Myfanwy Nixon at mySociety’s blog and OpeningParliament: “If you need data on the people who make up your parliament, another country’s parliament, or indeed all parliaments, you may be in luck.
Every Politician, the latest Poplus project, aims to collect, store and share information about every parliament in the world, past and present—and it already contains 100 of them.
What’s more, it’s all provided as Open Data to anyone who would like to use it to power a civic tech project. We’re thinking parliamentary monitoring organisations, journalists, groups who run access-to-democracy sites like our own WriteToThem, and especially researchers who want to do analysis across multiple countries.
But isn’t that data already available?
Yes and no. There’s no doubt that you can find details of most parliaments online, either on official government websites, on Wikipedia, or on a variety of other places online.
But, as you might expect from data that’s coming from hundreds of different sources, it’s in a multitude of different formats. That makes it very hard to work with in any kind of consistent fashion.
Every Politician standardises all of its data into the Popolo standard and then provides it in two simple downloadable formats:
- csv, which contains basic data that’s easy to work with on spreadsheets
- JSON which contains richer data on each person, and is ideal for developers
This standardisation means that it should now be a lot easier to work on projects across multiple countries, or to compare one country’s data with another. It also means that data works well with other Poplus Components….(More)”