Welsh Assembly

[griffiths95]

Hi,

just thought i would contribute to the discussion by enquiring what the latest is with the development of Welsh Assembly stuff on TWFY?  Also could anyone tell me how I can get involved/help? Would love to help out in any way.

Aled

[sam]

Hi Aled,

I've created a ruby gem that gets the XML of speeches from the assembly. I believe TWFY uses Python for importing so it could be worth creating a python library as well?

[john felipe urrego mejia]

Sam please share ruby gem

Tnks

[sam]

https://github.com/samknight/assembly_wales

[martin...@gmail.com]

Would be good to see TWFY include Welsh Assembly. What help us needed?

[Chris Shaw]

If you are looking for transcripts of Welsh Assembly debates, there is already http://www.yoursenedd.com/

Chris

---

From: "martin...@gmail.com" <martin...@gmail.com>
To: TheyWorkForYou <theywor...@mysociety.org>
Sent: Wednesday, 2 March 2016, 22:16
Subject: [theyworkforyou] Re: Welsh Assembly

Would be good to see TWFY include Welsh Assembly. What help us needed?

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[edsno...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone,

I went to the Welsh Government website to look up who my local and regional AMs are, and what the voting stats were like in the last election.

I gave up after 15 minutes. This is pretty appalling, so I came to TheyWorkForYou.com. Alas, nothing functioning here, so I ended up on Wikipedia.

What is the status of the Welsh Assembly development, and how do I get involved? I'm a frontend developer by trade, with the tiniest smidgin of JS and Ruby to break lots of stuff.

Jake

[Aled Powell]

Of course there's not a list of AMs on the Welsh Government website. Look on the Welsh Assembly website, but be aware there currently aren't any AMs to list.

It's not for the Welsh Assembly to document the election of members. I'm not sure even the Electoral Commission has the responsibility or resources to do so. Got to remember there are essentially 60 separate elections, I think. Got to rely on people or press to gather the info for it all to be available in one place. 

Aled

Anfonwyd o'm ffôn (CM 12.10 Cy-GB ar GT-i9100)

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[Sam Knight]

It will be available on Your Senedd once the new AMs are elected

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/d/msgid/theyworkforyou/572135e0.88cbc20a.be41d.315dSMTPIN_ADDED_MISSING%40mx.google.com.

[edsno...@gmail.com]

> Of course there's not a list of AMs on the Welsh Government website.

Well, the UK government website has a list of MPs, so it's not unreasonable to expect the Welsh Government website to have a list of AMs.

> Look on the Welsh Assembly website,

When you search for "welsh assembly government", the Welsh Assembly website is 8th down the list. And really, there ought to be information about AMs, past and present.

> It's not for the Welsh Assembly to document the election of members.

I beg to differ. If you want to encourage political participation, I think documenting the election of your own members is a good start.

Back to TheyWorkForYou, any idea what the state of play is with the development of the Welsh Assembly part? I'm still keen to get involved :)

Jake

[edsno...@gmail.com]

On Wednesday, April 27, 2016 at 11:01:18 PM UTC+1, sam wrote:
> It will be available on Your Senedd once the new AMs are elected

Thank you, I've bookmarked the site. Who runs it, btw, can't seem to find any contact/about info?

[Struan Donald]

Hi,

You can also find a list of the Welsh AMs for the last Assembly on EveryPolitician at:

http://everypolitician.org/wales/assembly/term-table/4.html

There’s not a handy postcode lookup tool I’m afraid so you’ll have to know which seat and

region you are in. The aim is to have a complete history but we’re not there yet.

And, in case it’s of interest Democracy Club’s Who Can I Vote For will provide a list

of the candidates in the current election:

https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/

which is based on the data from:

https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk

Hope that helps,

Struan

[edsno...@gmail.com]

Hi Struan,

That's brilliant, thank you for the websites :)

> There’s not a handy postcode lookup tool I’m afraid so you’ll have to know which seat andregion you are in.

This is what I'm keen to help out on, to help build TheyWorkForYou for the Welsh Assembly.

Has this work already started and how do I help out?

many thanks, Jake

[Matthew Somerville]

Hi,

If you check out the archives of this list, nothing much has changed
since the last time(s) this was discussed :-)
https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/forum/#!searchin/theyworkforyou/wales%7Csort:date
has previous discussions.
Though actually, if we go right back to 2007, where I wrote the
following about Scotland:
https://groups.google.com/a/mysociety.org/d/msg/theyworkforyou/HRg6AGgU4DI/LRDTZBFR7tMJ
That's very out of date links wise, but the broad concept hasn't changed.

