[TheyWorkForYou-Scotland] TWFY for the Scottish Parliament
Thomas Graham
I just thought I'd post a quick email to say that I was thinking of
having a go at getting some of TWFY for the Scottish Parliament done.
Although I've got quite a lot of experience using PHP, I've not done
anything serious in python or perl, and I've not got a clue about
working my way round the MySociety codebase.
By way of an introduction, my name is Thomas, and I'm an undergrad
CompSci and Maths student at the University of Edinburgh (though
originally I'm from Manchester). I think it would be quite nice to get
things rolling before the Scottish Parliament elections in May.
Anyway, if anyone has any pointers or ideas about where I should start
it would be good to know.
Thanks,
Thomas Graham
+447986240262
--
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him:
"*Whose?*" -- Don Marquis
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--
Thomas Graham
+447986240262
--
When a man tells you that he got rich through hard work, ask him:
"*Whose?*" -- Don Marquis
*****************************************************
Thunderbird + Enigmail = Encrypted Email
My PGP Key - http://grahamnet.org.uk/?view=GnuPG
*****************************************************
Matthew Somerville
> I just thought I'd post a quick email to say that I was thinking of
> having a go at getting some of TWFY for the Scottish Parliament done.
You could also have said First Post; this list has not had any use before.
:-) I might as well post here what I sent to Thomas separately, for the
benefit of the, I think, 2 other people on the list.
https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety/twfy is the current
TWFY source code; that's the front-end.
http://ukparse.kforge.net/parlparse/ has links to all the current XML files
- that's XML of constituencies, members, debates and so on - and the parser,
the back-end that scrapes and parses the various websites. You can also get
them via SVN or rsync.
As to steps for getting MSPs, here's sort of how it breaks down in my view:
1. Generate XML file of MSPs (probably should really include history if at
all possible, if we ever want to do the Scottish Hansard at a point in
future) - files to look at here (all in parlparse/members/ ) include
all-members.xml (MPs), peers-ucl.xml (Peers), ni-members.xml (Northern
Ireland). Not sure how you can do history, but should be possible if there's
not much changes, and Wikipedia is probably helpful - doing Northern Ireland
didn't take too long.
2. Adapt members/personsets.py and the like to join multiple member entries
together as one "person" in people.xml (I don't think any MSP is an MP,
unlike MLAs, so that should be quite easy, but I bet some of them have
become Lords or something).
3. Adapt xml2db.pl (over to TWFY code now, in twfy/scripts/ ) to load these
new members into the MySQL database.
4. Add new code (presumably copied from existing code :) ) to display the
MSPs on the front-end. This should be easier given my work on Northern
Ireland, which made various bits of the code more robust, but still probably
not trivial.
I'm sure I'll have missed something vitally important, but I think that's
generally how it breaks down, and probably enough of a start. Let me know if
you want any bits expanding/explaining and so on.
--
ATB,
Matthew, mySociety