After months of extracting and analyzing information from parliamentary websites, documents, and other public records, Demócrata — a recently launched news outlet focused on Spanish government and public policy — published a series finding that in general Parliamentary sessions, the ones that get the most attention, men gave nearly two-thirds of the speeches. Women were underrepresented on congressional committees related to “state matters” like defense, economic affairs, and budgeting, but make up the majority of members on committees focused on equality, gender violence, and children’s rights.

Stories like these are what Demócrata aims to provide news consumers in Spain: Data-based journalism that helps to holds politicians accountable. That series, for example, included a methodology of how the journalists obtained the data, organized it, and decided what to include. (For instance: “Participations of less than one minute duration have also been left out. They mostly deal with oaths to take possession of seats, questions of order, requests to speak…They accounted for less than 1% of the total interventions collected.”)

“It brings a lot of transparency to the legislative process,” said Pilar Velasco, a veteran investigative journalist and Demócrata’s editorial director. “When the noise of politics occupies the entire news cycle, it generates a space for opacity that isn’t reported on.”

The site fills a gap in Spain, which will hold its general election in December. “It’s a good year to launch a news outlet with a focus on politics and policies,” said Eduardo Suárez, the head of editorial for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. “[Demócrata’s] value proposition is to report on public policies and Parliamentary debates in much more detail than mainstream publications. Newspapers in Spain are much more focused on politics than on public policies, and this might provide an opening for a publication like Demócrata, whose goal is to cover those policy debates in a more nuanced and granular way.”

Demócrata is the country’s only news outlet that specifically covers Parliament and public policy from an accountability lens daily, according to the Iberian Digital Media Map by Iberifier, a European Commission–funded initiative. (Another initiative in Spain, Civio, was founded in 2012 and focuses on data-powered watchdog reporting on the environment, healthcare, and the justice system.)

Demócrata has a team of seven. It’s funded by an initial investment from its board of directors and from advertising, though Velasco wants to expand into sponsorships, paid events, and subscriptions. The site has multiple sections: Agenda (an archive of the weekly newsletter that summarizes what’s happening in Parliament in the coming week), Actualidad (updates and play-by-play of laws and amendments), Políticas (news on proposed and ongoing policies), Quieren Influir (economy stories), and an analysis and opinion section. The site’s initial target audience is political insiders and politics junkies, but Velasco said the stories are written so that general audiences will be able to understand them as well. The Agenda newsletter has around 2,000 subscribers.

Demócrata’s goal is to use its data expertise to tell stories that other outlets can’t. Leading up to the outlet’s launch, the data team spent months building the software it uses to scrape and analyze data that, while technically public, is disorganized and difficult to parse. When the country’s far-right party, Vox, called for a vote of no confidence against the current ruling socialist party this past March, Demócrata published an analysis of Vox’s legislative footprint in the current parliamentary session, finding that the party has so far failed to pass any laws.

Velasco, who was an investigative reporter for Spain’s largest radio network Cadena SER, where she investigated political corruption cases, experienced first-hand the challenges of telling data stories for radio, where it can be difficult to delve into numbers. As a 2018 Yale World Fellow and one of the co-founders of Spain’s Investigative Journalists Association, she also saw American sites like Politico cultivated audiences for in-depth political reporting. When Demócrata founder David Córdova (who is also the director of a public affairs consulting firm, Vinces) approached her for the project, she saw it as a chance to experiment and try something new. (Demócrata is editorially independent from Vinces.)

“The mission is permanent scrutiny of institutions,” Velasco said. “Through continuous supervision of the work of politicians and legislators, information transparency, we believe, can strengthen institutional credibility. [The news] that comes to us from Parliament is often the political discussion, statements, politicians fighting with each other, and press conferences. But the legislative branch is a pillar of the State where many things happen that regulate life in society. It is what orders us and regulates us. And all of that wasn’t being covered in Spain with the specialization it deserves.”

