

Slovenia gets transparent by revealing all government spending via Supervizor - tomazstolfa
http://www.funkykaraoke.com/2011/08/transparency.html

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AJ007
One project I always wanted to do is create a publicly searchable database
which mined connections between public officials and their financial
interests.

It would kind of be like a Facebook which the users had no control over their
profiles. All known associates of an individual would be linked together in a
giant social network. An algorithm would flag conflicts of interest. This
should make it easy to see problems with connections a step away from a public
official rather than just high profile associates or close family members.

Automated alerts would trigger when individuals within a public official's
group are arrested, convicted of a crime, etc. Much like Google's algorithm
identifies "bad neighborhoods" of web site links, you could instantly see if a
particular public official was surrounded by questionable or explicitly
corrupt characters.

Most importantly this could be used to generate an easy to understand
corruption score, making it simple for the public at large to understand how
corrupt the individual is. Once a particular politician or official scored
past a certain point they may become an outcast, finding potential campaign
fundraisers and advocates avoiding them.

The migration of eyeballs away from television and old media is going to have
a profound impact on the democratic political space. Imagine if a political
candidates advertisements delivered via Google also contained a corruption
score next to them, much like how e-commerce stores on Adwords display user
ratings.

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edavis
If you haven't already, you might want to take a look at some of the projects
put together by the Sunlight Foundation
(<http://sunlightfoundation.com/projects/>).

In addition, their developer section (<http://sunlightlabs.com/>) is full of
APIs and datasets for dealing with government transparency data.

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ldd-
I gush about Slovenia all the time. During my 3 years living in Europe, it was
probably my favorite place to travel to . . . absolutely gorgeous country and
great people . . . also really darn innovative, smart and open (as illustrated
by this project).

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CWIZO
Wish that last part was really the case. If you want to succeed here you best
back your bags and move out to somewhere else. It's just the way it is here
communism is still deeply rooted in our society and successful people are
frowned upon by vast majority (envy) and you'll have no luck finding any
decent business ethics here.

~~~
CWIZO
Downvoter, why? I speak from personal experience living&working in Slovenia
...

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BerislavLopac
I upvoted you back sinc I don't like the meaningless downvoting nither. But I
must say that Slovenia, while still having a number of traits you have
described, is in no way worse than similar Central European countries like
Austria. If you really want to see a medieval mindset, just cross the border
to Croatia... :)

~~~
CWIZO
Yeah I'm not saying that it's all that bad, and I know you guys have it worst
but still ... it's no paradise :)

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tatsuke95
With all the doom and gloom of the economy, naysaying, sky-is-falling, world-
is-ending discussion (much of it warranted), it's nice to see that we're still
progressing - as a global society- towards freedom and transparency.

Bonus points for this progression being driven by technology.

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devindotcom
Good stuff, but only as strong as its weakest link - what's reported to the
government, and corruption can creep in at many levels. But this is a great
step.

~~~
hetman
Because any discrepancies could flag corruption, maintaining consistency would
require the corruption to be quite wide spread and far reaching into many
branches of the government to be successful.

Consider without this kind of system there is considerable amount of opacity
that exists between organisational units. Corruption functions well as long as
this kind of isolation is maintained for one simple reason: usually in this
kind of arrangement, your gain is somebody else's loss.

If the network of corruption is too large you have to spread the gains much
too thinly to make it worth the effort. Likewise, the more distant someone in
that network is from the originator of said corruption, the more like they are
to have very different goals and ideals and therefore disagree with and expose
this kind of corruption.

That's why I think this kind of system has a considerable degree of resistance
to misreporting of information. Certainly not perfect, but it makes corrupt
behaviour much more difficult and risky.

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Groxx
Neat. To get started, try entering "UJP" in the top box, and hitting the
button. Then translate that field, or let Chrome keep doing it for you (that's
a handy feature). You can dive into companies and even individual
transactions, though I haven't seen any itemized receipts yet :)

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eru
I'll have to go and ask my Slovenian co-worker about this tomorrow. Sounds
interesting.

~~~
jmarovt
Ask him. He'll probably know about it. It's the biggest news in Slovenia atm.

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entrepreneurial
Much needed in the U.S.

