This a project that was pitched at Garage48 Open & Big Data Hackathon in Tartu October 21-23 2016 and received a second runner-up prize and special pass to Latitude59.

In a nutshell, this is a project to scrape information from Tartu City document registry and present it in a usable manner for citizens as well as city officials themselves. This is already a lot, but as a special feature we give citizens an opportunity to participate in the decision process itself, commenting on documents and meetings in various phases and give a feedback vote on the results. It's a digital tool to make democracy great again and although we built it specially for Tartu, you can use it in any city or municipality with similar organizational structure.

Check out the test application or dig into data the scripts scraped for us.

Or see our final presentation at the hackathon (starts ~52:15).

Tartu is presenting itself as a Smart City, but unfortunately it's not very Open City. There is no Open Data directory in Tartu1, but there is still some data that can be scraped. Document registry provides data about meetings, protocols, drafts for municipal acts and votes about them in commissions, government and council etc. They are provided with some metadata of varying quality, but with some effort it can be rendered quite usable.

We can make a case for Open Tartu with:

1. Converting the scraped documents to one of the standard formats used to present documents produced in decision processes and link them to roles and phases of decision process, highlight the amounts of money and political parties involved etc;

2. Displaying parts of process visually in order to avoid headache from reading too much bureaucratic gibberish and make it easy to grasp what's going on in city, use different criteria for displaying the information, different levels of zoom, word clouds etc;

3. Showcasing an e-democracy portal to comment on the documents in different phases and give citizens ability to vote on the same topics city government, commissions and council does vote on.

This is something that the city could do and even has admitted, that should be done2, but won't do if not given an example of how this kind of Open Tartu would look like in practise.

Technology without openness leads to technological totalitarianism. This is our opportunity to stop Smart City of Tartu from turning into nightmare of technocratic control and digivolve it into a Smart and Open City of Tartu and make it the flagship of Open Governance and e-Democracy in Estonia (not to mention that if this actually works, this will be international news).