Introductions

[Steven Clift]

Welcome everyone.

This is the topic for friendly introductions. 

This is where new and long-time Poplus participants and everyone around the world interested in sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects can connect and collaborate.

So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some links.

If you like, you can answer these questions. 

1. Who are you? Be conversational.

2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)

3. Share any contact details and links you wish.

By posting your introduction here, on the public web-view, this topic will always be at the top to welcome new members to our ongoing exchanges.

If you'd like more information on Poplus before saying hello, see: http://poplus.org

Thanks,

Steven Clift

Engagement Lead, Poplus.org

P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to start a discussion.

[Willmar Pimentel]

Hi!

I am from La Paz, Bolivia we are a young ONG that works with IT technology in a broad way, and have our hearth in open data.

This 2015 we start a new project, that is inspired in this project from Argentina: https://www.caminosdelavilla.org/

the new project called: Desde Mi Barrio

I hope that we can share information about it in the next month when release our first beta

I know many of your in the populs congress of Santiago (2014) and this year wa hope to shate more than friendly :D

Great 2015 for all of yours!

[Caleb Tutty]

Hi all,

My name is Caleb, and I'm starting with the New Zealand Herald in a newly created position as a News Developer within the Data Journalism team.

My background is as a software engineer who studied politics, and this new role is something of an experiment for the Herald.  One of our aims is to open-source as much as is practical and to build APIs for reuse. Over time you will find our efforts here: https://github.com/nzherald

There have been a number of civic related projects in New Zealand - you may have met Rowan Crawford who has done amazing work running an Alaveteli instance at http://fyi.org.nz, and there had been a previous effort (until about 2011) around tracking Parliamentary votes and debates at http://theyworkforyou.co.nz. I worked with a number of other developers on an election results web-app for our 2014 General Election with features like poll-booth level breakdown and comparison with the previous results.

One of the first projects we have been planning is a reboot of our version of They Work For You, using PopIt and SayIt. New Zealand Hansard is published as HTML, occasionally with subtle errors and inconsistencies. We are trying an approach of automating scraping, but it may well turn out that we will need fallbacks.

Where possible we want to automate the maintenance of a popit-api instance from our Parliament website, including updating changing Ministerial and Select Committee posts to be a reliable, authoritative and standards-compliant source of information. Next hurdle is looking at scraping and parsing Hansard HTML into Akoma Ntoso for SayIt, and having a JavaScript webapp in front of it all for a public interface to navigate the New Zealand relevant logic of Parliamentary terms, Question Times, Debates and the MPs associated with them.

Through reading the documentation and experimenting a little, I've got a fair idea of what kind of code we'd use to glue it together in a microservices fashion - using PopIt and SayIt as components (perhaps as pure APIs without the UI) along with some New Zealand domain-specific pieces - and I'd be very happy to talk through the ideas we are looking at. It is still early stages (I don't officially start until Monday), so we are bound to get some things wrong as we try this all out. 

If anyone does have any advice, hard learned lessons or general neat tricks, I'd be more than keen to hear them.

I'm also curious as well - has anyone else had experience working with Poplus components - or other civic hacking projects - within a newsroom environment? What challenges and advantages have you found?

Feel free to email me on this email address or caleb...@nzherald.co.nz

- Caleb

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[Radhouane Fazai]

Hello all ,

I am Radhouane from Tunisia   a software engineer, contributor in opengov / open data movement in Tunisia  and ICT officer at Democracy International

I have been using  components from mysociety/ ciudadano inteligente and running local instances of Alaveteli , votaintelligente , and democracyOS   . During the last couple of years I've been busy building online election observation / reporting  tools and making  and contributing to election data browsers

• http://tunisiaelectiondata.org/ (old one  ,  the updated version is  under active development - http://fwelections.github.io/tunisiaelectiondata/#/stories/par)
• Egypt election data 
• lebanon election data 

and other data scraping activities that can be found on my  github repo

I am very interrested in poplus  components mainly because I intend to use them in Tunisia  not on County  level  but with local communities ; providing an online platform with plug and play modules   for each community   (ATI through alaveteli ,crowdring,  sms reporting , sayit , ckan , popit , mapit and cuttlefish in production -- i like it so far  ) .Well , I could also get cold feet and drop the whole idea   :)

Best ,

Rad

 .

 

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[Martín Szyszlican]

Hi Everyone.

Most here already know me, but I'll go ahead an introduce myself to the new people, and I encourage all list members to do the same.

I'm from Argentina, I became interested in open data when working in an independent design research project where we intended to redesign the website for the national parliament. On time, that design effort became what is now known as CongresoInteractivo.org, which a few projects:

- www.decadavotada.com.ar is a visualization of the parliamentary voting records, it uses Google Fusion Tables and D3.js

- www.elegilegi.org is a little game where you vote some laws and then it tells you what's the most similar member of the parliament. I would love to re-implement this on top of poplus for everyone to use (it is open source, but relies on static json files).

- monitor.congresointeractivo.org is our flagship parliamentary monitoring application, developed using poplus components and based on work by ciudadano inteligente. It was soft-launched on late 2014 with some minimal usage (1000 visits, about half form google, some user subscriptions, one email to one senator). We intend to actively promote the use of this tool during 2015 which is a year full of elections across the country.

I'm also starting a regular latinamerican open data meeting in spanish, with the parliamentary monitoring organizations we met at Abrelatam. The next meeting is on monday 12, at 16hs (GMT-3) and you're all welcome to attend, just send me a personal email.

Martín.

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[Jen Bramley]

Hi Everyone!

Firstly, thanks to Steven for thinking this up and starting a thread, it's really interesting to find out what everyone is up to and how Poplus might help. 

I'm working as a project manager on mySociety's international team. I can be doing anything from Fundraising to figuring out how to help people using our code in different countries. If you ever contact the intern...@mysociety.org email address, you'll come through to me. 

Currently the big thing I'm working on is an analysis of traffic data across a range of different sites running code we've written to try and figure out if there are similarities in the things that drive traffic and transactions on sites (so if you randomly receive an email from me over the next few months, this is why!). It's involving a lot of google analytics some of which boggles my brain.

