[ddj] Politician data tools/sites

Mon Aug 17 09:48:57 UTC 2015

Hi Matthew

Code for South Africa (http://code4sa.org <http://code4sa.org/>) recently rebuilt the South African Parliamentary Monitoring Group's website (https://pmg.org.za/ <https://pmg.org.za/>). PMG is a non-profit that monitors parliamentary activity, and has a huge amount of data. I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, so I'll briefly give some highlights:
- Built on Python (Flask)
- ElasticSeach to search the archive
- Flask-Admin for the admin interface
- It has a (mostly) open API: https://api.pmg.org.za/ <https://api.pmg.org.za/>
- The code is all available on Github: https://github.com/Code4SA/pmg-cms-2 <https://github.com/Code4SA/pmg-cms-2>
- For MPs, questions, etc, it links to another PMG website, People's Assembly (http://www.pa.org.za/ <http://www.pa.org.za/>), which is operated by MySociety, and I think has popit in there

The data we were dealing with:
- Minutes and summaries of more than 18,000 Committee Meetings of 116 Committees
- Progress, debates and versions of more than 500 Bills
- Hansards, minutes and summaries of over 600 meetings of the National Assembly, National Council of Provinces and Joint Sittings
- Thousands of hours of Committee Meeting audio recordings
- Over 300GB of supplementary PDFs, documents and audio

There's a bit more info here:
http://code4sa.org/2015/03/31/17-years-parliamentary-info.html <http://code4sa.org/2015/03/31/17-years-parliamentary-info.html>

Hope that helps somehow.

Jason Norwood-Young
Code for South Africa

> On 17 Aug 2015, at 11:18 AM, Matthew Linares <matthew.linares at opendemocracy.net> wrote:
> 
> Hi Andrea,
> 
> We're against the clock to find a solution as well as getting the right data sources worked out, so haven't had time!
> 
> What you describe certainly would be very useful. (It would be great to have some notation standard to allow simple scraping of threads like this where the job you describe has already been done by the group as the sum of replies, but remains unstructured!)
> 
> If there is time, we may assemble such a list, and the data sources we find useful.
> 
> Best,
> 
> 
> Matthew Linares
> Technical & Publications Coordinator
> openDemocracy.net <https://www.opendemocracy.net/>-- 
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> 
> On 13 August 2015 at 08:40, Andrea Nelson Mauro <andrea.nelson.mauro at gmail.com <mailto:andrea.nelson.mauro at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi Matthew,
> 
> Do you're adding all the resources listed in a single spreadsheet/collection? It would be helpful!
> 
> thanks :)
> 
> 2015-08-11 12:26 GMT+02:00 Matthew Linares <matthew.linares at opendemocracy.net <mailto:matthew.linares at opendemocracy.net>>:
> Thanks to everyone who has replied. There's so much excellent stuff going on, it's great to see it all.
> 
> I wonder if anyone has written up a review of the field and how developments are being harmonised. I'm glad to see projects like poplus aiming to reduce redundancy. I'd love to work out what the best and most flexible tools are.
> 
> Please do send over anything else relevant, including any contacts of developers working of with experience in this field.
> 
> 
> Matthew Linares
> Technical & Publications Coordinator
> openDemocracy.net <https://www.opendemocracy.net/>-- 
> Encrypt your mail to me.
> Find out how <https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/en/mac.html>→ My public key <http://pgp.mit.edu/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xD1707CAA65C5B374>→
> 
> On 10 August 2015 at 06:45, Andrea Nelson Mauro <andrea.nelson.mauro at gmail.com <mailto:andrea.nelson.mauro at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> for the Italian side we have some cases of interest:
> 
> - Openpolis <http://openpolis.it/> first: they work since 2007, absolutely pioneers not only in Italy and EU (I think). What they do: 
> tracking the Parliament debate before and after the vote of every single law/framework with OpenParlamento <http://www.openparlamento.it/> (even though data for Italian parliament are widely in open and linked formats thanks to dati.camera.it <http://dati.camera.it/> and dati.senato.it <http://dati.senato.it/>)
> tracking politician programmes: by doing quizzes, you might understand which party you could vote (here's an example per European elections in 2014 <http://europee2014.voisietequi.it/>
> tracking every decision/change of politicians who jump to new parties (check this post with stats <http://blog.openpolis.it/2015/08/03/cambi-di-gruppo-il-valzer-infinito-quota-290/>) and their activities (who do more, who do less), check the live toplist <http://indice.openpolis.it/>
> - Other team of interest is this one behind Pagella Politica <https://pagellapolitica.it/>: they do an everyday-factchecking of politician statements.
> 
> - You may take a look also to both Termometro Politico <http://www.termometropolitico.it/> and YouTrend <http://www.youtrend.it/>: they do similar, essentially to watch polls and results of elections.
> 
> Best,
> Andrea
> 
> 2015-08-10 5:41 GMT+02:00 Fernando Cabigao <fernando.cabigao at gmail.com <mailto:fernando.cabigao at gmail.com>>:
> Hi Matthew,
> 
> You may want to check http://moneypolitics.pcij.org <http://moneypolitics.pcij.org/>. It focuses on Philippine politicians' wealth, election campaign finances, the use of public funds, and socio-economic data.
> 
> Best,
> 
> Fernando Cabigao Jr.
> Researcher-Writer
> Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism
> 
> On Thu, Aug 6, 2015 at 7:30 PM, Matthew Linares <matthew.linares at opendemocracy.net <mailto:matthew.linares at opendemocracy.net>> wrote:
> Hello all,
> 
> I am looking for a few things which I think people here may know about. Any leads will be most appreciated!
> 
> 1) Good examples of platforms collating data on politicians (or structurally similar subjects), particularly where those platforms enable search and complex querying of the data. theyworkforyou <http://www.theyworkforyou.com/>, popit <http://popit.poplus.org/> (not actively developed) are examples I know of, but I'm looking for best in class projects from across the world, both active and otherwise, open and closed source.
> 
> 2) Anyone know why popit is no longer actively developed?
> 
> 3) Developers and others involved in the making, maintenance or analysis of this kind of software and datasets.
> 
> 4) Aside from the datasets in use at theyworkforyou <http://parser.theyworkforyou.com/>, useful sources of data (structured and otherwise) on UK politicians. This may be significant data relating to them explicitly as politicians, or referencing them as individuals in other fields (e.g. opencorporates <https://opencorporates.com/> which might be cross-queried with members data <https://github.com/mysociety/parlparse/tree/master/members>). Alternately, non-UK specific ideas about how to query data of this sort across domains.
> 
> 5) Any good resources which detail developments and resources in this field.
> 
> 
> Thank you for your thoughts!
> 
> 
> Matthew Linares
> Technical & Publications Coordinator
> openDemocracy.net <https://www.opendemocracy.net/>-- 
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> -- 
> Andrea Nelson Mauro - Datajournalist 
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