Project description:

Hiperia is a spanish platform to manage and follow up journalistic projects based on Freedom of Information requests and Open Data. Users can manage FOI requests, documents, data, links and contacts for each investigative project and share this projects with others registered users. Users can manage hundreds of information requests at three administrative levels: national, regional and local. Hiperia notifies you with automated alerts about time limits of response and claim for FOI request depending on the selected administration. Users can share their projects with others and manage all documents, links, datasets and contacts associated with each journalistic project.

Impact reached:

Hiperia was lunched as private beta in January 2019. Journalists from different media in Spain have been testing the tool during 2019. In Spain, there are dozen of transparency laws at national and regional administrative levels. Also different local transparency regulations. For each informative piece about (i.e.) health or education, due to the administrative distribution of competencies, it is necessary to make a minimum of 18 information requests and manage their deadlines and claims. With Hiperia users can follow up journalistic investigations based on requests for public information and data. This investigations do not end when the news is published. It is necessary to follow up the information and back to repetive the FOI requests at least every year.

Techniques/technologies used:

Hiperia has been built using open technologies like PHP, MYSQL, HTML, CSS and Javascript.

What was the hardest part of this project?

We have been working for months on an exhaustive comparative legislative study of 16 transparency regulations in Spain (at national and regional level) and we have converted this legislation to code to allow users to inform and alert you of the status of their requests, show jurisprudence or interpretative criteria of the Spanish Transparency Council to help users make their requests for information and management of a journalistic project based on requests for information and open data.

What can others learn from this project?

Hiperia  wants to be a hub that hosts all the jurisprudence on transparency in Spain as a weapon to obtain public information from journalists, activists and researchers. With Hiperia we want journalist to systematically use transparency laws as a fundamental weapon to do their job. Our mission is to help simplify the complexity of the different legislations, their response times and the management of a research project based on open data. Projects can be shared with other platform users 

Project links:

hiperia.datadista.com