I'm involved in Poplus because we wrote some of the components and we're half of the original founding team :) beyond that I love the idea of the components because, from a non technical point of view, lego like building blocks for great transparency and accountability websites seems like such a no brainer. I won't be able to help with technical issues but I'm super interested in social motivations and think that we have a great opportunity to take the burgeoning global connectivity to make technology a real driver towards (hopefully peaceful) social change. 

Please do feel free to get in touch with me to chat about your projects (or anything else you might want to talk about)!

All the best

Jen

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[James McKinney]

Hello all,

I’m executive director of Open North, a Canadian nonprofit. I maintain the Represent Boundaries component [1] [2], and I edit the Popolo specifications [3], a set of JSON schema for representing legislative information, which many components and other software use to exchange data. I’m also very involved in the OpenCivicData project [4], led by the Sunlight Foundation, which has a set of tools for scraping data and publishing it via API. A major contribution of OpenCivicData are its Division Identifiers [5], which make it easier to merge datasets relating to geographies (e.g. electoral districts). At Open North, we use a mix of Poplus and OpenCivicData code to run websites like http://www.openhousens.ca/ and http://represent.opennorth.ca/ 

Best,

James

1. http://represent.poplus.org/

2. https://github.com/opennorth/represent-boundaries/

3. http://www.popoloproject.com/

4. http://opencivicdata.org/

5. http://docs.opencivicdata.org/en/latest/proposals/0002.html

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[Tom Steinberg]

Hi all,

Bolivia, New Zealand, Tunisia - I wonder how many open source
communities are truly that international! Wow!

Lovely to see new names and faces - welcome!

I'm Tom, the director of mySociety, which is a globally-focused
organisation that exists to invent and popularise digital tools that
give citizens power over institutions and decision makers. We started
in the UK running websites like http://WhatDoTheyKnow.com, but today
most of our work is helping people in lots of other countries to build
big, strong citizen empowerment websites.

We're one of the founder members of Poplus, which we support because
the civic technology stack really needs some pieces that are more
civic than Ruby or Mongo, but less huge and single purpose than whole
'apps in a box'.

Please keep these introductions coming, it's so cool to hear what
people are trying to do in 2015, and the more intros here the more
likely it is we'll find new ways of connecting people together.

all the best,

Tom

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> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CCC55673-7C14-4C2B-B9F3-B0419AF9B495%40opennorth.ca.

[Khairil Yusof]

Khairil and Sinar Project team from Malaysia along with my team mates Swee Meng, Chee Leong, Sze Ming and Michael.

We're interested in Poplus because development is costly (time, human resources, funds etc.) and there is so much we want to do that everybody else is doing it also, so collaboration makes sense.

You can read up on what we do here: http://poplus.org/posts/popit-central-to-malaysian-transparency-efforts

We have a ton of work to do for this that will keep us busy for the whole year, in building parliamentary monitoring and transparency services around our popit database and components. We're rushing right now to get our initial version of our popit based MP site. We should have that up before the end of the month.

Now that we are funded to have full time team of 4, we hope to contribute more to existing components as well as contribute our own this year, instead of just being adopters.

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[Thomas Bjelkeman-Pettersson]

Hi Everyone,

A short introduction. I work for Akvo Foundation as the technical director. Akvo builds and runs open source data services used in international development. We are about 55+ people in many countries, with hubs in New Delhi, Bangalore in India; Denpasar in Indonesia; Nairobi in Kenya; Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso; Amsterdam, London. Stockholm in Europe; Washington DC in the US.

Our biggest services are Akvo FLOW, which is a mobile phone based data collection tool for field workers used by hundreds of partner organisation and many governments, primarily in Africa and Asia. We also have Akvo RSR a programme/project CMS and a few other things. 

We are in the process of transforming our Software as a Service tools into micro-services and we think that we'll both use Poplus tools as well as in the future potentially also contribute tools that could be Poplus components. 

more about Akvo can be found here: http://akvo.org/

Best regards

Thomas

[Greg Bloom]

Hi there - 

I'm the instigator and Chief Organizing Officer of the Open Referral Initiative, which is supporting the development of open formats and open platforms for the sharing of 'community resource directory data' -- i.e. information about health, human, and social services.

We've partnered with the Ohana Project, which emerged from a 2013 Code for America fellowship team in San Mateo County, and has since developed a stabilized API that exposes community resource directory data to an open set of systems. 

I think that the Ohana API (and its accompanying front-end search interface) could make for a Poplus component (it is free and open source, does one thing, and has been redeployed). And in the year(s) ahead, we may be producing more tools that could fit the bill. However, I'm still new to this community so I would welcome any suggestions, and I look forward to learn!

~greg

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202.643.3648

[David Moore]

Hi everyone, 

David here with the non-profit Participatory Politics Foundation - working on open-source web tools for civic engagement and open government. 

I'm based in NYC - live in Brooklyn, work in Manhattan from the office of the great planning group OpenPlans - and soon to keep a desk at the exciting new civic-tech space, Civic Hall. Encouraging to see the NYC community come together in a new mixed-use space, including city government staff and think tanks. 

PPF's primary project now is AskThem, questions-and-answers with public figures (U.S. elected officials and verified Twitter accounts) - an open-source Ruby on Rails app that I'm pleased James McKinney initially helped code, and that helped support iterations of Popolo. Our greatest traction so far is with NYC Council  - here's a year-end summary on our participating responders and issue-based question campaigns. Our immediate next step is developing free question-asking widgets as part of a Knight Foundation prototype grant and experiment with UI tweaks, like those in a New Zealand version, AskAway. 

The major proposal I've been circulating since last spring is rolling out Councilmatic, an open-source city council legislative tracking app, to cities nationwide with the Open Civic Data API. In short, this would be like a version of PPF's original site OpenCongress.org, but for everything in city councils - check the live app in Chicago, from our partners in this proposal, the awesome civic developers DataMade. Together we're fundraising to support a re-factoring of the existing Councilmatic app as a thin client on top of the Open Civic Data API, which can then serve as a foundation for new city-level engagement and transparency tools (email alerts, constituent voting on resolutions, summaries and translations, much more, hopefully including some useful components). 

