[okfn-be] DierenTheater, parsing (lachambre|dekamer).be (was Re: presentation)

Sun Mar 4 17:36:23 UTC 2012

Hello Bart,

On Sun, Mar 04, 2012 at 03:08:04PM +0100, Hanssens Bart wrote:
> Very interesting, especially if it could be a flow from preparing a law till the final published text.
> [snip]
> So there seems to be a group of people interested in publishing various parliamentary / legal
> texts in a more (machine-)reusable way ...

You can also contact http://regardscitoyens.org, they are also working
on something similar.

On my side I'm open if you need data or modifications of the current
API (which is still work in progress).

But to warn you: we are in a *very* bad situation in Belgium because
every law project is store in pdfs that is the worse format to
transform into data (just behind scanned documents). We don't have
structured informations or something that we can easily transform into
structured informations :/

I have some code to try to output something usable but this is highly
experimental and with a very high chance of bugs.

> Hi Laurent,

Hello Pieter,

> This is great work!

Thanks :)

Just to reformulate the aim of my project before answering your
questions.

When you want to build a website like http://nosdeputes.fr you proceed
like this:
- you get the data (parsing official website in general)
- you build the website using this data
- and you do communications/meet the press/legislative analysis on
  opendata etc ...

Now my situation:
- we don't have a nosdeputes.fr in Belgium or anything similar.
- I want similar websites in Belgium
- I don't have a lot of freetime
- I don't like and aren't very experimented in building website, I'm a
  backend and scripting (including parsing) guy (thus I know powerful
  techno like django or beautifulsoup/lxml and wish and know how to learn)
- I don't like lobbying, legislative analysis and communication and I
  don't think I'm very good about this
- I don't have the strength to build nosdeputes.be alone
- I still want to change things and having, among other, a nosdeputes.be

So, how can I still get to this? I've decided to do what I know to do
and to do it well: I'm building the first part (aka getting the data)
to allow *everyone* to do the last 2 part the way they wish to do
that.

So the intent of this project is to get data and to offer data to
everybody (via an API and by offering a dump (I'm coding this right
now in fact)). There is already a lot to do, especially if I want to
do this well (you can think for example about the pdf parsing).

I don't have any intent, for the moment, to do anything more like
actually building a nosdeputes.be.

However, DierenTheater is build in a modular way (thanks to django)
and extending it to build next to it a nosdeputes.be is totally
possible. This is absolutely not my current intent but if a team build
itself and want to do this I'll but very happy to help them if this is
their techno choice.

> How do you wish to advertise this to the public?

My targeted public is devs, maybe data journalists and people
conscious of the situation that can advertise this to devs.

I haven't planned something but I'm thinking about: well okfn-be to
start :p, hackdemocracy-be, constantvzw, nurpa, the lugs, the
hackerspaces, regardscitoyens has offered to relay the information,
maybe reddit.com/r/belgium, maybe hackernews, linuxfr, the ml 42 and
my current mental list ends here.
Also by asking persons if they know who can be interested by this.
For example: do you have any idea of person I can add to this list?

Maybe I'll also do some data visualisations to give people an idea of
what can be accomplished.

> What is the end-product you have in mind?

A website offering all scraped data via API and dumps.

> I think for this to become really useful for end-users we need an
> information architect to put all these things in order.
> What do you think?

I totally think the same thing than you! But I'm not building it and
I'm not planning to build it. A least not right now.

This will either be build by a team (or someone alone) using the API
I'm building (I'll be helping by improving the datas I'm providing an
co) or by a team in which I'll be if the technological choice match
mine by either building a new website or by extending DierenTheater.

Damned, I'm making too long email, sorry for that :/

Have a nice Sunday,

-- 

Laurent Peuch -- Bram