Piotr Zieliński

Where do our charts come from?

Piotr joined Sejmometr Media in March 2021. Since then, he has prepared exactly 148 interactive summaries regarding Chancellery expenditures and MP activity. Numbers don't lie, which is why Piotr spends the first 4 hours of every new project laboriously cleaning data from CSV and PDF files. We are not looking for flashy animations here that add nothing to the topic. It's about every citizen understanding a complicated budget in less than 12 seconds.

Specifics instead of colorful pictures

In his daily work, Piotr mainly uses the D3.js library and Python to process raw statistics from Wiejska. Last quarter, he analyzed 83 attendance lists from finance committee meetings. The result was clear: only 31% of MPs participated in every vote. These are the concrete data points we bring to light. No political babble and unnecessary adjectives that only cloud the picture.

• Preparation of 47 report templates for local media in 2023.
• Verification of 156 asset declarations regarding owned real estate.
• Automation of data downloads from the parliamentary information system, which shortened our work by 3.2 hours a day.
• Development of a fuel expenditure map for the 12 most active parliamentary offices in Lesser Poland.

Experience based on facts

Before joining our team, Piotr worked for 5 years in a Krakow newsroom dealing with urban data. There he learned that one wrong comma in a table destroys the credibility of the entire report. We have checked it in the tables many times – errors most often appear when manually rewriting amounts from parliamentary prints. That's why Piotr automated this process for us by 87%, which eliminates the human factor when entering figures.

The process of creating one infographic usually takes us 3 to 5 working days. We don't promise miracles in an hour because reliable visualization requires source verification in the official protocol. Piotr ensures that every dot on the chart has its reference in the documentation. In October 2024, he detected a discrepancy of 4,300 PLN in the flat-rate settlement of one of the offices, which became the basis for our large article. (Heads-up: Piotr only drinks coffee from a black mug, claiming that colors on his desk distract him when calculating moving averages).

If you need a specific data set for your article or broadcast, Piotr will prepare a ready graphic file for you. We usually send the first draft within 48 hours of establishing the data scope. You can order a single chart from us or permanent monitoring of a specific parliamentary committee.