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

Tue Mar 6 23:33:02 UTC 2012

Great ! A lot better than what we have over here...
I've filled the pad with the mapit's urls correspondign to each EUR region.
Does the same service exist for Ireland ?

Anyone from Poland, Belgium or Italy knowing about the situation in
these countries ?

Benjamin

On Mon, Mar 5, 2012 at 18:53, Benjamin Sims <benjaminsims at gmail.com> wrote:
> This information (postcode - electoral district mapping) is available in the
> UK at:
>
> http://mapit.mysociety.org/
>
> Our postcodes are pretty granular (one postcode will equal, for example, one
> block of flats or side of a street) so this should do the trick for you.
>
> 2012/3/4 Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou <b.ooghe at gmail.com>
>>
>> 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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>
>