What is Querido Diário

An Official Gazette is a publication made by various spheres of the Brazilian public administration, whether at federal, state or municipal (local) level and of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. It is through it that any action taken by these spheres and powers becomes official for the population.

Despite recurring efforts to strengthen the Access to Information Law (AIL) across the country, official communication remains - in most regions - restricted to documents in PDF format. These documents, despite being public, are not structured in a way that allows them to be analyzed by a computer or consulted together (for example, by searching for keywords in several publications at the same time).

Querido Diário’s goal is to facilitate public access to Official Gazettes of Brazilian municipalities, allowing anyone to access and consult the information within these publications.

To achieve this goal, we have several activities that aim to map and find out where gazettes are published, how to obtain them regularly so that we can process and make them available in a way that makes it possible for the population to query their content, either through a search page or an API so that this processing can be done through a computer.

How the project is maintained

Querido Diário is an open source project, which means that all the code used to extract, process and make Official Gazettes available is open for anyone to view, use and modify for their needs.

A Open Knowledge Brazil through Data Science for Civic Innovation Program is the entity responsible for maintaining the project’s entire infrastructure and organizing its development, in addition to the continuous contribution of hundreds of volunteers

How to contribute

You can contribute:

  • Financially by helping to maintain our entire server and storage infrastructure, in development and in organizing related events (development sprints, training lives and fostering collaboration) so that we can reach as many cities as possible.

  • With code for those with more technical knowledge, we have several projects that need hands on development (scrapers, APIs, infrastructure, documentation, etc).

Contact

You can get in touch with the project on our Discord channels.