Hi HN,

I’m the creator of donation.watch.

I built this tool over the years primarily for myself. I had some questions about political finance flows that were impossible to answer just by staring at the raw tables published by governments.

I needed a way to visualize the insights for my own curiosity. Since the result was useful, I polished it up and published it so everyone else can explore the data too.

The Architecture (No Database): To keep it fast and low-maintenance, there is no running database.

- backend: The scrapers are run locally and pre-generate the entire dataset into static JSON files

- frontend: The client loads these JSON chunks on demand. Many pages are staticly pre-rendered on build.

- stack: It’s a next.js app, hosted via OpenNext on Cloudflare Workers.

Moving Next.js to the edge (using OpenNext) combined with a purely static data model means the site is cheap to host and scales instantly, even when a big new dataset drops.

The "Open Data" reality:

While building the scrapers to answer my questions, I encountered some data quirks. A few favorites:

- The Greek Belgian: One 2021 EU foundation document randomly used Greek unicode characters (ΒΕ) instead of ASCII (BE) for the Belgium country code.

- The Encoding: All Austrian CSVs were standard UTF-8, except the 2022 file which was randomly encoded in Mac OS Roman (Apple Macintosh).

- The Vanishing Files: The Croatian Electoral Commission’s database has 404 errors for specific 2019/2020 party donation lists that used to be there. They made them available again after being informed about this issue.

I report these quirks upstream so the next developer doesn't have to suffer. I keep a log of the weirdest ones here: https://donation.watch/en/fun.

I’ve finally cleaned up the code a bit and open-sourced the whole thing (AGPL-3.0 for code, CC BY 4.0 for the data).

Repo: https://github.com/donationwatch/donationwatch

Site: https://donation.watch

I'm looking to add more countries. Do you know of any additional countries public donation datasets that are actually machine-readable (CSV/JSON/API)?

I've already investigated a few that are currently too messy (e.g., scanned PDFs or bad formats), listed here: https://donation.watch/en/other-countries. I'd like to integrate the US dataset in the future. The issue was that it's really big and I still have to figure out a good way to filter uninteresting donations out.

Very welcome and useful initiative. I deeply hate the fact that it's a next.js app (these apps simply should not be an option for the web unless HTML has somehow disappeared without a trace and humanity can't remember that it has ever existed) and not an HTML site with some JS where needed / useful. I suppose I understand the appeal and the convenience from a development point of view.

Open-sourcing the code is commendable and I'm happy to see this.

> Do you know of any additional countries public donation datasets that are actually machine-readable (CSV/JSON/API)?

I recently came across https://banipartide.ro/ but I'm not entirely sure whether they made all their data machine-readable. I found this: https://db.banipartide.ro/banipartide/Venituri+anuale+din+ra...