[Open-Legislation] WhosYourMEP as OpenData?

Sun Mar 4 22:47:27 UTC 2012

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