One of Velasco’s goals in the next few months is to continue the work on a platform, already in progress, that will monitor updates to every piece of legislation in Parliament in real time. Down the line, she hopes to launch a chatbot that can answer reader questions. Demócrata has also partnered with Political Watch (a group of academics who monitor Parliament), design studio Flat26, and the think tank Ethosfera, which is helping Demócrata with its own ethics and transparency policies.

“We sort of feel like a hub for people who already had innovative ideas about parliamentary information,” Velasco said. “We get a lot of pitches for [collaborations]. When that you’re a small outlet, to grow you have to put springboards in places to get to the next level, and you can’t get there on your own.”

First launched last June during Spain’s general election as a Telegram bot experiment, Politibot tried to offer Spanish audiences a more whimsical and comfortable way to keep up with a tense political cycle and dissect facts and figures politicians and their parties spouted. (Quartz’s news app and Purple’s messaging app were among the inspirations.) Promoted only through its founders’ networks, the spunky Telegram bot built up a reliably loyal following of 8,400 users.

Then a couple of the Politibot project’s founders, María Ramírez and Eduardo Suárez (who launched Politibot after they parted ways with the Spanish digital news startup El Español, where they were also cofounders) left for Univision to cover the U.S. election, and the news and information side of Politibot “went on holiday” last summer to the Spanish seaside resort city Torrevieja.

Ha vuelto ya @politibot de vacaciones. Vuelve te echamos de menos

— Daniel Torrejón (@Dtorrejonm) July 4, 2016

In Politibot’s case, it’s been more of a working vacation, as the team behind it began building out a full-fledged bot-making platform based on what it had learned from its Spanish election summer experiment, with the help of a €50,000 Google DNI grant from November 2016. The completed “bot management system” that other media organizations can use to build custom chatbots includes analytics more useful for newsroom purposes than either Telegram (through Yandex) or Facebook Messenger offer now, and more personalization on the messaging journey of individual users. The makeup of the eight-person team suggests the founders’ ambitions: On board are journalists, a designer, engineers who’ve worked on natural language processing, and political and data scientists. (Politibot chief of technology Miguel Gil Biraud detailed these new platform developments to me during a pitch event at the Global Editors Network conference last month in Vienna.)

“Someone describing Politibot once said it was almost Socratic; he had the impression he understood things better this way,” Suárez told me. “We have the platform and we have the expertise. Problems news organizations will run into, we’ve run into before. We can help them with that, and we can hopefully help them get the same retention and engagement we did.”

About two thirds of the Google DNI money went into platform development, and a third to producing original content for Politibot. After an overhaul of the backend bot platform, the team resuscitated Politibot for Telegram and added a Facebook Messenger version for a limited run in the spring. It began testing expanded editorial content again, including news digests, analyses of issues outside of Spain, newsy charts for Instagram, and an original politics podcast. It had to give up its audience from last year after it closed down the original bot, but the bot’s second season attracted more than 6,200 users across the two different platforms, about 3,400 of whom opened the bot once each week and 2,400 of whom opened it every day — a prime user base to target for any potential paid subscription or membership program, Suárez said.

Just this month is started to raise funds through a Patreon drive to build out the editorial side of the company. Suárez said the team would love to hit $2,000 in monthly reader support to add a journalist and help pay for its servers, and is working on exclusive content for paying supporters (it’s about a fifth of the way to that goal).

The company’s other planned source of revenue will be the clients who pay to use its bot-making platform, and for installation, troubleshooting, and advice. It’s also considered advertising (a narrative, serialized ad-bot, Suárez suggested), but hasn’t built anything. At the moment, it’s in talks with a couple of publishers in Spain, and according to Suárez and Biraud is looking at tiered monthly payment levels tailored to the organization, based in part on the number of messages the customized bot sends and the complexity of the bot required by the news organization.

