This project is using AI to analyse public data of receipts from elected government officials, detect anomalies and tweet about them. It has already led to a deputy to have to return funds to the government.
There is very little material in English about this project, I finally spent some time to translate and create an English and French wikipedia page. I am not otherwise involved with this project (yet!) but think it deserve more visibility, and that we should leverage it and similar project in other countries.
How is this project perceived by the government officials?
I am sure (or at least hope) that some of them are very much in favour, but are there others calling into question the accuracy / legitimacy of these type of analyses?
(Brazilian here with bad english) There isn't much interest yet. But that is expected.
Information flows somewhat like this here: First they ignore it hard, then media comes and make a fuss and that makes the gov. officials respond with disdain or support (depends on the strategy they adopt). But if it gets hotter something bigger magically happens to distract public opinion.
At least it is already on dados.gov.br, which is the brazilian portal for open data, meaning at least received some support from groups inside the government. But almost no interest from conventional media.
Government officials don't give a fuck about it. At all.
No one beside themselves has the power to declare any of their spendings as illegal. So they could, for example, declare they spent $190 dollars on burger and fries for one person, and nobody can do anything about it.
Operation Serenata may tweet about it. Some people will read that and complain on twitter, and life goes on.
Our current unelected president was recorded talking about killing people to stay in power, and nothing happened. People in high-paying government jobs are tricking the system to get paid twice and nothing happens. Politicians can vote on their own pay raise, which they do many times per year, and nothing happens.
None of these big things have consequences, so something as small as someone spending a bit more on lunch is so irrelevant that they don't even care to try and hide it.
Sorry, who talked about killing was the senator which presidential campaign lost by less than 3% of the votes. The president was recording supporting paying money for the silence of a jailed corrupt that was the Lower House Speaker.
Having worked in an innovation lab [1] that exists inside the brazilian house of representatives, I may be able to try to answer your question:
It's not an easy answer, things are not black and white. I think a great deal of the politicians don't give a shit about such initiatives, don't even understand them and their implications. But there's a great deal of people working close to theses politicians who keep pushing for a better future. I don't know them all because I have been mostly focused on the tech aspect of it, but you could reach out for some of them and they would guide you through their network.
For instance, Cristiano Ferri [2] has been doing a great work in this area. He was the head of the Laboratorio Hacker while I was there, and is very connected both to the politicans and the community.
[1] http://labhackercd.leg.br/ - Unfortunately HTTP, lol. I think it used to be served through SSL, but can't really remember.
Operations-level people overwhelmly love the idea. There is a big push inside the Brazilian government for publishing data, and Serenata de Amor is the showcase project for claiming "look, we just put the data out there and society can make good use of it".
There is very little material in English about this project, I finally spent some time to translate and create an English and French wikipedia page. I am not otherwise involved with this project (yet!) but think it deserve more visibility, and that we should leverage it and similar project in other countries.