About the Association
Transparency for Citizens is an independent civic association based in Seville, Spain. We observe, document and openly publish verifiable facts about the real functioning of public information access rights at the municipal level.
Identity
Transparencia para la Ciudadanía (Transparency for Citizens) is a non-profit civic association constituted to contribute to an informed and verifiable understanding of how institutional transparency mechanisms actually function.
The Association does not replace institutional oversight bodies, nor does it issue political or legal judgements. Its activity consists of observing, documenting and publishing verifiable facts in a reproducible manner, with explicit methodology and full open access to all results.
It operates from a position of civic observation, without partisan affiliation, and bases its credibility exclusively on the methodological quality and transparency of its own working process.
Key facts
| Full name | Transparencia para la Ciudadanía |
| Country | Spain |
| Location | Seville, Andalusia |
| Type | Non-profit civic association |
| Active since | 2025 |
| Repository | Zenodo / OpenAIRE |
| ORCID | 0009-0000-8891-7021 |
Context
The right of access to public information is recognised in Spanish law (Law 19/2013) and enshrined in broader European and international frameworks on democratic governance. Public bodies are legally required to respond to information requests within one month.
The Association's first empirical project — the Seville Provincial Transparency Observatory — tested this right across all 106 municipalities of the province of Seville. The results document a rate of non-compliance of 85.8%: more than four out of five municipalities did not respond within the legal deadline.
If transparency is a foundational pillar of democracy, the systemic ineffectiveness of access rights is not a minor technical problem. It is a structural problem of democratic quality — and one that deserves to be documented, published and made legible at European scale.
"85.8% of the 106 municipalities of the province of Seville did not respond to a formal public information request within the legal one-month deadline."
Query 1 — Seville Provincial Transparency Observatory · January 2026
Principles
Four principles govern every project, from design to publication.
Explicit, universal and homogeneous criteria applied to the full universe of subjects. Minimal interpretation. Maximum reproducibility. Every result can be independently verified.
All data, methodology and documentation are published in open repositories with permanent identifiers (DOI). Nothing is withheld. Indexed in OpenAIRE.
No partisan affiliation. No institutional funder with oversight. No commercial interest. Credibility rests entirely on the quality and openness of the process.
Every data point links to its primary source. Every version is registered. The full dossier — including human–AI collaboration where applicable — is public and documented.
Track record
The Association is in its first operational phase. The following has already been produced, published and externally received.
Full report, audited dataset (CSV + XLSX), methodology and supporting documentation published in open access. Indexed in OpenAIRE.
DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18263105 →Upon discovering that the dossier was being published openly, the regional oversight body broke its own administrative silence and urgently requested a meeting — a verifiable institutional reaction to the project's findings.
Coverage in two Spanish media outlets: eldiario.es (national digital newspaper specialising in political and social affairs) and Diario de Sevilla (leading provincial newspaper).
The project's methodological framework was cited in formal academic research — the first recorded instance of external academic reception of the corpus.
Open data policy
Every dataset, report, methodology document and supporting file produced by the Association is published in full on Zenodo, with a permanent DOI, under open access conditions. No data is withheld, embargoed or restricted.
This is not a gesture. It is a methodological commitment: a civic evidence project that does not fully account for its own process cannot credibly demand accountability from others.