“We’re more of a consultancy at the moment, and having conversations with newsrooms about installing the platform. The first part of the conversation is always, what do you want a chatbot for?” Suárez said. “If you just want a chatbot that is an RSS [feed], that gives you content from your news organization tailored to a user according to the user’s tastes, and pushes notifications around that, sure, that’s one option. Our experience says it’s probably more useful for an interested news organization to build this kind of interactive conversation through a chatbot, a conversation that really gives the reader a reason to come back.”

Suárez and Biraud both acknowledged that alternatives like Chatfuel or the free Wit.ai exist, but said that the various features in Politibot’s bot-making platform were honed with news organizations’ needs in mind. For its Spanish election experiment, for instance, Politibot profiled users on their age and gender, and then showed them how their specific demographic was voting, based on polls. In another chat interaction, it asked users for their location, and then returned a chart showing the results of their constituency. And if you wanted to offer different extra content to a segment of paying subscribers, the Politibot platform can help with that, too.

“You need different analytics for chatbots, since pageviews don’t make sense. It took us a while to find metrics that wouldn’t be easy to game,” Biraud said. “Now we have a way of showing a heatmap of the conversation tree, showing where an organization’s bot lost users, what branches of the conversation individual users followed, what individual users are interested in. We might have one conversation option on Brexit and another on French politics, and if the user never takes the Brexit branches, we need to think, what else can we show them?”

Some larger news organizations like The New York Times or the BBC will inevitably go in-house anyway when it comes to building bot experiences, Biraud said, but “smaller media groups are barely scraping by. They don’t have the resources. We can solve some problems for them.”

Lanzado por primera vez durante las elecciones generales de 2016 en España como un experimento vía Telegram, Politibot intentó ofrecer al público español una forma más original y cómoda de mantenerse al día con un ciclo político tenso, y explorar hechos y cifras difundidas por los políticos (la aplicación de noticias de Quartz y la aplicación de mensajería de Purple estaban entre sus inspiraciones). Promovido solo a través de las redes de sus fundadores, el bot de Telegram generó un seguimiento fiel de 8.400 usuarios.

Luego dos de los fundadores del proyecto Politibot, María Ramírez y Eduardo Suárez (quienes lanzaron Politibot después de separarse del emprendimiento digital El Español, al que también cofundaron) se fueron a Univision para cubrir las elecciones estadounidenses, y el costado noticioso de Politibot “se fue de vacaciones” el verano pasado a la ciudad balnearia de Torrevieja.

Ha vuelto ya @politibot de vacaciones. Vuelve te echamos de menos

— Daniel Torrejón (@Dtorrejonm) July 4, 2016

Pero han sido más bien unas vacaciones laborales, ya que el equipo comenzó a construir una plataforma de bot-making basada en lo que había aprendido de su experimento del verano electoral de España, con la ayuda de un subsidio Google DNI por un valor de EUR50.000 en noviembre de 2016. El “sistema de gestión de bots” que otros medios podrán utilizar para construir chatbots personalizados incluye analíticas más útiles para los propósitos de una redacción que las que ofrecen Telegram (a través de Yandex) o Facebook Messenger, y más personalización para usuarios individuales. La composición del equipo de ocho personas da cuenta de las ambiciones de sus fundadores: a bordo hay un periodista, un diseñador, ingenieros que han trabajado en el procesamiento del lenguaje natural, cientistas políticos y científicos de datos (el jefe de tecnología de Politibot, Miguel Gil Biraud, me explicó estos nuevos desarrollos de la plataforma durante la conferencia de la Global Editors Network el mes pasado en Viena).

“Alguien dijo una vez de Politibot que era casi socrático; tenía la impresión de que entendía mejor las cosas de esta manera”, dijo Suárez. “Tenemos la plataforma y la experiencia. Los problemas con que se encontrarán ya los hemos tenido antes y podemos ayudarles con eso, esperando que consigan la misma retención y compromiso que nosotros”.

