depuwatch – making government transparent and accountable

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Making government transparent and accountable

depuwatch.luSven Clement

+Open Data? – 5 stars of openness

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Y U NEEDOPEN GOVERNMENT DATA?

+Why Open Government Data?

Government needs to be held accountable Transparency creates trust

Accessible Data independent of visualization

Archivable Open formats can be read in the future

Reusable You can do crazy things with the data

+Famous examples

+Famous examples

+The situation in Luxembourg

No open data portal

Data available but licenses are too restrictive Geoportail.lu

Data available but difficult to exploit Chd.lu

Data available but almost impossible to exploit Yearly budget Wickrange-Livange investigation

+That’s why we started depuwatch.lu

Access easily the voting records of members of parliaments

Export the data as XML (and json if you are courageous)

Make available the database dump on simple request

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How did that work?

+YES IT WAS HARD!

+What did we do?

Scrape automatically ~35.000 individual votes Thanks to ScraperWiki.com this was less painless

Link votes to MPs And correct manually around 500 records

Categorize motions and laws into subject areas

Gather more details about MPs

Calculate attendance scores for them

Hit the chd.lu server very hard We rescraped the entire thing like 8 or 9 times

+The result

+YOU DON’T WANT TO STEAL MY “INTELLECTUAL” PROPERTY!