---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "Dave Whiteland" <[email protected]> Date: Sep 7, 2015 11:09 AM Subject: [Poplus] EveryPolitician "Destination 200" for GLOW week To: "poplus" <[email protected]> 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. -- Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Poplus - Collaborative Civic Coding" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/poplus. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CAEhW%2BAHrNS1usG%3Do8Bbf2e19d32f%2B9WmnqnR-Ep0aA0oj145zw%40mail.gmail.com . For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. ―― View topic http://groups.dowire.org/r/topic/1YLWeX2T02WacpNswRWfQ9 Leave group mailto:[email protected]?Subject=Unsubscribe
