---
redirect_from: /2013/10/sevilla-presus13/
title: 'Sevilla Presus: Data-driven journalism at municipal level'
authors:
- J. Félix Ontañón
---
A such a disruptive technology as Internet, is forcing us to re-think the role and methods of many professions. Old models hasn't died yet, but in the new ones we can find some common patterns for success: <strong>empowering people through a community for cooperation</strong>. Journalism isn't the exception. Through the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog" target="_blank">The Guardian Data Blog</a>, as an example, many citizens helped to transcribe and find stories in the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/mps-expenses" target="_blank">MP's expenses data</a>: people give their eyes, The Guardian gives the platform.

<a href="http://sevillaactualidad.com" target="_blank">Sevilla Actualidad</a> and <a href="http://sevillareport.com" target="_blank">Sevilla Report</a>, both local newspapers in Sevilla (Spain), are using two OKFN tools empower their fellow citizens in the spirit of The Guardian Data Blog. With the help of <a href="http://openkratio.org" target="_blank">OpenKratio</a>, a group of citizens for fostering the Open Government Data culture in Spain, we've launched <a href="http://crowdcrafting.org/app/sevilla-presus13" target="_blank">#SevillaPresus13</a>, a <a href="http://crowdcrafting.org" target="_blank">Crowdcrafting</a> app to crowdsource the transcription of municipal budgets.

<a href="http://crowdcrafting.org/app/sevilla-presus13"><img class="size-full wp-image-1556 aligncenter" src="{{ site.baseurl }}/img/blog/2013/09/pantalla-presus-sevilla-13.jpg" alt="#SevillaPresus13" width="650" height="454" /></a>

We aim to complete a set of visualizations on <a href="http://openspending.org" target="_blank">OpenSpending</a> for the 2011-2013 municipal budget series (<a href="http://openspending.org/seville-budget" target="_blank">2012 was done</a>), so it would be <strong>available for everyone</strong> to embed them in their own web posts. The plan is to link the budgetary information with the municipal public procurement. This way both local newspaper will have a powerfull tool to <strong>monitorize the municipal activity</strong> and finding insteresting stories to tell. This project <a href="http://comunidad.medialab-prado.es/en/node/278">has been accepted</a> into a data-journalism contest in Madrid (Spain).

<a href="http://crowdcrafting.org" target="_blank">Crowdcrafting</a> is an amazing platform to build crowdsourcing apps for transcribing document and images into machine-readable data. As it provides some <a href="https://github.com/PyBossa/app-pdf-table-transcribe" target="_blank">out-of-the-box pdf transcribe apps</a>, all you need to do is <strong>download, customize and deploy for your own proposes</strong>. In the case of PDF files, tools as <a href="http://tabula.nerdpower.org" target="_blank">Tabula</a> are improving the way <em>non-techie</em> people can unlock the information, but only <a href="http://crowdcrafting.org" target="_blank">Crowdcrafting</a> is able to develop an engaging crowd-experience for users.

