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Ausa Riigi Valvur (‘The Honest State Guardian’) brings together data-driven online tools that allow all citizens to investigate the honesty of political decisions made in Estonia. To this end, a single ‘dashboard’ brings together information that is otherwise often scattered and difficult to access on websites run by different agencies. For the purposes of ‘The Honest State Guardian’, the data has been harmonised and made easily accessible.
The web platform allows citizens to search, sort and interactively filter information based on different data sets. In this way, ‘The Honest State Guardian’ will help to increase transparency, fairness and equality in Estonia’s democratic decision-making processes, and to monitor the different institutions for potential conflicts of interest, undue influence or even possible corruption.
The technology behind the platform (D3.js) was originally developed by the New York Times to make complex data sets accessible to a wider audience. All data sets are also downloadable, as the platform supports open software and open data principles.
The website contains three different sets of data:
Data from the Public Procurement Register (Riigihangete registr)
e-Business Register data
The reports on the financing of political parties
The datasets used by the ‘The Honest State Guardian’ are obtained exclusively from the official websites of the various Estonian institutions.
‘The Honest State Guardian’ is part of the pan-European Integrity Watch programme, which was first launched in October 2014 by Transparency International EU (TI EU) under the leadership of Daniel Freund, former Head of Advocacy in the Finance and Policy team. In Estonia, the project is co-ordinated by the NGO Corruption Free Estonia. The project is funded by the European Commission.
