- Non-tech crash course into Operação Serenata de Amor
- Tech crash course into Operação Serenata de Amor
- Contributing with code and tech skills
- Supporting
- Acknowledgments
Serenata de Amor is an open project using artificial intelligence for social control of public administration.
We are a group of people who believes in power to the people motto. We are also part of the Data Science for Civic Innovation Programme from Open Knowledge Brasil.
Among founders and long-term members, we can list a group of eight people – plus numerous contributors from the open source and open knowledge communities: Tatiana Balachova, Felipe Cabral, Eduardo Cuducos, Irio Musskopf, Bruno Pazzim, Ana Schwendler, Jessica Temporal and Pedro Vilanova.
We use technology just like large organizations such as Google, Facebook and Netflix in order to track government spendings and to make open data accessible for everyone. We started looking into data from the Chamber of Deputies (Brazilian lower house) but we expanded to the Federal Senate (Brazilian upper house) and to municipalities.
Irio had the main ideas for the project in early 2016. For a few moths he was experimenting and gathering people around the project. September, 2016 marks the launching of our first crowd funding. Since then we have been creating open source technological products and tools, as well as high quality content on civic tech on our Facebook and Medium.
We have no non-virtual headquarter, but we work remotely everyday. Most our ideas are crafted to work in any country that offers open data, but our main implementations focus in Brazil.
Empowering citizens with data is quite important nowadays: people talk about smart cities, surveillance and privacy. We prefer to focus on smart citizens, accountability and open knowledge.
Serenata de Amor develops open source tools to make it easy for people use open data. The focus is to gather relevant insights, share them in an accessible interface in order invite citizens to dialogue with politicians, state and government about public spendings.
Serenata's main role is played by Rosie: she is an artificial intelligence who analyzes Brazilian congresspeople expenses while they are in office. Rosie can find suspicious spendings and engage citizens in the discussion about these findings. She's on Twitter.
To allow people to visualize and make sense of data Rosie generates, we have created Jarbas. In this website users can browse congresspeople expenses and get details about each one of the suspicions. It is the starting point to validate a suspicion.
We have three main repositories on GitHub. This is the main repo and hosts Rosie, Jarbas and more experimental code in the research/ directory.
In addition we have the Whistleblower – the tool that gives Rosie the power to tweet – and the toolbox - a pip installable package to follow the DRY principle alongside our repos and modules.
In spite of all these players acting together, the core part of the job is ran manually from times to times. The only part that is always online is Jarbas – freely serving a wide range of information about public expenditure 24/7.
Roughly once a month we manually run Rosie and update Jarbas. A few times per year we upload versioned datasets accessible via the toolbox – but we encourage you to use the toolbox to generate fresh datasets whenever you need.
Jarbas is running in Digital Ocean droplets, and deployed using the Docker Cloud architecture.
The answer to most technical why questions is because that was what we have got at hand in the past, and that enable us to deliver fast. We acknowledge that this is not the best stack ever, but so far that is what brought us here.
Make sure you have read the Tech crash course in this page. Next checkout our contributing guide.
- Join our recurring crowd funding campaign on Apoia.se
- Donate via Bitcoin to
1Gbvfjmjvur7qwbwNFdPSNDgx66KSdVB5b - Follow, share and interact with us on Facebook
- Follow, retweet and join Rosie on Twitter to interact with your favourite congresspeople
