[okfn-labs] Parliamentary Monitoring Software

[stef]

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 01:50:08PM +0200, Adi Eyal wrote:
> I was hoping for advice regarding parliamentary monitoring tools. I
> have been asked to develop a CMS for parliamentary monitoring group
> and I am loathe to start from scratch. I know about Pombola but are
> there any others that I should be looking at.

afaik there's none. although in some cases some texts are published in akoma
ntoso, the bulk of the data and its formats are very institution dependent. so
from my experience the most useful you can do is to liberate this data,
publish it in some raw format for anyone to build their own solutions to it,
and to provide some kind of light web frontend for this data. the bulk of the
work will be maintaining the scrapers. in your spare time you can improve the
webfrontend, but you'll never do as awesome stuff as others that you share
your data with :)

tl;dr sorry, you'll have to build this yourself if there's no existing free
software project already dealing with your target institutions.

you can check out the source code on https://github.com/pudo/parltrack for
what this means in the european parliament context. it's a mess. all the edge
cases that you get from bad data make the code one of the best sacrifices to
the great flying spaghetti monster. (i'm the author /o\)

s

-- 
otr fp: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/otr.txt