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Manuel Aristarán (@manuelaristaran) - Changing the world one line of code at a time
In the year '87, I was 6 or 7 years old...
My dad showed up home with a present, that was a computer.
This computer was a Czerweny 1500, which was the national version of the Timex Sinclair 1500,
which was a British computer.
In that moment, computers were a rare thing,
I didn't know what to do with this computer,
and my Czerweny 1500 was... quite boring.
It was much more boring than all of the computers of that time,
like the Commodore or the MSX, that had sound,
and cool games, and all that.
Most of the computers of that time had something great,
which was that, when you turned them on, you were faced with a blank screen,
mysterious, which you didn't know what it was for,
and it really struck me that you could write instructions,
that did things.
So then I found out what this programming thing was,
and I asked my parents, and I was very persistent.
And you know that a seven year old can be persistent.
And they bought me a book called Basic for kids,
with a little character called Arturo, that told you a story
and taught you how to program, and there were some magazines at that time
that came with printed programs, which you copied and saw how they worked...
And then little by little I learned how to program in Basic,
which was the language of computers of that time.
And in my house, for as long as I remember, politics has always been a frequent topic.
We always discussed a lot, with great passion.
It was never considered a bad word.
We were never told "don't get involved", rather the contrary.
So then, when I started secondary school,
I ended up being, obviously, the delegate of my class, in the Student Government.
It was the '90s, the Federal Law of Education....
We discussed a lot, and we protested.
Later, I started university to study computer science.
It was in the '99.... another very tumultuous time for Argentina.
And then I went through my militancies and such.
Ever since that time, since my dad showed up with the computer,
and even since '99, when I started university,
the relationship we have with information changed a lot.
Today computers are much more powerful,
there's Internet almost everywhere.
Hence we consume information through these machines at all times,
and above all we generate information.
Many times, without knowing.
And countries and provinces and cities also generate a lot of information.
They always generated a lot of information, but today more than ever.
And they have no other choice but to generate information, because the role of civil servants is to
make decisions that have to be motivated by information.
For that reason they perform census, and make maps, and measure the economy,
and socio-economical indicators, and education and environmental ones.
Many states are starting to think of this as a public good.
They're starting to think of information as a public service,
and the publishing of the information they generate as a public service,
and this is starting to happen very gradually in our country with some information.
And the Municipality of Bahía Blanca, which was the city where I was born
and where I was raised,
since 2001 publishes the purchases it makes every day on its website.
The purchase orders it emits.
And this is quite a strange thing because, think that to today's date, in 2013,
barely the 30% of the municipalities in the country have websites.
Therefore a municipality that, not only had a website, but also published almost in real time everything it bought
was a rare thing.
And purchases are very valuable information, because if one sees what a state purchases,
if one sees what anyone purchases,
one can get to know it quite well. One can see what its priorities are,
to where it focuses its efforts.
The thing is, with the tool they used to publish this information,
it was very hard to answer very basic questions that this information enabled answering.
For example, how much had been spent in advertising in the last 3 months,
or how much had been paid to a supplier in the last year.
Answering to these questions with that information was possible, but it was presented very poorly.
Then, it was like trying to answer that and the source of information was a mountain of papers.
It was very hard.
So, seeing this was there, and that the information was public,
I sad "well, this can be done a bit better".
So I built Gasto Púbico Bahiense (Bahiense Public Spending), which is a tool that, using this information,
and using the purchases this municipality publishes every day, it puts it in order.
It makes it a bit more friendly, and a bit more comprehensible.
And it makes these questions a little bit easier to answer.
Therefore, for example, we can see which were the departments that most spent in a period,
or which were the supplies that received more money from the state,
or the evolution of spending.
It wasn't a hard project. It is a very easy project.
I built it in a week, more or less,
using tools from free software, built by the global community of free software developers.
And, almost without thinking, I published it. I put it up on the Internet.
And shortly after would I be conscious of the impact this was generating,
somewhere in society, in the media.... even in politics.
So there were journalist that called me home to ask me about this,
and they asked why had I done it.
And I said "Simply because, because I could... I don't know... because it was easy...
and because I wanted to see what would happen".
They asked me who was funding me, who was behind all this,
who was the scheming mastermind.
And I told them I had done it from my living room,
and that the information was already there. It was already public.
The only thing I had done was to present it another way.
The government of Bahía Blanca, in that time,
(this project was launched three years ago, more or less)
during the first year didn't seem to mind the fact there as a tool using the information it generated
and that was presenting it another way, and that was getting known in Bahía Blanca.
Until one day, exactly a year after the tool was launched,
right in the Transparency section, where this data was published,
the government put a CAPTCHA.
You may know a CAPTCHA is a computer mechanism,
a resource used to differentiate human beings from computers.
A human being faces a CAPTCHA and is able to solve it; a computer is not.
And since Gasto Público Bahiense is a computer,
when it was faced with this it didn't know how to proceed,
and couldn't keep extracting information.
The fact it was put in a place where public data was published... was ridiculous to me.
It really angered me. So I told it on Twitter.
I said "Hey, this cannot be"... and an even bigger turmoil was caused.
A media turmoil happened even bigger that the one than the one caused when I first published Gasto Público Bahiense.
The government finally stopped ignoring Gasto Público Bahiense.
And went on to make quite harsh remarks.
"[the creator of GP] is a tremendous malicious liar or a technological ignorant."
"These guys used a robotic software (?) that got in our database."
"These guys are angry because they'll have to work harder."
They defended CAPTCHA as a way to preserve the security of the information,
when a CAPTCHA doesn't enhance, or protect the integrity of the information hosted in a server at all.
