A computational tool for assessing the completeness of requisites in Brazilian governmental transparency portals

• Catherine Fortes Thedim Costa UFF
• Shaiana Pereira UFF
• Pedro Souza E Silva UFF
• Daniela Trevisan UFF
• Luciana Salgado UFF
• Flavia Bernardini UFF

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/wcge.2023.229864

Abstract

Transparency Portals (TPs) are a way for citizens to follow information about government actions and understand how resources from collected taxes are used. However, there are several instruments indicating legal requirements and good practices for implementing TPs, turning difficult the task to assess completeness of a TP. The objective of this work is to propose a computational tool to support such evaluation. For this purpose, we analyzed good practices guides and laws indicating the necessary requirements for constructing TPs in order to present a unified guide to allow the process of evaluating the completeness of such requirements. We evaluated this guide through two studies: (i) for evaluating three portals from different city halls; and (ii) for conducting an empirical evaluation of the guide, through interviews with professional users of the TP of Niterói. We implemented a web tool as our guide is composed by 268 items (requirements for completeness evaluation). We could observe in our analysis which items are well attended by the guide and the tool and which still need to be improved. An important future work is to evolve the tool in order to allow new instruments to be incorporated.

Keywords: open data government, governmental transparency, open data portal completeness

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