Experts from FIT BUT launched a portal analyzing council voting

How transparent are regional council meetings? How many times did they meet in this term? What is the ratio of male and female representation? And what is the difference between income and expenditure in each region? These and many other questions will be answered at the Zastupko.cz portal, developed by Kristýna Zaklová and a team of researchers Dexter@FIT at the Faculty of Information Technology of Brno University of Technology (FIT BUT).

This weekend, regional elections will take place across the Czech Republic. For the next four years, they will make key decisions in a wide range of areas that directly impact the quality of life of residents. The Zastupko.cz portal analyses in detail the terms of office of regional councils from 2020-2024.

The project, which began with a master's thesis by Kristýna Zaklová from FIT BUT, has focused on the regions on the occasion of the upcoming elections to reveal trends and patterns that will give people deeper insight into the political processes in their region. These are primarily based on freely available data from the regions' websites, which are then imported into the system for visualisation. Additional data was drawn from the summaries of the Czech Statistical Office.

The creation of the portal was not without its challenges. "There were some complications in most of the processed regions, therefore we cannot guarantee 100% correctness of all analyses. An example of this may be invalid votes, which in some cases cannot be distinguished from valid ones," explains Kristýna Zaklová.

In addition to regional data, the portal also provides information about the Brno city Council and the Most city Council. The PhD student developed the portal in cooperation with both cities, together with Jiří Hynek and Petr John from the Dexter@FIT team, which focuses on research in information systems, data processing and smart cities. The initiative was also supported by other students of the faculty as part of their final theses.

Kristýna Zaklová believes that the portal will help residents to better navigate local politics. "Despite the fact that municipal politics has the biggest impact on our daily lives, people are often not interested in it at all. County and city websites are disparate, council meeting materials tend to be hard to find, and advanced filtering of records is lacking. That's why this idea of centralizing and creating a generic tool that looks the same for all entities was born."

The processed data can be used for further analyses, as the authors provide it to the public as open data, a trend that can be observed in the Czech Republic in recent years. For example, the National Data Catalogue was created as part of the National Recovery Plan to increase transparency in public administration. At the same time, various data portals of regions, cities and institutions are being created.

"However, data alone is not enough. It is necessary to use their potential, to process them further and to reap all the benefits from them. In addition, it is necessary to deal with the standardization of the format of such data and to evaluate their accuracy and quality," concludes the PhD student.

In addition to the Zastupko.cz portal, the Dexter@FIT team also focuses on processing, modelling, analysing and visualising data from car, public and cycling transport with the aim of providing tools to enable the general public to travel more efficiently in these systems. For smart devices that provide a digital representation of the real world, the team focuses not only on processing the data they generate, but also on user-friendly ways to manage the interaction between them.