The DataMade folks and I have had conversations with Tom Steinberg and some of the Poplus team last year about staying integrated moving forward, and that's still a priority for us this year. Anyone with connections to charitable foundations, please get in touch with me, I have a more-detailed funding prospectus to share - but this is my primary focus for 2015, and I'm really excited about the potential to roll out Councilmatic to, well, hundreds of U.S. city governments that can be made far more accessible. (We're pleased to have a thumbs-up from over ten Code For America Brigade leaders here in the U.S. and the important Open Civic Data project at Sunlight Labs.) 

Recently I've made time to blog a bit more about my view of the civic-tech landscape, what's needed for greater civic engagement in the U.S. political space, and what I see as the rich potential of open data standards for constituent communications. Really interested in feedback on those ideas & arguments, over email or micropublishing - when I'm not writing emails, I bike around NYC to catch art exhibitions. 

Hope to move forward with Councilmatic enhanced w/ Poplus components, feel free to drop me a line anytime. Thanks everyone.

-David

(917) 753-3462

Skype: davidmooreppf 

[erdb...@gmail.com]

Hi

I'm Dimitris.  I've built a Cypriot-parliament tracker

(http://openpatata.eu/), which has been live since September.  So far, there's

been no uptake; though I've published an article on 35-33

(http://www.35-33.com/) and posted about it in tech and hacker circles, I

remain the only contributor and regular visitor to the site.  I'm currently

looking to use SayIt for plenary transcripts.  I'm not part of any

organisation or movement.

Dimitris

[Steven Clift]

Thank you everyone. This is fun and inspiring.

Imagine that we are at an unconference going around the circle ... our
friendly eyes are upon you. :-)

We've had lots of coders step forward, keep on posting. But if you,
like me, have a desire for improving democracy or community with
technology, but need partners to help build out your vision, this our
space too. Or perhaps you are a student just exploring civic tech or
someone where English is your 2nd or 3rd language ... everyone is
welcome and asked to say hello. Feel free to say hello in whatever
language you like, perhaps with a short summary in English.

1. Who are you? Be conversational.


2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic
technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)


3. Share any contact details and links you wish.

(Please add Twitter and/or LinkedIn links if you like.)

Also, if you'd like to catch-up on past intros, via the web see:
http://bit.ly/poplusintros

Tag you are it,
Steve

[Henare Degan]

Hi everyone,

My name is Henare and I've been a civic hacker for over half a decade, volunteering on all of the OpenAustralia Foundation's half a dozen major projects.

We run one of the first ever civic tech redeployments - OpenAustralia.org, which is a PMO site built from the TheyWorkForYou.com code about 7 years ago. My collaborators and I are also major contributors to other open source civic projects like Alaveteli.

We've also created and run other bits of civic infrastructure like our scraping platform morph.io and the free and open transactional email server Cuttlefish (which we were lucky enough to be awarded a Poplus mini-grant for and are currently applying to be a Poplus component).

I'm interested in collaborating on shared civic technology because groups like ours across the globe have such limited access to time, money, and people. I'd rather use those precious resources to create better things for citizens and not focus on building technology.

Cheers,

Henare

--
Henare Degan
hen...@oaf.org.au
Volunteer | Worker | Director - OpenAustralia Foundation - @OpenAustralia

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[James Baster]

Hello,

I'm James Baster, a Web/PHP/Android Developer in Scotland.

I make a wiki calendar website that communities can use to build up a knowledge base of events for the benefit of all. This started out as a project for one specific community I'm part of - the local tech community - and is now available to others.

I've got some feedback from the list on this project before, which I will be working on when I have time.

However, I've just released a new major version on to my own servers. That and a big Android app released at Christmas have been keeping me busy.

In the immediate future, I have a small handful of communities using it up here already, and my current priority is to work with them to make sure they get the most out of it and to see how I can improve the software. I'll also be working on some features, mainly about importing and user testing the UI/UX.

I should be at the chat next wed, talk soon,
James

http://opentechcalendar.co.uk/
http://ican.openacalendar.org/
http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/

Demo site: http://demomasterss.openacalendar.org/

IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive

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and collaborative calendars for all http://ican.hasacalendar.co.uk/ (open data & open source)

[Kersti Wissenbach]

Hello everybody,

I am Kersti, of German origin, living in Amsterdam and working in different parts of the world.
I am a consultant on the intersection of technologies and transparency, accountability and freedom of information and free expression. That means I do work with human rights organisations to support strategy developments and implementation processes. I am currently serving as the Technology for Transparency and Accountability Lead of Oxfam.
Within Oxfam's Tech4TA work we are currently exploring how to stronger engage with civic tech movements such as Poplus. We made it one of our principle to move towards embracing the work with components and minimize and new building of tech as much as possible. We are about to launch a Justice Monitoring project in Rwanda where we will focus on how we can potentially integrate Poplus components or build upon existing ones together.

I am also a researcher. As external PhD candidate of the University of Amsterdam, I am researching transnational activism on the intersection of information and communication technologies and shifting forms of community buildings. I am not interested in the technology itself but rather related changes in our senses of belonging and identities in those regards.

I am also working with the Open Knowledge Foundation, being the ambassador of OK in the Netherlands.

I am excited and very much looking forward to work together and to bring the more traditional NGO world and the civic tech scenes closer together!

Kersti
@kerstiru

[Ben Campbell]

Hi everyone,
I'm Ben Campbell and I'm based in Christchurch, New Zealand.
For my day job I'm the resident coder at the Media Standards Trust (http://mediastandardstrust.org).
I do a lot of screen scraping.

I was looking at setting up a yournextmp for last years NZ general election, but got scuppered by a massive lack of free time :-(

My homepage and main email address is at http://scumways.com

If anyone's ever passing through Christchurch, drop me a line if you'd like to meet up!

Ben.

