The Ministry of Territorial Policy has finally published a tool decent to follow up on the destination of the aid funds to the municipalities. This is public data information that until now was accessible but through a very little agile system to be able to carry out searches and have a broad vision and, in addition, over the territory itself.
From here we have given a lot of follow-up on the issue of state funds for city councils (in its 2009 version and in its 2010 version), and I always missed a good tool to analyze what kind of projects the money has been used for, which municipalities have received funds and for what, etc. With this map published by the Ministry we now have much more information. The map includes the projects of the State Fund of Local Investment (2009), the State Fund for Employment and Local Sustainability (2010) and, also, the funds destined to alleviate damages caused by natural catastrophes. Now the information can be seen geolocated through Google Maps, which allows you to play with the zoom to go down to the ground and identify practically street by street where the financed projects have been carried out in each of the municipalities. From the widest scale and by zooming in you can discover the number of projects by Autonomous Communities, by provinces and by municipalities and, once here, visualize the different typologies into which they are divided.
Another way to view this data is through the listing, which allows searches by province, municipality, type of fund and amount, as well as the type of project. Here I have missed that the system allows discriminating information so that it offers exclusively what the user is looking for. For example, I was interested in knowing the list of projects (and the territorial distribution on the map) for activities that can best contribute to the transformation of the productive model at the local level:
State Fund for Local Investment
- Industrial promotion
State Fund for Employment and Local Sustainability
- Promotion of economic and entrepreneurial activity
- Creation and equipping of innovation infrastructures
- Improves access to information technologies
- Technological modernization Local Administration
- Electronic Administration
- Urban sustainability, less polluting transport and road safety
To do it, unless I have missed something, you have to do it through the list and the order by projects. The rest of the functions I think are a great advance compared to how this data was available until now.
In the search for outputting this public data through a visualization system, I pay for the work arose some time ago , an initiative that has already made the data accessible through lists of municipalities and provinces, with the possibility that the citizens who use the platform can enter new data and comments on the projects. I understand that the development was put on hold at some point and the Ministry’s map covers this gap, although it certainly does not open up the possibility of entering information by users.
In any case, reviewing the projects, comparing them with the type assigned to them, would lead to another post, especially the generous allocation of some categories (Promotion of economic and entrepreneurial activity, Technological modernization Local Administration , etc.) to some projects whose title is quite far from that goal.