The front end is at https://github.com/mysociety/theyworkforyou (mostly in PHP).
The parser is at https://github.com/mysociety/parlparse (mostly in Python).

At a very high level, for the assembly members, you need to:
1. Get data for AMs added into the parser's members/people.json file.
As Struan has linked to Every Politician's data, that could be a
useful source to get the data from and maintain it and keep it up to
date automatically. You might have issues matching up people with
existing people in that JSON, but that should be an initial one
off/only each election cost.
2. Add new code to the front end to display the AMs. Hopefully it is
already shared code displaying existing sets of people, so shouldn't
be too complicated
(thankfully all the stuff in my 2007 email about personsets etc is no
longer needed!).

Similarly, for Assembly transcripts, you need to:
1. Write something that takes the Assembly XML and transcribes it into
the XML format TheyWorkForYou imports. Your Senedd have previously
linked to their code at https://github.com/samknight/assembly_wales
which they use for import, so that might be useful to look at. The
most obvious from previous discussions is what to do about bilingual
text, but that could be done whichever way seems easiest.
2. Add new code to the front end to import/display this data. Again,
this will hopefully share lots of existing code and, at its core, be a
new Section subclass.

I'm unaware of any current activity on the above. Hope that's helpful.

ATB,
Matthew

PS On the aside topic of Welsh websites, I do think it would be
helpful if the Welsh Government website could acknowledge the Assembly
and the election (it probably warrants at least a mention on its front
page?), and I agree it most definitely *is* the Welsh Assembly's role
to document the election of members to itself. That is why they run
www.2016.wales after all.

On 27 April 2016 at 23:25, <edsno...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Back to TheyWorkForYou, any idea what the state of play is with the
> development of the Welsh Assembly part? I'm still keen to get involved :)

[edsno...@gmail.com]

Hi Matthew,

That's brilliant, just what I was looking for, thank you. Do give me a little while to digest all this, then I'll get back in full.

all the best, Jake

[John Handelaar]

On 28 April 2016 at 12:25, Matthew Somerville <mat...@mysociety.org> wrote:
> Hi,

>
> At a very high level, for the assembly members, you need to:
> 1. Get data for AMs added into the parser's members/people.json file.
> As Struan has linked to Every Politician's data, that could be a
> useful source to get the data from and maintain it and keep it up to
> date automatically. You might have issues matching up people with
> existing people in that JSON, but that should be an initial one
> off/only each election cost.

This data I still have in a Google Spreadsheet from the start of the Assembly.

What do we do about person IDs and constituency identifiers?



jh

[Matthew Somerville]

On 30 April 2016 at 22:12, John Handelaar <jo...@handelaar.org> wrote:
> What do we do about person IDs and constituency identifiers?

Person IDs are incremented from the highest (currently 25486) for
unique people. Membership IDs historically were separated; I don't
think there's necessarily a need for that any more, but we might as
well continue to do so and increment them starting from 70000 (MPs go
from 1, Scotland goes from 80000, NIA from 90000, Lords from 100000)

TheyWorkForYou goes by name for constituencies internally, so again we
can increment the post IDs from their current maximum in people.json
and that should cover it.

ATB,
Matthew

[Sam Knight]

I should be gaining some free time come May so I'm starting to set up the prep for finally making the data be collected by TheyWorkForYou rather than YourSenedd.

I'm going to need some guidance but I suppose we've got to start somewhere so I've started here https://github.com/mysociety/parlparse/pull/79

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[Matthew Somerville]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for this! TheyWorkForYou actually no longer uses XML for people
data, we switched before the 2015 UK election to a JSON file (in
Popolo format) at members/people.json that contains all the people
information. That way, people who were e.g. both MPs and Lords can
have one person entry much more simply than the previous error-prone
method. On the downside, it's quite large, so perhaps we'd need to
look in future at having some way of holding them separate, but it
works fine for the moment.

It looks like EveryPolitician has structured data for the Welsh
Assembly from 2011 to present –
http://everypolitician.org/wales/assembly/ – and our old XML file
looks to have pre-2011 in it (dunno if it has everything, but must be
most at least). So I guess what we'd need at this stage is a script
that translated/added the relevant data from those two sources to the
existing parlpase JSON, providing it with TheyWorkForYou specific
identifiers. If it could be used to keep it up to date over time as
the EP data changed, that'd be great too, to save on maintenance :-)

ATB,
Matthew

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[paul smith]

Could you please take me off the recipients list for this.

Thanks

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