[Stephen Abbott Pugh]

Hi everyone,

I'm Stephen Abbott Pugh and I'm working to set up a civic technology non-profit in Rwanda after moving to the capital Kigali about six months ago. I'm setting up the company with a local technologist called Migisha K Claude. 

Our first project - launching at the end of January 2015 - is to use mySociety's Alaveteli platform to launch an access to information website for Rwanda. This will hopefully make it a lot easier for anyone to make use of the 2013 access to information law passed by the Rwandan government. We're partnering with ODESUDI, a local civil society organisation, to make this project a success.

Claude and I can see opportunities to use a lot more open source projects or Poplus components here in Rwanda and across east Africa.

Before arriving in Rwanda, I worked as the head of digital projects for the UK Parliament and before that I was an executive producer for the Guardian's website based in London.

Please get in touch if you're interested in the work we're doing in Rwanda or if you're based in the region and have any questions.

Stephen Abbott Pugh

[Felipe Álvarez]

Hello everyone:

My name is Felipe and I'm a Chilean developer working with Ciudadano Inteligente (http://ciudadanointeligente.org) I'm based in Santiago, I'm currently working in write-it and I'm interested in what other things are happening regarding technology and citizenship.

We're currently are very interested in getting partnerships with different groups and NGOs in LatinAmerica who might be interested in the sort of things that we've doing in Chile.

If you're ever passing in Santigo, please drop us a line.

Kind regards

--

Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved

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Felipe Álvarez
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Twitter: @lfalvarez
Cellphone: +56973961732

Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente

Holanda 895 - Providencia, Santiago de Chile. 
CiudadanoInteligente.cl | @ciudadanoi | (56-2) 419 27 70

[Andrew G. Mandelbaum]

Greetings

I'm Andrew Mandelbaum, co-founder with Hind Kabaj of SimSim-Participation Citoyenne, a non-profit in Morocco. 

Our first project, Nouabook.ma, enables citizens ask questions to their members of Parliament using the WriteIt component.  

For more on our project, check out a recent blog post here.

Best,

Andrew

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CAA5PczcDXFsyxWKCQfBhTzRjvnA3N9vQ9B%2BCRJDYRcCaa_cyJg%40mail.gmail.com.

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--

Andrew G. Mandelbaum
Co-Founder, SimSim-Participation Citoyenne

@agm3dc

Skype: agm3jordan

Phone: +212 (0) 6 62 68 10 56 

www.SimSim.ma

@SimSimPCM

Facebook: SimSim

[Eunjeong Lucy Park]

Hi everyone!

I'm Lucy Park at Team POPONG (http://en.popong.com), located at Seoul, Korea.

We've built Politics in Korea (http://en.pokr.kr) and Poplus was quite helpful in designing our product specifications.

Luckily, I've had the chance to meet some people in this group already, and hope to see many others in the future.

Tell me when you're in Seoul!

Best,

Lucy Park

 

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CAM_8-P%3DVSasuFSNry%3Do83Aq-EXTXV%3D5J3aq-8bcZ38xeuaw2WQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[Gemma Humphrys]

Hi everyone,

I'm Gemma - I work for mySociety coordinating their events programme. 

I'm involved in Poplus because I co-organised PoplusCon with Ciudadano Inteligente in Santiago back in April. PoplusCon was Poplus' first ever conference that bought together civic hackers and activists from around the world - it was awesome and kickstarted the network :) 

I was lucky enough to meet so many interesting people and hear about their inspiring projects. You can check out notes from the sessions that took place at PoplusCon here: http://poplus.org/popluscon/ There is also a fun little video on this page, which brings back nice memories :)

I feel my role in the Poplus community is to help spread the word about the network and try and recruit more people to the group, so more people can learn from each other and share their experiences and code. I think one of the best ways of doing this is to be present at conferences around the world, where we can hold sessions and lightning talks about Poplus. 

I'll soon share a list of upcoming conferences on here, so we can see if any of the community will be at them, and potentially spread the word about Poplus :) I have loads of Poplus merchandise (stickers, t-shirts) if anyone is planning an event and would like me to send you some - do just ask!

Hoping there will be another PoplusCon at some point - all depends on funding! Of course I'd be very happy to help organise again. 

Looking forward to seeing everyone on the call on Wednesday :)

Cheers,

Gemma. 

[Eduardo Bejar]

Hello,

I'm Eduardo, from Ecuador. I've been working on projects related to technology and social change for more than a decade, and in the last few years I've been interested and developing some initiatives related to technology for transparency and civic engagement. I'm the Director of Fundapi (www.fundapi.org) a non profit organization working in the mentioned areas, and also Ecuador's Ambassador for Open Knowledge Foundation. We launched Ecuador's first open data portal in 2013 as a civic initiative, and also developed some workshops and visualizations around the topic. I attended PoplusCon last year and have been following its development since then. 

Looking forward to continue keeping in touch and learning from this community.

Best!

Edo

[Csaba Madarász]

Hello,

my name is Csaba, and I'm from Hungary.
Dealing with a loads of stuff technology and democracy/community related since years now in our slowly developing country.
Last year we have started with Edemocracy Association (Hungary) a local transparency model project. The project called "Glass village" - in Hungarian we have the same word for Village and Wall, so it means glass walled / glass village.

I am deeply interested in beneficial civic technologies and methodologies.

Looking forward for D-Cent and all other good issues.

Csaba

[Steven Clift]

Csaba, Eduardo, Gemma, Lucy, thanks everyone, welcome.

We've been joined by 21 new members in the last two days and 33 more
since December 1. We will do a special round of virtual applause every
time a new country or a new organization says hello. :-)

From these introductions we've already made new connections and spun
off important ideas for exchange.

So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some links.

1. Who are you? Be conversational.


2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic
technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)


3. Share any contact details and links you wish.

Thanks,
Steven Clift
Engagement Lead, Poplus.org

P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to reply
to substance shared.
Steven Clift - Executive Director, E-Democracy

* Support E-Democracy. Pledge drive to raise $10,000 US:
http://e-democracy.org/donate?ft - Only $890 to 2015 Goal

> --
> Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved
> IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
> Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive
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[Marcel Augsburger]

Hey everyone!

