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Towards Transparent Governance: Unifying City Councils Decision-Making Data Processing and Visualization

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Good Practices and New Perspectives in Information Systems and Technologies (WorldCIST 2024)

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Abstract

The local open government data holds undiscovered potential for wider application. Municipal policies and representatives’ decisions have a direct impact on citizens’ daily lives and the public should be aware of them. Nevertheless, the data related to city council activities may not always be easily searchable, and if available, the varying formats complicate further extraction and processing. This paper contributes to the academic discourse by proposing a unified approach to processing and storing the data from the council’s decision-making. The paper outlines a generic data model designed for broad application across municipalities. A data set within this model can be automatically processed and stored in the database. The solution presents an information system with an user-friendly interface that visualize the data in the form of dashboards, enhancing accessibility for the general public. This paper contains practical example of how the data model can be applied to real votes of the council in the City of Brno, which is the second largest city in the Czech Republic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://5stardata.info/en/.

  2. 2.

    https://data.gov.cz/english/.

  3. 3.

    https://data.gov.cz/ofn/.

  4. 4.

    https://opendata.victoria.ca/pages/mayor-and-council.

  5. 5.

    https://data.gov.cz/datasets.

  6. 6.

    https://data.cambridgema.gov/General-Government/City-Council-Roll-Call-Votes-2018-2019/3g59-fvq4.

  7. 7.

    https://www.dallasopendata.com/Services/Dallas-City-Council-Voting-Record/ts5d-gdq6.

  8. 8.

    Its Data department, respectively Data.Brno team, which publishes the city’s data on the municipal data portal—https://datahub.brno.cz/.

  9. 9.

    https://github.com/zastupko/data-model.

  10. 10.

    https://www.brno.cz/zastupitelstvo-analyza.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by project Smart information technology for a resilient society, FIT-S-23-8209, funded by Brno University of Technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Information Technology, Brno University of Technology, Božetěchova 1/2, 612 66, Brno, Czech Republic

    Kristýna Zaklová, Jiří Hynek & Tomáš Hruška

Authors
  1. Kristýna Zaklová
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  2. Jiří Hynek
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  3. Tomáš Hruška
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kristýna Zaklová .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. ISEG, Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Álvaro Rocha

  2. College of Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA

    Hojjat Adeli

  3. Institute of Data Science and Digital Technologies, Vilnius University, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Gintautas Dzemyda

  4. DCT, Universidade Portucalense, Porto, Portugal

    Fernando Moreira

  5. Institute of Information Technology, Lodz University of Technology, Łódz, Poland

    Aneta Poniszewska-Marańda

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Zaklová, K., Hynek, J., Hruška, T. (2024). Towards Transparent Governance: Unifying City Councils Decision-Making Data Processing and Visualization. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Dzemyda, G., Moreira, F., Poniszewska-Marańda, A. (eds) Good Practices and New Perspectives in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST 2024. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 987. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-60221-4_38

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