[okfn-labs] Parliamentary Monitoring Software

[Adi Eyal]

Hi Stef

Thanks for the email. Thankfully, I already have access to all the
relevant documents so the scraping nightmare that you describe doesn't
apply.

Adi

On 22 May 2014 15:30, stef <s at ctrlc.hu> wrote:
> 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



-- 
Adi Eyal
Director
Code for South Africa
Promoting informed decision-making

phone: +27 78 014 2469
skype: adieyalcas
linkedin: http://za.linkedin.com/pub/dir/Adi/Eyal
web: http://www.code4sa.org
twitter: @soapsudtycoon

For more information on how to participate in the open data community
in South Africa, go to: http://www.code4sa.org/#community