[open-government] A minister says NosDéputés.fr has a dangerous effect on the French Parliament

[Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou]

Hi everyone,

We've been quite busy the last two weeks : in addition to helping on
the declaration's translation, we've been dealing with some public
criticisms that came from the french minister in charge of the
relationships between the executive and the parliament. We believe
these critics are totally unjustified.

First during a political meeting debating methods to revalorise the
parliament <http://lelab.europe1.fr/t/la-froide-colere-du-ministre-vidalies-contre-les-effets-pervers-du-net-4446>
and then in an interview to a news website
<http://www.pcinpact.com/news/73356-nosdeputes-alain-vidalies-souhaite-pole-reflexion-sur-transparence.htm>,
Alain Vidalies basically said two things:
- our numeric criteria being uncomparable (which we claim as well by
refusing from the start to establish a mixed combination with some
kind of palmares) would be misused in palmares made by local press.
- MPs would have started to speak saying repeated things within
comittee reunions just to appear on our website and therefore would
pollute the debates and make them slower.

We've looked through both our press reviews and actual data and could
not verify any of this. We've actually demonstrated the opposite
showing that the recent debates were in fact shorter than they used to
be in the previous years, the only real bump observable being a few
months before the creation of our website and therefore linked to
institutionnal reforms rather than us.
More details in french are in our answer to the interview we've published here:
http://www.regardscitoyens.org/nosdeputes-fr-%C2%AB-dangereux-%C2%BB-vraiment-nos-reponses-au-ministre-des-relations-avec-le-parlement/

We've met with the minister and his office since then and it sounds
like we all would like the relations to be more constructive and that
we could maybe work together on some colloquium with the institutions
to discuss improvements on the measurement of parliament activity
early next year. It is just too bad they did not realize this before
our open legislative data event in Paris last July... ;)

We'll publish another blog article in french reporting on our meeting
with the minister this afternoon.

Best,

Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou for Regards Citoyens