Civic Tech Platform for Legislative Transparency

Overview

OpenPerú is an open-source civic-tech platform that collects, processes, and structures public data from the Peruvian Congress to improve political transparency, accountability, and public access to legislative information. The project builds an end-to-end data pipeline that transforms fragmented and poorly structured government data into clean, queryable datasets and analytical tools.

Open Peru

Problem

Legislative information in Peru is:

Highly fragmented across multiple web portals
Published in inconsistent formats (HTML tables, PDFs, scanned documents)
Difficult to track longitudinally (bills, committees, voting records, memberships)

This makes it hard for researchers, journalists, and citizens to analyze congressional behavior or hold representatives accountable.

Solution

OpenPerú automates the full data lifecycle:

Data extraction from official congressional websites and APIs
Processing and normalization into structured relational models
Versioning and change tracking to monitor legislative updates over time
Foundations for analytics and visualization to enable downstream research and civic use cases

The system is designed to be extensible, reproducible, and transparent.

Technical Architecture

Backend: Python
Data Collection: httpx, Selenium, lxml, BeautifulSoup
OCR & Document Processing: Tesseract, PDF text extraction pipelines
Data Modeling: SQLAlchemy ORM, Pydantic schemas
Databases: SQLite
ETL Design: Incremental updates, deduplication, change detection flags
DevOps: Docker, multi-stage builds, CI-friendly project structure

Key Features

Scraping and tracking of:
- Bills and legislative steps
- Committees and memberships
- Motions and voting outcomes
- Congressional documents and revisions
Robust enum mappings to standardize legislative states
Explicit handling of temporal logic (legislative periods, memberships)
Clear separation between raw, processed, and analytics-ready data layers

Impact & Use Cases

Enables empirical research on legislative behavior in Peru
Lowers barriers for journalists and watchdog organizations
Serves as a foundation for future tools such as:
- Voting record dashboards
- Bill progression tracking
- Party cohesion and coalition analysis
- Predictive models of legislative outcomes

Status

🚧 Active development
The platform is continuously expanding coverage and improving reliability, with plans for public APIs and visualization layers.

Open Perú