I'm Marcel, from Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente (FCI), located in Santiago, Chile. We work on transparency, accountability and citizen participation, using technology as a way of reaching people. I work on FCI's lab, mainly programming, but ultimately focused on advocacy.

We started out in 2009, creating first a candidate comparison site, later a PMO site, then another one for FOIA requests, an interest inspector, etc. We eventually realized how hard it is to adapt the tools we'd made to other countries, and how many of the functionalities and data we used were redundant between our own sites. And that's why we're here on poplus, and why we think it's a wonderful project and a beautiful community.

Great to hear there are so many interesting people and initiatives around the world! Let's work together and make great changes!

To post to this group, send an email to pop...@googlegroups.com.

Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/poplus.

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CAO9TZ0VBvLw3oLW4khO7RsoimH%3DKAC_nYv5HyopA1dEXKw37ng%40mail.gmail.com.

[Lynn Fine]

Hi all,

I'm Lynn, writing you from San Francisco. I work at Code for America, a non-profit organization that works with local governments to help them deliver better digital services and engage citizens. All of our projects are open source and we try to re-use as much as possible. We've been educating our network about the components and have created some great tools to help people contribute to civic technology projects such as a "Civic Tech Issue Finder" that flags open github issues in civic tech projects that bubble up from the CfA API (codeforamerica.org/api). A lot of organizations are on it, only criteria is that they're working in civic tech and that their projects are open source.

For the past year I've been CfA's International Programs Manager, working closely with organizations in other countries who want to run variations of CfA-style programs (more info at codeforall.org), documenting their work in case studies and building a network of these groups and resources (toolkits, shared github account, etc.) to support their efforts. We're also starting to develop trainings we can offer local governments that we hope to package in ways others can re-use. 

I'm really excited Poplus is moving forward, hope to see some friendly faces again soon!

Best,

Lynn

[James McKinney]

Hi Lynn,

Is the Civic Tech Issue Finder open to CfA Brigades only, or to any civic tech group? I was looking at the documentation to get a project’s issues listed: https://github.com/codeforamerica/civic-issue-finder#how-to-get-your-issues-included (By the way, all, the issue finder is at http://www.codeforamerica.org/geeks/civicissues )

The challenge of finding open issues has come up on the list before, and the Civic Tech Issue Finder looks like a great solution!

- https://groups.google.com/d/topic/poplus/zVtdr8ESz_w/discussion

- https://groups.google.com/d/topic/poplus/Gj0KV4hvrI4/discussion

If the issue finder is meant to be CfA only, how much work do you think it would be to set up a new one for Poplus members?

Cheers,

James

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/90bb2447-fc61-41c8-b027-1befa6b790b1%40googlegroups.com.

[Lynn Fine]

Hi James, how's it going? So glad it looks useful to you! I've copied Andrew Hyder from our team. He built the issue finder and has been working really hard to create better technical infrastructure to support civic tech work. Hopefully he can help you out.

Best,

Lynn

--

Lynn Fine

International Programs Manager

Code for America

Want to bring the Code for America Fellowship to your city? Learn how.

[mlsoto...@gmail.com]

Hi everyone! Thanks Steven for creating this for everyone ;)
So I know most people, as until a november I worked at Ciudadano Inteligente, but just wanted to let you know a bit about the project I'm currently working on as a UNICEF Consultant in Chile.

I am coordinating UReport (www.ureport.in), which is a participation program for young people and adolescentes through SMS and twitter. It's been mostly used in Africa, and now we're deploying it in Chile. Basically it empowers young people to answer pollos of questions, and publishes all the results on line as soon as the polls are answered.

It's powered by RapiPro, and it's open source.

All the best for everyone!
Lucha

[Temi Adeoye]

Hi Everyone,

I am Temi. I co-founded Tekrapi; a tech volunteer team that builds websites for non-profits in Nigeria. I am aspiring to start a Code for America brigade in Nigeria and got to learn about Poplus on the Google Groups for CfA.

I've been in New York for the last 2 months to hone my programming skills as well as understudy the folks at BetaNYC (the CfA brigade in NY).

My country is in dire need of transparency and accountability in government and I cannot overemphasize the role of technology and civic hacking in a better Nigeria. The tools that are being built at Poplus would be of great help!

I am open to all forms of advice, suggestions, or links that could help us build a strong and healthy civic hacking team in Nigeria. And if there's any Nigerian on this list, please, shoot me a mail!

Thank you,

Temi Adeoye
M: +1 (646) 525 1820 / te...@tekrapi.org

[Julia Keserű]

Hey all,

My name is Julia, and I`m leading the international work at the Sunlight Foundation, a U.S. based nonprofit that uses technology to open up government data. We work on a variety of topics (money in politics, lobbying, parliamentary transparency), with a mixed approach (building tools, policy advocacy, investigative reporting). We are the org behind Open States, Scout, and OpenCongress, and co-funders of global transparency initiatives like the OpeningParliament network or the Money, Politics and Transparency project. We work a lot with the international community of open gov activists through creating guidelines and resources for data disclosure, and giving specific advise on how to open up government data in other countries. 

As for me personally, I come from Hungary where I used to work for K-Monitor, a small grass-root that uses open data to fight corruption. I write and talk a lot about the connection between open data and accountability, and I`m pretty enthusiastic about how this movement is driving real change around the world. You can see my face at the myriads of open gov events, and I`m thrilled to get to know those of you I haven`t met before! 

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CAFnyQavkWuyNTLQuf3uohikxOXLNw--hp%3DuKP8LGtYr%2BQ4b9Zg%40mail.gmail.com.

For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

--

Júlia Keserű

International Policy Manager

1818 N Street NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036 

(1) 202-742-1520 *246

   

[Andrew Hyder]

Hi James,

I'm a big fan of Poplus. I promote your components all the time to our network of volunteer civic technologists. I recently used SayIt for a big court case that was happening here.

Poplus groups are welcome to use the Civic Tech Issue Finder. It is open to include any civic technology groups. Its works like this:

• We'd add Poplus as an partner organization on our opt in list of civic tech groups
• In `projects_list_url` you can either put a GitHub Org or point us to a list of projects.
• If they are GitHub projects with open issues, they'll show up in the issue finder.
• You can filter the Issue Finder to include only what you want and embed it anywhere.

