[open-government] [Open-Legislation] WhosYourMEP as OpenData?

Sun Mar 4 23:08:15 UTC 2012

Hi,

it is easy in the Czech Rep. and Slovakia - single constituency in each 
country.

But we have encountered problem with postcodes, which led us to leave 
the idea using postcodes - for Czech Parliament or Prague city council 
(which may be the same problem in some of those 5 countries, which do 
have constituencies in EP): one postcode can belong to more 
constituencies (e.g., up to 4 in the parliament).
But this problem led us to do better than we thought: We (or our users) 
can use any address-like input (not just postcode) and we let Google do 
the magic.

Michal

On 2012-03-04 23:47, Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou wrote:
> Dear everyone,
>
> Jérémie from the Internet freedoms advocacy group LaQuadrature.net
> asked us recently whether it was possible to know precisely from one's
> postcode anywhere in the EU who their representatives at the European
> parliament is or are.
> Having this kind of information could provide a great improval for
> advocacy tools such as LaQuadrature's freshly created piPhone :
> http://piphone.lqdn.fr/?setlang=en
>
> For example in France, official data lacks quality, but precise postal
> codes correlated with elective boundaries could be recreated since the
> European boundaries only assemble smaller subdivisions :
> http://www.nosdonnees.fr/package/listes-des-communes-par-rgions-dpartements-circonscriptions
>
> But I understand every country has its own elective systems for its
> MEPs, sometimes by zone, sometimes not, sometimes proportionnal,
> sometimes nominal, sometimes by language spoken. Also postal codes may
> not be existing as databases everywhere. Some countries also seem to
> have only one geographical zones which makes it a lot simplier :
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament_constituency
>
> So the questions are :
>   - Do we have people from every EU country on all these mailing-lists ?
>   - Do we have for all members of the european parliament an
> electoral_zone_id that could be used commonly to identify one MEP
> through the different european parliament data scrapers (this is a
> call to parltrack mepwatch votewatch itsyourparliament and so on! ;) )
>   - If so, can we provide for each 27 countries a csv with
> country;electoral_zone_id;postal_code(or list of postal_codes)
>   - Anybody interested in opening a simple platform to collect those
> and crowdsource the missing info if there is any ?
>
> As a start here's a pad with all EU circonscriptions listed by country
> so that we can identify in which countries we already have all the
> needed info :
> https://pad.lqdn.fr/p/bP9pBHJwJa
>
> Also another approach could be, considering the size of the considered
> boundaries, to just use coordinates within a big svg to cocreate that
> would assemble all European circonscriptions/districts.
>
> In any case, it sounds like a democratic challenge we could accomplish
> altogether :)
>
> Best,
>
> Benjamin for Regards Citoyens
>
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-- 
Mgr. Michal Škop, Ph.D.
KohoVolit.eu
michal.skop at kohovolit.eu
+420 775 187 021 / +420 721 484 915