Collaborative ShinyApp for georeferencing public schools in Brazil

Gabriela Marin | Paulo Kuester

October 13, 2025

Why build such an APP?

Who are we, why do we care, why did we need this?

Brazilian Internet Governance Model

Internet Steering Committee CGI

Mission: improve the Internet access and quality in Brasil

Brasil’s RIPE NCC NIC.br

Regional Internet Registry for Europe


Put all CGI decisions into practice

  • Internet Exchange points (IXs) in Brazil
  • Information and Communication Technology (ICTs) surveys
  • Internet Quality measurements tools

Broadband measurement area


We aim to

  • Contribute to the universalization of Internet access

  • Understand the patterns of connectivity in Brazil

  • Identify digital inequality

  • Enable assertive decision making

  • People install or use our tool
  • We collect, monitor and analyze the quality of the Internet in Brazil

Schools Schools

Public school project

Back in 2020 we wanted to create a map with all schools and several ICT indicators

https://conectividadenaeducacao.nic.br

https://conectividadenaeducacao.nic.br

Let's plot all schools! Oh, wait...
  • 49,204 (29.4%) schools without any geo location data!
  • Some were placed in the ocean!
Important for centralized, high level education policies
  • Distance to the nearest fiber connection
  • Cost estimating for connecting schools and effective resource allocation
  • Improved educational planning

Public school project

  • 49,204 (29.4%) schools without any geo location data!

  • Some were placed in the ocean!

Important for centralized, high level education policy
  • Distance to the nearest fiber connection
  • Cost estimating for connecting schools and effective resource allocation
  • Improved educational planning


So we begin our crusade to find all schools!

.



Quick disclosure




UK fits about 35 times into Brazil






Brasil

  • 5 regions







  • 5 regions



  • 27 states





  • 5 regions



  • 27 states



  • 5,568 cities



  • 5 regions



  • 27 states



  • 5,568 cities



  • 160,215 public schools

Not our first solution

Affiliated organizations, APIs, visiting…

Taken Approaches

Affiliated organizations

  • Maybe the Telecomunication Agency knows?
  • Internet Providers?

Geolocation APIs

  • Open Street Map
  • TomTom
  • Bing (Microsoft)
  • Google

Visiting

  • I always travel with a list of unlocated schools, business or vacation


Data source Geolocated Schools
Ministry of Education 107,940
Affiliated organizations 5,088
APIs 28,167
Still missing 19,020

The APP

User experience, Packages used, Data Storage…

Geolocation collection



Data Storage

Used packages



Shiny

library(shiny)
library(shinyjs)
library(shinyWidgets)



Maps

library(sf)
library(leaflet)
library(leaflet.extras)



Data Manipulation

library(dplyr)





API communication

library(curl)
library(jsonlite)
library(httr)

Results

All the numbers

Results


  • 215,341 contributions recieved


  • For 72,060 different schools


  • 675 (0.5%) schools without previous information

Struggles

Not quite as expected…

Results

How to deal with multiple contribution?

Average of 2.99 contributions per school

Struggles







Since we had the bad feedback, we are only accepting those 675 contributions without previous data

Struggles

Maybe change the way the ShinyApp works?

Struggles

Maybe inform user about how it works?


Note

Important: Your contribution will be curated and may be accepted within a few weeks



Maybe prevent geolocation contributions for schools we trust the original datasource?


Note

Important: We already have good intel for this school, no contribution needed. Thank you!

Struggles

Maybe change the sources we trust?

.




Any suggestion would be appreciated!