Sound good? If you want to opt in, just give me the email addresses of who needs permission to edit that sheet.

Andrew Hyder ::

Developer Relations Engineer

2013 Fellow

@hackyourcity

Code for America right now using our Civic Tech Issue Finder.

[Csaba Madarász]

Hello There!

Another Hungarian is on the list now!

My name is Csaba, and currently I work on several civic coding issues - mostly connected to the Hungarian Edemocracy Society (a very small organization). We have a forerunner project - GlassVillage http://www.uvegfalu.hu, the first transparent local government in Pázmánd village.
I do help to write the concept model, frame the local legal texts and also investigate into best practices around the world from data schemas to software solutions. I have been involved in different EU projects in the previous years, mostly related to citizen participation and e-participation.

I am proud to be the founding member of Democracy International, an international ngo to promote direct and participatory democracy. I am also member of the OpenGov Partnership  advisory board in Hungary, and trying to push the commitments also to local level.

Beside all of these, I have been involved in various e- and open government stuff, from the Hungarian Occupy Movement to community organizing and giving technological/methodological help to various NGO's, as an individual consultant.

It is so lovely to know, that many of my existing mates are on this list too!

Cheers,

Madarász Csaba
+36703643482

madaras...@gmail.com

LinkedIn

http://www.uvegfalu.hu

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CABH16po7RkPPGZY7b_jOo6GbatMJoFekn5QCKaKsjgY9J%2BF7iA%40mail.gmail.com.

[Myf Nixon]

On Friday, 23 January 2015 22:37:05 UTC, Andrew Hyder wrote:

Poplus groups are welcome to use the Civic Tech Issue Finder. It is open to include any civic technology groups. Its works like this:

• We'd add Poplus as an partner organization on our opt in list of civic tech groups
• In `projects_list_url` you can either put a GitHub Org or point us to a list of projects.
• If they are GitHub projects with open issues, they'll show up in the issue finder.
• You can filter the Issue Finder to include only what you want and embed it anywhere.

Sound good? If you want to opt in, just give me the email addresses of who needs permission to edit that sheet.

Hi Andrew,

I'm Myf and I'm on the Communications committee for Poplus. I'd be happy to take on the editing, if you can add myf at mysociety dot org. Thanks!

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[Chris Mytton]

Hi all!

I'm based in the UK, working as a developer at mySociety. I'm
currently part of the Parliaments team, spending most of my time
working on PopIt [1], our component for storing and sharing lists of
politicians.

I also work on Pombola [2], our PMO platform which we've deployed to
several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, the biggest being Mzalendo
[3] in Kenya. Pombola uses PopIt for storing information about
politicians and SayIt [4] for parliamentary transcripts. We're
currently in the process of migrating Pombola over to using
django-popolo [5], which will mean the models in Pombola will follow
the schema suggested by the Popolo project and hopefully make it even
easier to integrate PopIt with Pombola.

If you have any questions or suggestions specifically about PopIt then
you can get in touch with the team on po...@mysociety.org.

Cheers,

Chris

1: http://popit.poplus.org/
2: https://www.mysociety.org/projects/parliamentarymonitoring/pombola/
3: http://info.mzalendo.com/
4: http://sayit.poplus.org/
5. https://github.com/openpolis/django-popolo

On 7 January 2015 at 14:42, Steven Clift <cl...@e-democracy.org> wrote:
> Welcome everyone.
>
> This is the topic for friendly introductions.
>
> This is where new and long-time Poplus participants and everyone around the
> world interested in sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects
> can connect and collaborate.
>
> So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some
> links.
>
> If you like, you can answer these questions.
>
>
> 1. Who are you? Be conversational.
>
>
> 2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology?
> (aka Poplus or related concepts)
>
>
> 3. Share any contact details and links you wish.
>
>
> By posting your introduction here, on the public web-view, this topic will
> always be at the top to welcome new members to our ongoing exchanges.
>
> If you'd like more information on Poplus before saying hello, see:
> http://poplus.org
>
> Thanks,
> Steven Clift
> Engagement Lead, Poplus.org
>
> P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to start a
> discussion.
>
> --
> Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved

> Notes: https://popluscon.hackpad.com IRC: #poplus
> https://webchat.freenode.net

> ---
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> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.



--

Chris

[Paul Lenz]

Hi there

I'm Paul Lenz, and I am the Head of Finance and International Projects for mySociety.  I have worked here for four years, having spent many years in the commercial sector before then.  I am, I should stress, the least technical person in mySociety!

My role involves a whole load of finance, fundraising and general management work, but more importantly as far as Poplus is concerned I am ultimately responsible for developing and overseeing our international partnerships and projects.

My first major project when I started at mySociety was the re-launch of Mzalendo.com.  One outcome of this project the Pombola code-base which has now been re-used in Ghana, Nigeria, Zimbabwe and South Africa - a very clear demonstration to me of the value of the re-using codebases!  Although not technical, I do have some understanding of the challenges faced by people implementing civic technology.  For the Mzalendo launch I went through all of the un-matched names scraped from the Hansard (something like 600 of them) and associated them with the correct person records - not always an easy task due to mis-spelling or only part of the name being captured.  I also went through through a 40,000 line excel spreadsheet and fixed around 1,000 mal-formated lines of data by hand (the formatting fails were not consistent or easily parseable by a machine).

Chris has already mentioned how we are using components within Pombola, but in addition I am keen to see how things like YourNextMP can be re-used internationally, how WriteIt can be developed further and what opportunities there are to scale up PopIt.  On these last two points I will be mailing more soon about the "Open Politicans" project that we are just about to start.

Kind regards

Paul

[Marci Harris]

Hi All,

I'm Marci Harris, co-founder of POPVOX, a site for legislative information and civic engagement focused on the US Congress. I'm based in San Francisco but keep one foot (metaphorically) in DC. My background is as a lawyer and Congressional staffer. 

