[liberationtech] EveryPolitician "Destination 200" for GLOW week

[Steven Clift]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Dave Whiteland" <dave at mysociety.org>
Date: Sep 7, 2015 11:09 AM
Subject: [Poplus] EveryPolitician "Destination 200" for GLOW week
To: "poplus" <poplus at googlegroups.com>
Cc:

Hello Poplus people

We're having a busy week this week on EveryPolitician! For Global
Legislative Openness Week (GLOW), we're doing a push to try to get
data in place for 200 countries' legislatures.

If you don't know about EveryPolitician already, this is a good time
to find out about it. We're ambitiously aiming to store and share open
data on every national-level legislator in the world at
http://everypolitician.org/

The blog post announcing our GLOW push is here:
https://www.mysociety.org/2015/09/07/how-quickly-can-we-get-to-200-countries-on-every-politician/

There are two things we're particularly hoping you may be able to help
with (well, three really). One is to help identify sources of
comprehensive politician data we can use or scrape. This might be
easy, especially if it's for your country and you already know where
there's a published list of politicians.

Just to be clear -- we looking for comprehensive data sources, that
is, those that contain all the current legislators. These sources
might be pages on an official website, or they might be the work of
civic groups like us. The data might be rich (dates of birth, twitter
handles, and so on) or it might just be names. For example, if you can
tell that Wikipedia has comprehensive data for a country, because you
know that country, then we’re happy to use that. (Oh, also: current
data is good of course, but we’d love to get historic data too, and
that sometimes needs a little more specialist knowledge to unearth,
but we think some of you on the Poplus list might be those kind of
people).

The second way to help is a bit more of a leap, and that's for
countries where we do have a source of data, but for which we haven't
written a scraper (yet). We'd really appreciate anyone who can write a
scraper picking a country we haven't done yet, and making it
happen[1].

You can see the countries we need help with here:
http://everypolitician.org/needed.html

The third way to help is of course to *use* EveryPolitician data. Our
objective in curating the EveryPolitician data the way we do [2] is to
make it almost unavoidable that if someone builds a handy, funky, or
profound tool for handling the data on *their* country, it will
probably be easy for people in other countries to repurpose it. But
I'm getting ahead of myself: *this* week is all about seeing if we can
reach a target of 200 by identifying data sources and pulling that
data into EveryPolitician. Thanks in advance for joining in and/or
sharing the word!

Yours
Dave
mySociety

[1] some guidance on scrapers for EveryPolitician:
http://everypolitician.org/scrapers.html

[2] “consistent and useful”
http://everypolitician.org/data_structure.html -- so the JSON we put
out is Popolo (of course!) but we’re applying EveryPolitician
conventions on how data is presented. There’s a lot of freedom in the
spec, because it’s expressive, so we are limiting that in order to
keep everything consistent.

--
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