. Most of these investigations have been around questionable contracts awarded by different government entities and officials in Puerto Rico. No-bid contracts like the ones award to White Fish and later to Cobra Acquisitions have generated national outrage. Lack of transparency, costly mismanagement, and abuse of power can be found throughout.

The Office of the Comptroller of Puerto Rico has built a tool that lets you search and download contract documents (after they’ve been redacted of sensitive information). While it serves its purpose of making this information available, the tool does not permit any mass data analysis or download. In less than a week we were able to release a very early version of our tool to improve this.

Our goal was to present a "better" way to search and use this data, create a sustainable project that could be easily used, while also keeping effort and cost to a minimum. For all these reasons we landed on using Python and Django. Django and the ecosystem around it presents an amazing opportunity to minimize effort and cost for a civic tech project while providing a robust way to manage the processes and data of a project like ContratosPR. Django's admin give use a central place to glance which contract documents need to be requested, OCR'ed, and provides the tools to execute the request process. All of this in combination with great docs and an amazing community made them a clear choice.

In the years after Hurricane Maria there has been a sharp increase in investigative journalism in Puerto Rico. Most of these investigations have been around questionable contracts awarded by different government entities and officials. We've used Python and Django to create a tool that consumes an unwieldy government site to make this data more accessible to journalist and citizens.

A Python conference north of the Golden Gate
North Bay Python is a single-track conference with a carefully curated set of talks representing the diverse Python community and their different areas of interest.

If a topic is less to your interest, or you've met some people you really want to sit down and chat with, we'll have plenty of areas away from the main theatre to catch up and chat.

Our goal is to keep prices as low as possible. That means we won't be catering lunch. Instead, you can look forward to extra-long lunch breaks you can use to explore all of the great food options around the venue.

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Sun Nov 3 17:00:00 2019 at Mystic Theatre

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