I'm super inspired by the growth and reach of the Populus project... and excited to learn more and contribute!

[Steven Clift]

Welcome Marci. Hello Paul.

Keep them coming. This is a friendly group, we won't bite. :-) If you
are more or less "just lurking" that's OK, say hello. It might just be
that something exciting will be sparked because you say hello and
share an idea or thought.

For those reading on the web (perhaps at a later date), here are a few
introductions shared under other subjects:


From: Fabrizio Scrollini

Hi all

I am writing on behalf of DATA Uruguay, where we work advocating and
using open data to foster human development.

At the moment we have various projects running. Our website
www.quesabes.uy is based on Alaveteli and allows people to make access
to information requests. It has been successful as campaign tool so
the Uruguayan government had to acknowledge they have to reply to
e-mails:)
Pormibarrio.uy (My neighborhood) is a project that helps people in
Montevideo to report potholes (among other stuff) and is based on FMS
software. It adds a bit of software but crucially is fully integrated
with the City of Montevideo systems (so you get to see what public
officials are doing-or not- about your problem). We also run workshops
in neighborhood to promote the adoption and usage of the platform. We
are now developing some exciting work in health and we love to
organise Conferences and Unconferences :)
Best,
Fabrizio


MIGISHA KALISA Claude
Jan 16
New Year Greetings,

I am Claude from Rwanda, ICT4D Expert. I am glad to join this group
and look forward to exchanging with you all.
For more about me:
https://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=56357934&trk=nav_responsive_tab_profile

Thank you.

Claude MK.


Ale Michael
Jan 2
Most excited joining this wonderful group.
Hope this group will help Nigeria experience fair voting during their
electioneering process especially with the deployment of the mobile
technology.
Appreciate if discussion can continue on this proposal.
Thanks All
Micheal
National MIS Consultant

Steven Clift - Executive Director, E-Democracy

* Support E-Democracy. Pledge drive to raise $10,000 US:
http://e-democracy.org/donate?ft - Only $890 to 2015 Goal

> --
> Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved

> IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
> Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive

> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
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> email to poplus+un...@googlegroups.com.
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> To view this discussion on the web, visit

> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/f8cb2f7f-e106-40cc-85f1-b8df1050cc39%40googlegroups.com.

[Tim Barnes]

Hi everyone,

I'm based in London and work for Dods, a political communications business, as a digital project manager.

Dods harnesses open data from sources such as data.parliament.uk, the European Parliament and Gov.uk to provide its customers (predominantly public affairs and communications professionals) with political monitoring and analysis services. We also run PoliticsHome, Westminster Briefing, DodsPeople, Civil Service World, the House Magazine, Dods Polling, Westminster Explained, Holyrood magazine and the Parliament Magazine. 

We're using more and more open source software and are gradually evolving as a business to a stage where we can open up our data and our code. As a publisher established in 1832 this isn't going to happen overnight but we're working towards this. 

From a personal perspective I'm very interested in digital democracy and previously managed political research and editorial teams, as well as worked for an MP. 

Best wishes,

Tim 

[Charlie Martial NGOUNOU]

Hello Everyone,

I am Charlie from Cameroon - Central Africa. I work for AfroLeadership, a civil society organisation promoting IT for Civic Engagement, Governance, Democracy and Follow the Money Strategy. We have also committed to Open Government Data in Central Africa. So far, we are interested in using and adapting MySociety tools like Alaveteli, Fix My Street, They Work For You, etc. We have begun with Fix My Street and we hope to succeed in promoting Civic Tech in Cameroon. We also have a focus on Local Governments as we believe local democracy and local governance are keys for development as a whole. In this group, we hope to keep on learning and sharing !

Charlie Martial NGOUNOU
cha...@afroleadership.org
AfroLeadership
Open Government Data
Yaounde - Cameroon

[Daniel Dietrich]

Hi all,

my name is Daniel Dietrich. I work with the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, based in Berlin. www.okfn.de

At OKF DE we run a couple of open data and civi tech projects and programs, including an FOI platform www.fragdenstaat.de, a Parliamentary monitoring platform www.offenesparlament.de, legislation under version control pilot bundestag.github.io/gesetze a civc tech program www.codefor.de any many more. Although I am more of a larger at the moment, I am deeply interested to see how this community develops. I love the idea of the components, and believe sharing code and knowledge is key for our movement.

All best
Daniel

--
Daniel Dietrich, co-founder & chairman
Open Knowledge Foundation Germany
www.okfn.de | in...@okfn.de | @okfde
Office: +49 30 57703666 0 | Fax: - 9
Mobile: +49 176 32768530

> --
> Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved
> IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
> Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive
> ---
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[Cristhian Parra]

Hi Everyone, 

My name is Cristhian Parra and I am a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, where I will be working at CITRIS (the Center for Information Technology Research on the Interest of Society). Here, I am working in the AppCivist project, which aims at designing and building a service-oriented middleware to connect and compose existing civic engagement services and applications. For this reason, i would like to explore more about poplus components and get to know the community, and perhaps also contributing/collaborating in the future with new components. 

As a background, I am an Informatics Engineer from Paraguay and recently (1 year ago) got my Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Trento, in Italy, where I have spent the last 5 years. My Ph.D. was focused on HCI and Social Informatics, specifically in designing and studying ICT for active ageing. During that experience, I got the wonderful opportunity of working closely with social scientists and local communities, which led me to be more an more interested in the interactions between computer science and technology with the social sciences, within community-based research/action projects.   

As a long-term goal, I would like to contribute to the development of a more participatory culture in my home country. 

Happy to be part of this group!

[James McKinney]

Hi Christhian,

AppCivist sounds very interesting! I found:

http://citris-uc.org/social-apps-lab/project/appcivist/

http://appcivist-demo3.meteor.com/

The repository at https://github.com/socialappslab/appcivist points to socialappslab/hypersphere, which seems to be a private repository. Are there any other links to share?

Cheers,

James

--
Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved
IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive
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[dar...@daraja.org]

Hello Steven,

My name is Simon Mkina from Tanzania.

Happy to be among this interesting group.

