Transparentia. The largest search engine for politicians' salaries
Context
Transparentia is a one-page web application built for Newtral to search salaries and positions of more than 10,000 Spanish politicians and public officials, including historical career records.
My role
- Data visualization
- Frontend development
I developed the client-side application flow and search experience, from basic lookup to advanced filtering by party, institution, and role.
I coordinated the front-end behavior with a Laravel + MySQL backend integrated as a WordPress plugin, alongside backend work by Xavier Foguet.
Data and methodology
The data model allowed multiple salaries per position and a timeline of current and past offices for each profile.
The interface paired plain search and faceted search so users could move from quick checks to structured exploration without leaving the same screen context.
Key decisions
- Implemented it as a single-page app and used history.pushState to keep navigation feel while preserving speed.
- Kept interaction patterns lightweight to maintain responsive search across a large public salary dataset.
- Designed around changing requirements, prioritizing flexible filters and extensible record structures.
Result
Newtral published Transparentia as a civic lookup tool that made salary and position data queryable in seconds.
Impact and learnings
- The project translated fragmented public records into a practical transparency interface for everyday accountability reporting.