Organization: Team POPONG
Project: Pokr - Politics in Korea
Country: South Korea
Government Level: National
Overview: Pokr (pronounced pōker) – short for “Politics in Korea” – was designed and developed by Team POPONG, a non-profit organization from South Korea. Team POPONG’s goal with Pokr is to organize Korean political information and make it universally accessible and useful. The website allows users to search for any official or candidate; proposed bill; political party or administrative region in South Korea.
Background: Team POPONG (POPONG: Public Open POlitical engineeriNG) is a Korean nonprofit, nonpartisan group founded in 2010 that aims to make politics easy and fun via technology. They value political neutrality, process automation and reproducibility, open source and open data.
The team initially created a platform called Korean Political Dictionary that compared candidates standing for election in the National Assembly. At the time, there was very limited amount of information available on public candidates. POPONG began to find this data and, with the use of APIs, organized the information within a single source. This project turned into Pokr when the team decided to also provide information on bills and the inter-election season in which they were proposed.
The main objectives of Pokr include: 1) Inform citizens with easy and fun political information; 2) Strengthen communication and trust between citizens and the National Assembly; and 3) Enhance political data accessibility. With these objectives, Pokr addresses challenges such as the obscurity of political data, which is difficult to access and understand, and prevents many citizens from engaging with important information during elections. Moreover, the system has also established Open API and batch political data that will remain available to the public and the uses of other potential developers. As a long term goal, the team hopes to use Pokr to improve the quality of communication and trust between citizens and their representatives.
Example of a Pokr profile of a Member of the National Assembly
Implementation: In June 2013, Team POPONG launched Pokr as their main service to replace their Korean Politician Dictionary. The initiative was launched entirely with volunteer labor and no funding, starting with two developers and a designer. The project has since expanded to include eighteen, part-time volunteers, including new developers, marketing staff and a pro bono attorney. Some of the updates to the new service included: launching Pokrbot, which tweets new bills in real time; improving search capability to allow people to search public officials and candidates (by both English and Korean names), bills, regions, and schools; linking original PDF documents of proposed bills; and adding election pledges to politicians’ pages.
Team POPONG describes their methodology for Pokr in the following way:
1. Aggregate various political data sources into a unified dataset.
2. Convert the data from various sources to machine readable formats, and make it universally available for further development.
3. Extract useful information from political data and transform it into interesting visualizations and easy-to-read formats.
4. Concentrate on universal access, by means of RWD (responsive web design) and i18n (internationalization).
5. Publish real-time legislative information via Facebook and Twitter.
6. Publish customized legislative information based on user favorites. (In development)
Open source and open data are Pokr’s default strategies. However, Team POPONG maintains that the process automation and replication are the service’s most important values. As a small organization composed of part-time, volunteer staff, these features ensure that the system will continue to run regardless of the availability of its developers. Meanwhile, the reproducibility of Pokr’s methodology ensures that, should POPONG been unable to continue developing Pokr in the future, someone else will be able to begin where they left off. These processes are thus key to the system’s sustainability.
Achievements:
POPONG received a $5,000 grant from the City of Seoul, and won a $50,000 prize for their work from Samsung. These new resources will be used for server space and meeting space until July when it will assist in funding the re-organization of the project into a more sustainable non-profit or for-profit model.
Citizens and politicians are paying the service more and more attention thanks to word-of-mouth (as observed by Twitter Pokrbot retweets)
Unique website visits per day: approx. 500 (as of February 2014)
POPONG entered the Tomorrow Solutions competition co-sponsored by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning and Samsung, winning first prize.
Critical Challenges:
Citizen engagement and marketing to the general public
Sustainable development
Choosing between a for-profit or not-for-profit model
Contact: [email protected]
Additional Resources: Blog (displays recent work) http://blog.popong.com/en/
Relevant Networks: Creative Commons Korea, OKFN (Open Knowledge Foundation) Korea
Note: This post is part ten in a series of case studies on tools PMOs have used that can be replicated or serve as models for organizations in different contexts. To see all of the case studies, click here. To contribute a case study on a project that your organization has created, please fill out the template or email Dustin Palmer at [email protected].