Aproximadamente dos tercios del dinero de Google DNI fueron destinados al desarrollo de la plataforma y el tercio restante a producir contenido original para Politibot. Después de una revisión de la plataforma backend del bot, el equipo resucitó Politibot para Telegram y añadió una versión limitada para Facebook Messenger durante la primavera. Comenzó a probar nuevamente contenido editorial ampliado, incluyendo resúmenes de noticias, análisis de temas fuera de España, tablas informativas para Instagram y un podcast político. El equipo tuvo que renunciar a su audiencia del año pasado tras cerrar el bot original, pero la segunda temporada del bot atrajo a más de 6.200 usuarios a través de las dos plataformas, de los cuales 3.400 abrieron el bot una vez por semana y 2.400 todos los días; una excelente base de usuarios para apuntar a cualquier posible suscripción o programa de membresía, dijo Suárez.

Recién en julio acaban de comenzar a recaudar fondos a través de Patreon para construir la parte editorial de la empresa. Suárez dijo que al equipo le encantaría recibir US$2.000 mensuales de ayuda de los lectores para sumar un periodista y ayudar a pagar los servidores, y está trabajando en contenido exclusivo como forma de pago a los seguidores (les falta una quinta parte del total para llegar a este objetivo).

La otra fuente de ingresos de la compañía serán los clientes que pagan por utilizar su plataforma de creación de bots, por su instalación, por la solución de problemas y por el asesoramiento. También están considerando la publicidad (bots publicitarios en serie, sugirió Suárez), aunque no han avanzado en ese sentido. Por el momento, están en conversaciones con un par de publicaciones españolas y, según cuentan Suárez y Biraud, se están buscando niveles de pago mensuales escalonados adaptados a la organización, basados en el número de mensajes enviados por el bot personalizado y la complejidad del bot requerido por el medio.

“En este momento estamos funcionando más como una consultoría y conversando con salas de redacción sobre la instalación de la plataforma. La primera parte de la conversación es siempre igual: ‘¿para qué quieres un chatbot?'”, cuenta Suárez. “Si solo quieres un chatbot que sea un RSS [feed] que brinda contenido adaptado al usuario de acuerdo a sus gustos y envía notificaciones en torno a eso, claro, es una opción. Pero nuestra experiencia dice que probablemente sea más útil construir un tipo de conversación interactiva a través del chatbot; una conversación que realmente le dé al lector una razón para volver”.

Suárez y Biraud reconocieron que existen alternativas como Chatfuel o la gratuita Wit.ai, pero las características de la plataforma de bot-making de Politibot fueron perfeccionadas con las necesidades de las organizaciones de noticias en mente. Por ejemplo, para su experimento electoral español, Politibot perfiló a los usuarios por edad y género, y luego les mostró cómo estaba votando su franja demográfica según las encuestas. En otra interacción, le pidió su ubicación a los usuarios y, a continuación, devolvió un gráfico que mostraba los resultados de su distrito electoral. Y si quieres ofrecer contenido exclusivo a un segmento de suscriptores pagos, la plataforma Politibot puede también ayudar con eso.

“Necesitas diferentes analíticas para medir chatbots, ya que las páginas vistas no tienen sentido. Nos tomó un tiempo encontrar métricas apropiadas”, dijo Biraud. “Ahora tenemos una manera de mostrar un mapa de calor de las conversaciones, que marca dónde el bot de un medio pierde usuarios, qué ramas de la conversación siguen los usuarios individuales y qué usuarios individuales están interesados. Podríamos tener una opción de conversación sobre el Brexit y otra sobre política francesa, y si el usuario nunca va por las ramas de Brexit, necesitamos pensar qué otra cosa podemos mostrarle”.

Algunos medios grandes como el New York Times o la BBC inevitablemente ganarán cuando se trata de construir experiencias de bot, dijo Biraud, pero “los grupos de medios más pequeños apenas están sobreviviendo. No tienen los recursos. Podemos resolver algunos problemas por ellos”.