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  • We conceptualize, design and build products for civic engagement: Tools and platforms that enable citizens and organizations to better understand and interact with the world around us.

    We create our own projects and provide commercial services around data journalism, news products, open data, civic engagement.

    Design

    • UX
    • Visual & illustration
    • Data visualization

    Data

    • Scraping
    • Processing and analysis
    • Open data

    Code

    • Web apps
    • Interactives
    • Tools

    Community

    • Engagement
    • Interaction
    • Training

    Products

    Gobierto

    November 2015
    Online tools and consultancy to promote transparency, open government and participation in public administrations. Design and technology to help open and modernize organizations.

    Reasons.club

    June 2015
    A experiment-in-progress to explore better online discussions: Discuss with order, reach conclusions faster, take decisions.
    Tasks complete product

    Projects

    Offshore Leaks Database

    ICIJ
    May 2016
    We designed and built a new version of the ICIJ Offshore Leaks database (updated with the data from Panama Papers). Now the search is more powerful and flexible, new filters were added to search by a given country or jurisdiction and brand new data visualizations were created to allow users to browse nodes and relationships.
    Tasks ux, visual design, front-end, back-end, visualization

    Panama Papers: Politicians, Criminals and the Rogue Industry That Hides Their Cash

    ICIJ
    April 2016
    We designed and built the website for the the biggest leak in whistleblower history, as well as the accompanying back-end components to publish articles as the story unfolds, to follow the investigation through a set of automated emails, read later functionality, etc. We also designed and implemented the accompanying visualizations and charts that help understand the whole story
    Tasks ux, visual design, front-end, back-end, visualization

    Fatal Extraction: Where Australian Mining Leaves its Mark / data explorer

    ICIJ
    July 2015
    We built the interactive map and web site where you can browse details about the companies. Data was parsed from a Google Doc the editorial team was working on. Import was automated through a script.
    Tasks ux, visual design, front-end, back-end, data processing

    España en Cifras

    El Español
    May 2015
    We compiled and proccessed more than 85 different datasets from different sources to provide a simple fact-sheet with key indicators about economy, demographics, employment, election results, budgets... for the +8.000 councils, provinces and spanish regions to give context for the coming elections. We also created interactive maps from the data, and tools to compare indicators from different councils or provinces. All data was indexed using Elastic Search and internal APIs were created to build new services from the data. More about the process.
    Tasksux, visual design, front-end, scrapping, back-end, elastic search, ruby on rails, D3

    Evicted and Abandoned / data explorer

    ICIJ
    July 2015
    Tasksux, visual design

    Earnings Inspector

    Brown Institute (Columbia/Stanford)
    June 2015
    Tasksux, visual design

    Swiss Leaks / data explorer

    ICIJ
    February 2015
    Tasks ux, visual design

    Code

    When time allows we tidy up our code and publish it at github.com/PopulateTools.

    Who we are

    Álvaro Ortiz

    Álvaro Ortiz

    Likes to UX and imagine digital products that change behaviours. Past lifes: partner at The Cocktail, co-founded Actuable (acquired by Change.org), founded Mumumío, and former Marketing Director at CartoDB.

    Fernando Blat

    Fernando Blat

    Ruby on Rails and Javascript developer, with devops knowledge. The only one using the standing desk.

    Jorge Gómez

    Jorge Gómez

    More than 15 years experience in software development, digital product management and general management. Co-founder of BeBanjo (acquired by the TDF Group).

    Populate Links

    We send a weekly digest of links we find interesting and that we share internally throughout the week. Also ocassional news about our projects. Subscribe to receive it:

    Have fun checking past issues.