http://everypolitician.org/
http://www.gender-balance.org/
developed by https://www.mysociety.org/
10-12 countries in the world where governments actually publish good structured data about their politicians.
Other countries you need to scrape etc.
http://everypolitician.org/ is designed to be one platform for this all over this world, so that people can build tools against the one API etc., and not redo the same work.
Every Politician now has current politicians for almost every primary chamber in the world.
"69,355 politicians from 233 countries (so far)"
Uses the http://www.popoloproject.com/ data standards
(at the moment lots of civic tech software is open source, but lots of the time data isn't in the same formats atm, which leads to re-inventing the wheel.)
Challenges
- Lots of countries - works out as one general election every week or so
- New parliament is usually used as an excuse for countries to redo their parliament website, breaking scrapers
- Identifying people across different data sources is very difficult - generally no consistent identifiers for politicans, and names aren't always enough
- Politicans legal name can be different to how people know them
- Politicans may be doing shady activity under other names
- Data even on official sites is often incorrent. (Using info to make controversial statement is a good way to get broken data fixed).
What we really want: what the politicians are *doing*
List of politicians is necessary but not sufficient for this.
Mysociety can't gather all info about what politicians are doing, so want to know what types of information people are specifically looking for / would find most useful.
Currently mysociety is crowd-sourcing gender information for politicans (as this is more easy to crowdsource, and useful for vraious purposes - also useful to have the info individually to aggregate up to e.g. parties - whereas some information that exists about this currently is only aggergate for the entire parliament)
http://www.gender-balance.org/
e.g.
- Show any politican, anywhere in the world, that's received funding from a big oil conglomerate, and then changed their voting pattern.
These sorts of questions are very hard to answer atm, particularly across the world.
In the EU we have http://www.integritywatch.eu/
Has info about auxilliary functions (work on the side)
Want to do the same in the netherlands, but everything is PDFs, and the number of disclosures seems to be smaller than expected.
What information about politicans would be useful to track?:
- Auxiliary functions (see above)
- Lobbying information (exists in the EU)
- Where politicans are employed before/after being in office
Even if mysociety/everypolitican doesn't do these directly, it's important to work together on these.
A good way of working together is using the same IDs e.g. the ones from everypolitican or wikidata
Hope is to build a comon "base layer" around tracking politicans (including everypolitican), so that projects that previously took 9 months might hopefully only take a few weeks.
How do we track information about judges?
http://www.transparency.lt/en/open-courts/ suggests how this might be change.
Meeting of judges from around the world in the netherlands around open courts.