La Donación full source code and documentation

This documentation draft is a work in progress. I expect to have it completed by September 24, 2022.

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

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 businesswoman and socialite Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein.

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 repository holds the full source code of the website at ladonacion.es and the documentation needed to understand its architecture. By open sourcing it I aim to encourage and pave the road for other data and investigative journalists to share their own stories of public interest by reusing and building upon my work.

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

I have gathered all of the data exclusively from 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 ("Biblioteca") 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

I haver collected, analyzed and connected these documents with the help of a custom methodoly 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.

A document-driven tool for exploration

This 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 opinion free framework.

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

Reuse and adapt it to convey your story!

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. ("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")

Technical overview

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.

Deployment

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

How to contact, ask and contribute

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.

How to help

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.

License

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/>.

This documentation draft is a work in progress. I expect to have it completed by September 24, 2022.