Agustín Benassi

Data Architect & Product Owner

About me

Economist from Buenos Aires University and self taught programmer, currently working as Public Data Director at the Secretariat of Modernisation, part of the Argentina's Cabinet Office.

I have experience designing the data architecture of big organizations as well as for particular application systems, and managing multidisciplinary teams with developers, designers, data analysts and project managers to build the different parts of a user centered data infrastructure.

In my daily work I design and enforce data standards, craft administrative resolutions, manage contracts, develop product requirements and negotiate with areas to get data assets properly developed, managed and published.

Contact information

​agusbenassi@gmail.com | twitter| github ​| medium ​| linkedin ​

Experience

Undersecretary of Open Government and Public Innovation · Cabinet Office of Argentina

I coordinate the design and implementation of the Open Data Policy at the national level, build an open data infrastructure and assist different government units in improving their data management capabilities.

I currently manage an in-house team of data analysts, designers, system administrators and product managers together with a contracted team of font-end, back-end and QA developers.

I also design and manage the implementation of data based technological solutions for particular projects with our government partners.

Products I have managed:

• Time Series API and related tools. A practical API to query time series data - following ​FRED​s inspiration - and its ecosystem of tools to transform data into time series, validate time series catalogs and visualize time series on the web. This project required designing a metadata standard and several ETL routines, together with negotiating with partners data publishing and delivering within the system. Also I conducted user research to target specific data user needs for building user oriented product features.
  

  ​Github repo​sitory

• Georef API​. An API to normalize geographical names in Argentina, geolocate addresses and expand coordinates associated data. This was a part of the national data architecture oriented to ease data assets interoperability.
  

  ​Github repo​sitory

• Portal Andino. The technology behind the National Open Data Portal of Argentina and several portals of other ministries, provinces and cities. Built following a designed metadata standard for documenting data assets in Argentina and part of our federated strategy to consolidate management of different organizations data.
  

  ​Github repo​sitory

• API Gateway​. A tool to manage public APIs, used to ease our data API developments.
• Precios Claros​ (not open source). I designed a technical data specification for a normative resolution under which supermarkets securely transfer daily prices lists across the country to a centralized data base. Also managed the development of the back-end and API of the system.

Other published open source projects from the Public Data Direction are at ​Argentina’s Data Team Github.

Buenos Aires City Government Laboratory

Developed the prototype "Transport Oriented Development" at Buenos Aires City Government Laboratory. I designed data requirements, model, ETL routine and final web application to meet public officials users needs in a challenging time schedule.

Recurse Center

The Recurse Center is a community-driven educational retreat for programmers in New York City. There I sharpen my programming technical skills together with a top notch technical community of international developers.

Center of Studies of the Situation and Perspectives of Argentina (CESPA) · University of Buenos Aires

Researched about freight transportation networks and Argentina's economic issues. I compiled and built structured data bases and programmed data based simulation models to analyze research scenarios.

Some publications:

• Un Modelo de Costos para el Transporte Terrestre de Cargas en Argentina | PDF
• Transporte Automotor de Cargas en Argentina: una Estimación de Orígenes y Destinos - 2010 | On-line version | PDF | Github repository

Center for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth (CIPPEC)

Modeling and analyzing data bases about transportation and economics. I implemented ETL routines and compiled different data sources oriented to feed a research goals in efficient time frames.

Faculty of Economics · University of Buenos Aires

Compared Economic Systems​, ​Projects Evaluation and Industrial Organisation.

MiNU

Organizing events at civil association doing UN and legislative participative models for young people.

Studies

University of Buenos Aires, Economics Science Faculty

Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires

Selected talks

Regional Conference of Open Data in Latin America and the Caribbean (CONDATOS 2019)

International Open Data Conference (IODC 2018)

Belize Open Week (BOW 2018)

Regional Conference of Open Data in Latin America and the Caribbean (CONDATOS 2016)

Regional Conference of Open Data in Latin America and the Caribbean (CONDATOS 2015)

Certifications

Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO 2017)

Skills

​Contracts Management - Data Design / Architecture - Product Management
Business Analysis - Team Leadership - Agile Development
User Centered Design - Python - Jupyter Notebooks

JavaScript - HTML - CSS - SQL - PostGIS - Git - Github
PEGs - Travis CI - Coveralls