La donación (Spanish for "the donation") is a data-driven set of rich interactive visualizations exposing all the known details about the donation in 2012 of 65 million euros from the then King of Spain, Juan Carlos I, to Dutch-German businesswoman and socialite Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.

This repository contains the complete source code of the website at ladonacion.es and the documentation needed to help understand its internals.

The software powering the visualizations and the database holding de details of the particular story about the Spanish Royal Household are kept apart, menaning the code and the data are completely separated and decoupled. This means the software can be easily reused to convey the story of your choice.

By open sourcing it I aim to:

• Pave the road for other investigative journalists to share their own investigations of public interest. Specially when it comes to exposing fraud and corruption.

• Encourage others to build upon my work, by reusing and adapting it as a boilerplate for their own stories.

• Give back to the community, from which I have received vast amounts of insight and inspiration.

⭐ Like it? Then star it now on GitHub.
It only costs you a click and it greatly helps others discover it. ❤️

What can we citizens do against the endemic problem of corruption in politics and institutions? We all see how technology is transforming the world, and my hypothesis is that technology can also transform the way fraud and corruption is exposed and combated.

Massive data leaks, such as the Lagarde and Falciani lists or the Panama Papers, have for the first time exposed the vulnerability of the global money laundering, tax evasion and organized crime machinery. And data science unearths tangible evidence from a vast ocean of information that is otherwise impenetrable to human endeavor.

Interested in this intellectual challenge, I, a software engineer specialized in data, have applied a methodology to the exploration of the recent scandals surrounding the Spanish Royal House.

I have gathered a corpus of documentation about the alleged corruption in the Spanish Royal House from an extensive set of national and foreign public sources. Most of it comes from the legal proceedings, mainly in Geneve, Switzerland, leaked to and published by the European press. Other sources featured in the application's extensive library include:

• The Panama and Paradise papers and the Bahamas Leaks, all three published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ)
• The United Kingdom Companies House
• The Spanish Official Gazette ("Boletín Oficial del Estado")
• The Spanish Royal Household itself
• Other public records

The broad transversality of the sources ensures a multilateral approach to the matter.

To strip the information of the interpretive bias of the media, I have prioritized the documents of the judicial investigation: company deeds, bank statements, official models, correspondence between the actors…

From this documentary corpus I have designed an ontology with classes, objects, attributes, rules and a vocabulary of relationships. I have modeled each document on this abstract framework, thus obtaining a structured representation of the entire plot that I have then addressed using software that I have developed for this purpose.

Finally, I have built the interactive visualizations that make this data model visually explorable, so that any user can navigate through each element of the plot without sacrificing detail.

This of the Royal Household is a highly relevant and polarizing story in Spain and it has been one of my goals from the very beginning to approach it from a document-driven and opinionless framework.

Thus, the information architecture behind the application is laid out in such a fashion which makes it impossible to assert a fact if there is not at least one document in the library providing evidence. So by design no claim is made and no position is taken from me as a storyteller.

While the web application is intended for a Spanish audience and the user interface is presented in Spanish, both the source code and this documentation are written in English.

As with most web applications, you can think about this one as two independent layers. One contains the logic needed to build and display the user interface and the interactive visualizations. The other holds the data fueling it.

You surely want to keep the application logic, adapt it's text strings and design aesthetics, and ditch the topmost layer to replace it with your own datasource.

Here it is assume you already have git and npm installed on your local machine.

1. Clone the repo:

   $ git clone https://github.com/JaimeObregon/ladonacion.git

2. Install the project's dependencies:

   $ cd ladonacion
   $ npm install

3. Fire up the development web server:

   $ npm run dev

A new tab should pop up in your browser, serving the app from your local httpdocs directory.

I haver collected, analyzed and connected these documents with the help of a custom methodology and tooling available under /data and /bin. These two are not deployed, but used to validate and compile the final data structure consumed by the web application.

This GitHub repository contains both the web application powering the interactive visualizations and the details around this particular story. Both —code and data— are separated and decoupled.

This means the application can be easily reused and adapted to power other investigations. It best fits one which has can be clearly expressed in the following four planes:

	1. A network of relations between persons or business entities. (The who is who)
	2. A sequential set of events. (The facts)
	3. A geographical dimension. (The places)
	4. A repository of documents from which the whole story is derived. (The library)

The technological stack comprises only web standards. The application is fully static and writen in modern JavaScript (ECMAScript 6), web components, ES modules, shadow DOM, HTML5, CSS3. Therefore there are no other user requisites than a modern web browser.

The user interface is fully componentized. Other of my goals with this project has been to demonstrate that it is possible to build a reasonably complex web application without frontend frameworks such as React, Vue or Angular, and in the absence of transpilers such as Babel and complex build processes.

The Who is who dynamic graph is built upon Mike Bostock's excelent D3 charting library. The rest of the site if manually crafted.

Deploy to production is done via rsync with every push to the master branch. See the provided GitHub action at /.github/workflows/main.yml.

Like in any open source software project, contributions to this repository are very welcome. However, before submitting your contribution please note the following:

• If you detect any issue in the software or have any questions, comments or requests, please open an issue here on Github and I or the community will try to resolve it or respond to you.

• If your contribution or comment is about the plot of the story, please keep in mind that I will only incorporate factual data that is supported by public sources or documents, ideally official sources and sufficiently established and recognized public media. This is not a place for opinions, subjectivities or untested assumptions.

• Feel free to submit pull requests with your contributions, but before contributing, please open an issue first and share your plans. I have a very clear vision for this project and its goals, as well as high standards for merging contributions, so sharing your plans in an issue beforehand will maximize the chances of it being accepted.

• If you want to specifically address me as the original author of this project, you can reach me on Twitter.

1. ⭐ Star this project on GitHub. It costs you only a click and it greatly helps its discoverabilty.

2. Contribute code or documentation.

3. Support me on Patreon.

The whole project, from the design of the data model to the coding itself, has been done in 2021 by me, Jaime Gómez-Obregón.

This project is released under the GNU Affero General Public License (see /LICENSE).

La donación
Copyright (C) 2021-2022 Jaime Gómez-Obregón

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License as published
by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU Affero General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU Affero General Public License
along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.