PCIJ launches MoneyPolitics online

THE PHILIPPINE CENTER FOR INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM (PCIJ) is proud to announce the launch of its MoneyPolitics website, a new rich database meant to enable citizens with an online resource, research, and analysis tool on elections, public funds, and governance in the Philippines.

The website, MoneyPolitics.PCIJ.org, was developed with a three-year grant from the Open Society Foundation (OSF). It will go online next week.

The site aggregates the cache of documents and databases that the PCIJ has amassed in its 24-year existence on public finance records; statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth (SALN); election spending reports; civil works contracts; graft and corruption cases; profiles of elective and appointive officials; data on elections and political families; and socio-economic statistics across the Philippines.

PCIJ’s Malou Mangahas explains the concept behind the Money Politics site

MoneyPolitics is designed to serve as a ready-to-access tool for citizens, journalists, civil society groups, policy analysts, scholars, and public agencies and regulators. The site links and loops information enrolled in public documents to allow readers to discern how money in politics drives and defines policy and governance in the country.

PCIJ Executive Director Malou Mangahas said that the PCIJ Library has 57 gigabytes of digital information, with more than 6,400 unique files on elective and appointive officials from mayor to the Presidents, dating to as far back as 1998.

The 57 gigabytes of digital files of the PCIJ represent just a small portion of the total cache of raw source documents that the PCIJ has collected in the course of the work on investigative reports, books, video documentaries, and training seminars by its writers, editors, researchers, and fellows.

Using the OSF grant, the PCIJ in 2011 started digitizing, aggregating, and organizing datasets for MoneyPolitics using as backbone the cache of documents that it has gathered from its birth in 1989.

More public documents were acquired to bridge the gaps in data, as well as to collect information on local elective officials and appointive officials from the other branches.

Some of the files featured in MoneyPolitics come from documents that are no longer publicly available, or had been lost over the years.

Some election spending reports, for example, had been burned in the fire that gutted the old office of the Commission on Elections in Intramuros, Manila, years ago. However, the PCIJ had managed to keep copies of these files in its library.

A work in progress, MoneyPolitics will feature a steady harvest of new and more datasets in the coming years, or in time for the synchronized national and local elections in 2016.

PCIJ Research Director Karol Ilagan said MoneyPolitcs features four content categories.

Public Profiles offers information on elective and appointed officials from mayors, vice mayors, and councilors on the local level, up to President and Vice President, as well as from the judiciary, the constitutional commissions, the armed services, and some government-owned and -controlled corporations.

The datasets include time-series information on the career, wealth, and election donors and expenditures of public officials.

Also featured under this tab is the Social Network of the official, or data on his/her business interests and financial connections, family ties, and election donors.

A page under the Public Profiles tab is Public Spending, which focuses on pork barrel releases and disbursement by the senators and congressmen, and internal revenue allotment for the local government officials.

Campaign Finance, the second tab, uploads the statements of election contributions and expenditures (SECE) that elective officials had submitted to the Commission on Elections since 1998. This tab will allow the public a peek into how much officials spend just to bag their positions in government.

The third tab, Public Funds, presents information on how government raises revenues and spends public funds. These include data on the yearly budgets, allocations by departments, lump-sum items in the national budget such as special purpose funds and pork barrel allocations.

The fourth tab, Elections and Governance, offers data on governance indicators, political clans, and elections and socio-economic statistics for provinces, towns, and cities of the country.

Ilagan added that the PCIJ would also like to encourage the public to be more proactive by donating or uploading documents, especially on the local level.

PCIJ Researcher Rowena Caronan said development work on MoneyPolitics involved months of haunting the halls of the Commission on Elections, Office of the President, the Office of the Ombudsman, among many other public agencies that are repositories of documents, to request and photocopy official records.

At times, Caronan said, the PCIJ staff had to spend entire weeks just photocopying documents. This, however, was only the first step. The PCIJ have had to scan, digitize, organize, and aggregate the data enrolled in the documents in Excel, spreadsheet, CSV, and other formats to allow for sorting and analysis as datasets.

Interestingly, Caronan also gave everyone an idea of just how inaccessible some public documents are to the public, not just because of a culture of secrecy in some agencies but also because of the prohibitive costs of reproducing the documents.

For example, Caronan said the Office of the President charges five pesos per photocopied page, while the Civil Service Commission charges P30 per page. In some other agencies though, she said public records are available online and at no cost at all on requesting parties.

The PCIJ also had to do scraping and scripting of the data available on government websites to develop some of the pages of MoneyPolitics.