MAKE IT OR BREAK IT: The pains of accessing Peru's most respected Ministry's open data

I tried to download data from the most important Ministry in Peru: the Ministry of Economics and Finance. It is one of the few respectable places to work and it is known for staying at the frontier of transparency and technical correctness.

Entering the web portal to access public spending data is one of the most common reasons why people enter the Ministry's webpage. The Ministry itself has spent a lot of resources making it as user friendly as possible. The site's name is actually called "Friendly Consultation". Among some friends of mine, we used to call it "Zero Friendly Consultation". 

And here is why:

When you first access the portal you have to decide the module that you want to access Public Spending or Public Revenue, and if you want the data to be updated monthly or daily. It is still unclear what varies with the update, and they give no indication of the differences or trade-offs, so right off the bat, if you don't know the difference, it could alter whatever analysis you want to conduct.

Assuming you accurately decide the best module (I went for Public Spending with monthly update), you are then welcomed to the portal by one line of the total budget for the present year and different columns with different numbers. One point in favor of the site is that each line has a hover option where it tells you what each column mean, whether it's how much money was budgeted, modified budget, or actual spending, for example. Then you can access different levels of spending. 

On the surface it looks like it's going to be relatively easy. 

The next problem comes at this stage, you have to decide what level you want for a certain type of spending. For example, to obtain data from a social program you have to enter the Ministry of Development line of budget and then in spending subgroups and so on. The problem here is that people normally don't know how the public spending is structured and could be easily deceived or obtain the wrong information. 

Assuming you find exactly what you want, the most common tasks is wanting to compare the same type of expenditure for a given period. The problem here is that there is no way of selecting a range of years and downloading the data, you have to change each year every time and then download the spreadsheet. Moreover, and more scandalously, every time you change the year you have to start all over again, because it resets you search to the total budget! 

I believe this is because some budget lines switch positions over the years, still, I am sure there must be a more efficient way to show the changes without the user having to suffer so much. If the Ministry would dedicate time to actually making that consultation friendly, a lot of people would be more encouraged to analyze government public spending. The trade off would be finding weird stuff, but in reality people are already looking for that, so there is only much to gain from making it user friendly. With the new trend of pay for performance in budget allocation, the Ministry would benefit from making the user more engaged and interested in the data available

Again, another expectation v. reality moment. Here is a visualization on how the total budget has changed in the past 10 years.