# Post 5 — Jul 1 · VISO

**Angle:** Civic accountability, live SQL, dataviz with substance

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Parliamentary expenses are public. They're also 400,000 rows of CSV that nobody reads.

**VISO** is a dashboard I built to change that — not just charts, but a live SQL interface that lets anyone query the raw data directly from the browser. No download, no Excel, no waiting for a journalist to summarize it for you.

The design question was: what does transparency actually look like when you respect the user's intelligence? The answer I landed on was: give them the data and the tool to interrogate it, not just the conclusions.

Built with Python on the backend, React on the front, and a query engine that runs directly against the normalized dataset. Open source.

Civic tech is some of the most technically interesting work I've done — the constraint that the data is messy and the user is real makes everything harder and more honest.

🔗 github.com/rafapolo/viso