For journalists
Impacto Público is an independent civic observatory of Portuguese public decision-making, with no advertising, no commercial interest and no account required to read anything at all. It gathers what Portuguese institutions publish and shows every record with its date, its amount where there is one and the link to the official document it came from.
WHAT IT PUBLISHES · 23 OFFICIAL SOURCES
21 of the 23 official resources in the public catalogue are up to date: the Assembly of the Republic, Portal BASE, Portugal 2030, DGAL, the Court of Auditors, AD&C, ERSE, the European Parliament and municipal councils. Every record shows the date, the amount where there is one, and the address of the document behind it.
WHY IT IS ANONYMOUS
The observatory scrutinises Portuguese public administration, and that is precisely why it does not expose who maintains it. A contract record, a municipal account or an audit report is worth the same whoever compiled it. The organisation answers; no individual is named. It is a recorded editorial decision, taken after an independent review recommended the opposite, with the objection kept in writing.
VERIFYING · METHOD
Only what can be shown in the source is published. Every claim leads back to the document, the passage and the version behind it, and an association is never presented as causation.
VERIFYING · GAPS
Source by source: when it was last checked, how many records passed validation, how many did not and for what reason. A value that fails validation is published as null and never disguised as a zero.
VERIFYING · LIMITS
Before writing that something does not exist, check here: an absence on the site may be an absence in the source, and the difference is on the record.
VERIFYING · API
No key and no account. Every response carries in meta.source the moment of observation, the official URL, the SHA-256 of the observed file and the counts, and in meta.license the terms of reuse. A newsroom check has everything inside the same response that produced the figure.
VERIFYING · CORRECTIONS
A factual correction shows the date, the previous text, the new text, the reason and the evidence. Nothing disappears quietly, and watching an error corrected in the open is the fastest way to test an observatory.
STORY · 307 OF 308 ACCOUNTS
The management accounts published by the DGAL cover 307 of the country's 308 municipalities. The missing ones are named in the meta.source.missingMunicipalities field of the public response, beside the caveats the DGAL itself flags. The story is not the gap: it is being able to see it, with a name and a reason.
STORY · 854 CONTRACTS EXCLUDED
The annual Portal BASE cut holds 186,119 observed contracts: 185,265 pass validation and 854 do not, each exclusion with its reason on record. It measures the quality of Portuguese procurement data from the official file itself.
STORY · 4 OPEN CONSULTATIONS
4 ERSE public consultations are open, each with its regulatory object, legal basis and the closing date given by the source. A regulator's consultation almost always closes without coverage, and a deadline is one of the few stories that forces publication before rather than after.
STORY · 2,234 INITIATIVES
2,234 initiatives from the current legislature, with author, type, official stage, committee and recorded votes. Search and filters work without an account or a key, and every entry leads to the official text.
STORY · EUROPEAN FUNDS
Portugal 2030 operations are published with the beneficiary, the fund, the official thematic area and the territory, and they cross-reference municipal accounts and each council's published activity. Fund coverage is almost always national aggregates; the local cut is what rarely gets written.
STORY · THE DENOMINATOR
Every day the daily record picks four facts, one per area, and says how many candidates were assessed to reach each of them, with the selection rule in plain sight. In /v1/daily-highlight, the candidateCount field is the denominator that almost no editorial selection publishes.
CONTACT
The channel is the corrections form, and it also takes newsroom requests: a raw cut, a historical window, a specific slice for research. You do not have to identify yourself; the reply address is optional and is used only to answer on that matter.
CONTACT
contacto [at] impactopublico.pt
Newsrooms and researchers can write to this address. Name the page, figure or record concerned and the deadline you are working to.