And well, all the turmoil, the fuss of the media was present in Bahía Blanca during many days.
And I had to explain what a CAPTCHA was many times. It isn't easy to explain what a CAPTCHA is.
We reached the national media. We made a lot of noise, to say the truth.
And I think this was motivated by quite a clear reason,
which was to force that this information was consulted only with the tool provided by the municipality,
and not with another. And this isn't minor, because obviously the resource one uses to analyze information
is not less important. Obviously, a magnifier and a microscope aren't the same thing.
And because there still exists to some civil servants the notion that public information belongs to them.
Really I think we should start to think of it as a common good.
Some friends told me a story that's a bit tragicomic.
They work with public information.
They reached out to a public office to request some public information,
and the clerk told them:
"No, I cannot give that to you because it's public information."
(Laughter)
It's a bit... I don't know... (Applause)
But well, the CAPTCHA issue we solved it by making the same people,
who had taken over the tool, that used it everyday,
when they entered our site, we showed them the CAPTCHA that the municipality showed us,
and they solved it... Therefore, this way, the extraction kept working,
and Gasto Publico Bahiense kept up to date.
And all these people who had taken over the tool, who made it theirs
and who, in some way, defended it solely by using it,
is very diverse.
For example, politicians, both from the opposing and official parties,
use it to see some of the State's accounts.
There are businessmen that use it to see the prices for which the municipality purchases to maybe improve those prices in a public tender.
Academics made studies with this.
There were journalists that found stories among this data, because it was easy to consult.
Then, for example, they found the story of an advertising agency that received more and more money from the State,
in big amounts, a disproportionate amount for a city of 300.000 inhabitants such as Bahía.
They found conflicts of interests, like the one of a supplier that worked at the same time for the municipality.
And some citizens started to understand the State as an important economic actor,
because when one sees what is buys every day, one understands how it affects the economy of the city.
Later, the municipality diametrically shifted its relation with Gasto Público Bahiense
and, instead of obstructing the access to this information, facilitated it to us, and also created a dependency
dedicated to the access to information, and all that.
And I believe, humbly, that Gasto Público Bahiense had something to do with this decision, this change of attitude.
And this is because the people took over the tool, and the tool made itself known,
and they started realizing the benefits of public and State-generated information
being easy to consult. Not only for transparency, which is a legal reason,
but because it works. It's an important resource.
And I was enthusiastic about this, and I realized I really enjoyed working with State information,
and making it more understandable.
So I applied for, and luckily I was chosen, for a fellowship sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation,
that sends programmers to newspapers all over the world.
And I was chosen to work in the team of data journalism of the newspaper La Nación.
And there one of the things I did was a tool that allows people to see the results of the primary election this year in Argentina,
differentiating between voting centers, every place where people voted.
And for this, to build it, we obviously used public information that was maybe not published with that purpose.
But was useful for this.
Then, in the first place, we used a list with the voting centers.
But we wanted to make a map of those voting centers, and the precise geographic information of each of them wasn't there,
we combined it with a map of schools published by the Ministry of Education.
And as almost all voting centers are schools, we could combine them and do this.
Two days after the election, the State published the results for each booth were people had voted,
and since we knew where each booth was, we could make a map that shows the results of this election
from voting centers for some districts.
And I believe this is important, because for example it allows us to put the results under a magnifying glass,
and see the results in HD. In high definition.
And perhaps it will allow us to understand political realities that are a bit more complex,
such as the ones that take place where many people live together.
Also, this map allows to reach faster to booths.
Some people found the school where they had voted, found the booth,
and this way could find the telegram, which was also published by the State.
The telegram that authorities send when the voting ends and the votes are counted.
And they found out their vote hadn't been counted, so they could file the complaint and all that.
So I ask myself what is this all for,
what do these tools that handle public information reveal...
these that I've told you about and others that, luckily, are starting to come out.
And I believe they make it very clear that there's a great value in public information,
when it is thought as a public good,
and this value is knowledge, and this knowledge we can extract when we process it with
tools that are each day easier to use, and to build.
This knowledge obviously allows us to get to know reality, or at least a part of it, and to affect it, if we want to.
It also makes evident that the publishing of public information is a question of political will,
and nothing else.
There's not technological impediment to publish a database on the Internet.
Imagine that if today you can record me and upload it to YouTube immediately, I won't believe it
when somebody tells me they cannot upload a spreadsheet to a website.
This much-touted transparency doesn't solve all the problems of the State, or politics, or citizens,
but it's important, because if State-generated information is available and accessed without obstacles,
it may lead to improvements in the communication between the State and citizens, which are two things
that often seem too distant.
I don't want to sound an idealist with all this of computers, and data, and the internet, and social network Likes,
because they aren't the solution to anything.
And hard information isn't the only way to comprehend and understand reality.
But not taking advantage of it would be a mistake.
Therefore I believe we must work to make politicians realize, the ones in charge,
that public information doesn't belong to them, and that it's a public asset.
And that it makes sense to think of information publishing as a service.
And I believe programmers, the people like me, must begin to understand the new social role
that we're acquiring.
Us programmers cannot replace, or neither have to replace, politicians,
neither will software replace politics.
But we know how to handle information, which, today more than ever, is important.
So I believe that all of us who are trying to understand the State,
and how it works, and how it obviously influences our everyday life,
and want to understand it through the information it generates,
we must generate new resources for access to information, and must take over public information,
because it will help us understand the State a bit more.
Because I believe that if we want to improve something, first we must get to know it well.
Thank you.
(Applause)