[open-government] Study and DataViz on lobbying at National Assembly in France

Thu Mar 31 14:47:55 UTC 2011

Hi everyone,

We've been wanting to send this e-mail earlier but I guess it's never
too late to show an #OpenData transparency application! :)
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/transparence-france/etude-lobbying/

Our latest project led in collaboration with the french section of
Transprency International concerns influence interests within France's
National Assembly.
The subject is very taboo in France and there is not much infiormation
publicly available apart from an official register of lobbyist
published on the institution's website. Similar to the EU one, this
one lacks in quality though since it counts only about a 100
persons...

Therefore we decided to use the annexes from all parliamentary reports
and extract from it lists of people auditionned by MP's. We first
reveal this already lacks transparency since only 38% of the reports
have such a list.
To work on these information and make it data, we asked the support of
people trhough a crowdsourcing application (
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/transparence-france/crowdsourcing/index.php
) and successfully digitized in only 10 days more than 16000 names of
auditionnees thanks to 3000 people.

It took us some time then to requalify this data, especially to
categorize the different organizations as public, private, unions, ...
In the end we got a dataset of 9000 auditionned organisations (within
3 years at the national Assembly) categorized and thematized which
allowed us to publish a study and a data visualisation (inspired by
the first version of where does my money go) :
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/transparence-france/etude-lobbying/

Unfortunately it is only in French, but we figured it could be of
interest anyways !

Cheers,

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou for Regards Citoyens