Huge news:
https://www.mysociety.org/2015/09/15/everypolitician-200-countries-and-counting/
Can you help with these remaining countries?
http://everypolitician.org/needed.html
The text from the blog post above:
EveryPolitician – 200 countries and counting
Posted byMyfanwy15th September 2015
Posted in Projects
Amazing—we did it!
When we decided to mark Global Legislative Openness Week with a drive
to get the data for 200 countries up on EveryPolitician, in all
honesty, we weren’t entirely sure it could be done.
And without the help of many people we wouldn’t have got there. But
last night, we put live the data for North Korea and Sweden, making us
one country over the target.
The result? There is now consistently-structured, reusable data
representing the politicians in 201 countries, ready for anyone to
pick up and work with. We hope you will.
That’s not to say that our job is over… far from it! There’s still
plenty more to be done, as we’ll explain below.
Here’s how it happened
Getting the data for each country was a multi-step process, aided by
many people. First, a suitable online source had to be located. Then,
a scraper would be written: a piece of code that could visit that
source and pull out the information we needed—names, districts,
political parties, dates of office, etc—and put it all in the right
format.
Because each country’s data had its own idiosyncrasies and formatting,
we needed a different scraper for every country.
Once written, we added each scraper to EveryPolitician’s list.
Crucially, scrapers aren’t just a one-off deal: ideally they’ll
continue to work over time as legislatures and politicians change.
The map above shows our progress during GLOW week, from 134 countries,
where we began, up to today’s count of 201.
Thanks to
mySociety’s Tony, Lead on the EveryPolitician project, worked non-stop
this week to get as many countries as possible online. But this week
we’ve seen EveryPolitician reach some kind of momentum, as it takes
off as a community project. It’s an ambitious idea, and it can only
succeed with the help of this kind of community effort. Thanks to
everyone who helped, including (in no particular order):
Duncan Walker for writing the scraper for Uganda; Joshua Tauberer for
helping with the USA data;Struan Donald for handling Ecuador, Japan,
Hong Kong, Serbia and the Netherlands; Dave Whiteland, with
ThaiNetizen helpfully finding the data source for Thailand; Team
Popong for South Korean data; Jenna Howe for her work on El Salvador;
Rubeena Mahato, Chris Maddock,Kätlin Traks, François Briatte,
@confirmordeny, and @foimonkey for lots of help on finding data;Henare
Degan and OpenAustralia who made the scraper for Ukraine; Matthew
Somerville for covering the Falkland islands and Sweden; Liz Conlan
for lots of help with Peru and American Samoa; Jaroslav Semančík who
provided data for, and assistance with, Slovakia; Mathias Huterwho
supplied current data for Austria while Steven Hirschorn wrote a
scraper for the historic data;Andy Lulham who wrote a scraper for
Gibraltar; Abigail Rumsey who wrote a scraper for Sri Lanka;everyone
who tweeted encouragement or retweeted our requests for help.
But there’s more
There are still 40 or so countries for which we have no data at all:
you can see them here. This week has provided an enormous boost to our
data, but the site’s real target is, just like the name says, to cover
every politician in the world.
And once we’ve done that, there’s still the matter of both historic
data, and more in-depth data for the politicians we do have. Thus far,
we mostly have only the lower houses for most countries which have two
— and for many countries we only have the current politicians. Going
into the future we need to include much richer data on all
politicians, including voting records, et cetera.
Meanwhile, our first target, to have a list of the current members of
every national legislature in the world, is starting to look like it’s
not so very far away. If you’d like to help us reach it, here’s how
you still can.
Steven Clift - Executive Director, E-Democracy.org
cl...@e-democracy.org - +1 612 234 7072
@democracy - http://linkedin.com/in/netclift
Also with Knowledge Hub - steven.cl...@khub.net
World leading online public services exchange: http://khub.net
Call # above or +44 203 808 1118 (After 13:00 UK time)
On Mon, Sep 7, 2015 at 4:14 PM, Steven Clift wrote:
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: "Dave Whiteland"
> Date: Sep 7, 2015 11:09 AM
> Subject: [Poplus] EveryPolitician "Destination 200" for GLOW week
> To: "poplus"
> 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