Posts tagged "open data"
Posted October 10, 2013 at 3:01am by
Kenya’s open data portal is floundering. Despite the excitement that surrounded its launch in July 2011, the portal has not been updated in eight months, has seen stagnant traffic, and is quickly losing its status as the symbolic leader of open government in Africa.
For a number of reasons, the portal, which runs on a Socrata platform and can be viewed here, has not lived up to the often sky-high expectations of many onlookers.
Posted September 30, 2013 at 3:28pm by
Originally posted at the Sunlight Foundation blog.
It’s 2013, and the Library of Congress seems to think releasing public data about Congress is a risk to the public.
The Library of Congress is in charge of THOMAS.gov, and its successor Congress.gov. These sites publish some of the most fundamental information about Congress — the history and status of bills. Whether it’s immigration law or SOPA, patent reform or Obamacare, the Library of Congress will tell you: What is Congress working on? Who’s working on it? When did that happen?
Except they won’t let you download that information. Instead, popular websites like GovTrack, widely used services like Sunlight’s, and world-class newspapers like the New York Times are forced to design complicated, error-prone systems that extract what data they can from the pages of the website of the Library of Congress. It’s a lot of work, but it’s a necessary burden for anyone outside Congress who wishes to use that data to inform and empower the public.
Posted September 26, 2013 at 1:05pm by
Repost from Rebecca Williams of the Sunlight Foundation.
When we talk about providing a transparent and legible legislative process, the first step is identifying all the moving parts that contribute to the passing of law. In Washington, D.C., this means not just following the city council, but also following D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, or ANCs, the hyperlocal government entities that advise the city council on community issues. Although the District’s city government structure is uniquely granular, it serves as an excellent model for understanding what a complete legislative data framework should consist of.
Understanding D.C. local government is almost as complicated as understanding the federal government. Washington, D.C. is divided not only into 8 wards, but also into 40 ANC districts, and each ANC is further divided into many Single Member Districts or SMDs. Each ANC is made up of 2-12 commissioners (based on the number of SMDs in each ANC) that are regularly elected in small, nonpartisan elections. ANCs hold regular meetings, hear presentations, and commissioners vote on matters that affect the local community, such as: street improvements, parking, liquor licenses, zoning, restaurant and business issues, and trash and sanitation. Each ANC is also allotted a small budget, based on the population size of their district. While ANCs do not have city law making powers, their opinion is highly influential over city council decisions. In order to fully participate in D.C.’s government and to fully understand D.C.’s legislative process – let alone hold it accountable – one must have access to information about ANC commissioners, meetings, votes, and spending.
Posted August 27, 2013 at 12:02pm by
With open parliamentary data at their disposal, parliamentary monitoring organizations, data journalists and scholars can gain significant insight into how new legislation is shaped and how parliaments work as social groups. Apart from multidimensional scaling of voting patterns, an often used technique of reducing and visualizing complex parliamentary information is social network analysis. In this post, I would like to introduce it using an example of sponsoring bills in the lower chamber of the Czech Parliament.
As the name suggests, network analysis explores networks of mutual connections (or ‘edges’) between entities (or ‘nodes’). Nodes can represent groups of people (e.g. parliamentary party groups), individuals (e.g. MPs), objects (e.g. bill proposals) or even abstract entities, such as words or ideas. Edges usually represent some form of interaction, connection, cooperation, proximity or membership.
In case of this analysis, a node represents an individual MP in the 2010-2013 Chamber of Deputies of the Czech Parliament and an edge between two MPs represents that they sponsored a bill together. The more often two MPs sponsored bills together, the stronger the connection between them. Or, to use the terminology of network analysis, the more ‘weight’ the respective edge has.
Posted July 9, 2013 at 1:49pm by
Author’s Note: This is a repost of my blog at legixinfo.wordpress.com.
Legislation is difficult to read and understand. So difficult that it largely goes unread. This is something I learned when I first started building bill drafting systems over a decade ago. It was quite a let down. The people you would expect to read legislation don’t actually do that. Instead they must rely on analyses, sometimes biased, performed by others that omits many of the nuances found within the legislation itself.
Much of the problem is how legislation is written. Legislation is often written so as to concisely describe a set of changes to be made to existing law. The result is a document that is written to be executed by a law compilation team deep within the government rather than understood by law makers or the general public. This article, by Robert Potts, rather nicely sums up the problem.
Posted June 7, 2013 at 11:51am by
Thanks to Andrew Mandelbaum, Dan Swislow, and Dickson Omondi for their assistance on this post.
Increasingly, governments, civil society organizations, and citizens are utilizing open government data to improve democratic governance by increasing government accountability and efficiency. While the potential benefits of open government data have been widely recognized – states as diverse as Kenya and the UK have developed official open data policies and tools – the role of open data in diverse political settings is only beginning to be explored. Does open government data function differently in emerging democracies than it does in more established ones? How can open government data continue to drive political development in emerging democratic states? Is the quantity of info that a state possesses an obstacle or an opportunity? These are large questions and all the answers cannot be provided in this post; however, considering the value of opening up government data in emerging democracies is a valuable exercise that can produce many important lessons to countries looking to open up this important resource.
Posted May 4, 2013 at 12:00pm by
When compared to other countries, the Czech Republic is significant for a very high number of roll-call votes. In the Chamber of Deputies (lower but superior chamber of the country’s national parliament), there have been more than 5,000 roll-calls since the current term started in June 2010. Every vote in the Chamber is recorded by name.
Until recently, voting records were published on the Chamber’s website in an HTML format. Experts form KohoVolit.eu, a Czech parliamentary monitoring organization (PMO) dealing with parliamentary data, had to spend most of their time scraping the records from the website. Last year, we used the Declaration on Parliamentary Openness and talk the IT staff of the Chamber into opening the parliamentary database. Now, what could be done with this data and how does opening it help?
Some 40% roll-calls in the Chamber are procedural votes, mostly trivial but occasionally very important. Deputies sometimes play a strange kind of a “ping-pong” when they move key bill proposals in and out of the floor agenda to keep them from being addressed.