Thanks

Simon

[Mina Demian]

Hello all.

My name is Mina and I am a journalist with the South African public broadcaster. I'm based in Johannesburg.

I'm new to both journalism and data-driven stories. I work on stories, projects, and am whetting my feet in news apps, too. I'm looking to join the community and see where I can help out, as well as connect with future collaborators.

Find me on Twitter @minaddotcom or on email wo...@midiane.com.

Cheers

Mina

[Joyce Neys]

Hi everyone,

My name is Joyce Neys and I am from Amsterdam in the Netherlands. I am currently finishing my PhD research in Media and Communication at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) where I am also a lecturer.

The past five years I have been investigating how citizens use and appropriate different forms of new media to be(come) civically engaged and/or to encourage fellow citizens to be engaged and active as well. For example, I have conducted a study on video games developed by citizens. The games dealt with topics of social and civic relevance. Another part of my research has focused on political remix videos or (remixed) social commentaries created by citizens who critically addressed a social issue with the (re)use of popular culture. Currently, I am looking at (political) machinima and their creators in relation to civic engagement.

I am looking forward to joining this community and to see where I can help out, as well as connect with future collaborators both inside and outside of academia as I would like to explore the option to become more active in this field in a practical and applied way.

Happy to be part of the group!

Joyce

[Steven Clift]

Welcome Joyce, Simon, Mina, and Cristhian. With over 30 new members in the last few days, we now have 400 Poplus collaborators on this online group.

If you haven't introduced yourself, please do.

Here are some questions if you like ...

1. Who are you? Be conversational.

2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)

3. Share any contact details and links you wish.

- Steven Clift, Poplus Engagement Lead

[deborama]

Hi, I am Debra Keefer Ramage, from Minneapolis, MN, USA, the same town as Steven C., in fact the same neighborhood. I am a newbie and an amateur in the world of #opengov and I am excited to know about all this international activity and global interaction. In a previous life, I was a mainframe software engineer and a US expat living in the UK for 13 years. About half of that time, I worked for Experian, which, besides being a credit agency and a marketing solutions provider, maintains the voter rolls in the UK. What a small world it is! Nowadays, I do office management and database work for an arts-related non-profit, and I do website design and social media for an inner-city, atypically Methodist community church. I am also a freelance journalist, a city gardener and food activist, and a grandmother. With almost 40 years of IT experience, I hark back to the days before the internet, before the original C programming language, before cell phones or personal computers. I'm practically an authentic steampunk. But that's the past, and the future is what we're about here, so now that you know I'm here, I will shut up and learn.

Debra Keefer Ramage

[Fernando Uval]

Hey all! I'm Fernando form DATA Uruguay. Always been interested (since i understood the impact of social media) and the way people can participate of everyday decisions. In Latin America it's still difficult to find this, but we are optimistic of the work we are doing and the work of other Latin American fellows. So I personally think that this is the first step to stay together and to bring together much more than promises. This might be the future of our own and we certainly have to work on that.

Best to you all

Fernando

--
Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved
IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive
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[Mark Longair]

Hi everyone,

It's been great to hear about all the different projects people
are working on through this list.

I'm working as a developer for mySociety in the UK on our small
but enthusiastic "parliaments" team (between 2 and 4 people at
any time). Most of our time recently has been split between
working on PopIt (our web component for storing details of
people and organization) and Pombola (our software for PMO
websites which is being used in Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria,
Zimbabwe and Ghana). I've been a core developer of Pombola, but
on the PopIt side more working as a client of its API through
the YourNextMP project and setting up PopIt instances that
mirror data from our Pombola sites.

My main interest in this list and the Poplus federation is, like
many others here, just to find ways of making it easier to build
tools that help people find out more about their
representatives, the political system they live in and how they
can use that knowledge. The Poplus project has certainly
already been really inspiring and helpful for our team for
exactly that.

I got into civic tech work as a volunteer for mySociety while I
was doing my PhD in neuroinformatics (which is totally
unrelated, except for involving programming!). Tom Steinberg,
whom I met through Chris Lightfoot, mentioned that it would be
great to have the Scottish Parliament on TheyWorkForYou, and
that seemed like a fun project for the Christmas holidays :) It
turns out that that's actually been a salutary lesson in the
frustrations of PMO projects - at the moment I'm trying to build
up any enthusiasm for rewriting the Scottish Parliament scraper
and parser for a third time since I started this, as they
persist in redesigning their website in unhelpful ways...

Here are links to the projects I've mentioned above:

http://popit.poplus.org/
https://www.mysociety.org/projects/parliamentarymonitoring/pombola/
https://yournextmp.com/
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/

Best regards,
Mark

[Myf Nixon]

Hello everybody,

Delighted to be part of the longest running thread ever ;)

I am the Communications and Marketing person at mySociety here in the UK, and I was privileged to be at the Poplus conference in Santiago last April. There is nothing like seeing such enthusiasm and dedication at the birth of an organisation, to make you want to be a part of it.

While I do not have technical skills, I do have everything that's needed to shout about Poplus, whether that's on the blog, in press releases, or via social media. So (along with others) that's my role in the organisation, to record what goes on, and put it to the outside world (and increasingly, as our membership grows, I guess, to make sure we all know what's going on as well!).

That's also what I do for mySociety: you'll see that our website, blog posts, social media (eg https://twitter.com/mysociety), etc are written/managed by me the majority of the time. Sometimes it feels hard being a non-tecchie in an organisation that is mainly made up of coders, but I like to see the positives as well: the main one being that if I can understand the tech well enough to write about it, then our non-tecchie readers will surely understand it too. That phrase "explain it to me like I'm five" - it's a good one!

My other big area of knowledge is in user support, having taken that role for several of mySociety's websites for a couple of years now. It's something that I suppose many developers don't spend too much time thinking about when they are building a wonderful new tool, but since it's going to take up a proportion of your admin's time every day, perhaps you should! I'm always happy to answer questions/moan about user support.

mySociety's workforce is scattered all over the UK and I am lucky enough to live in Brighton, on the south coast. If you ever see typos in my work, that's because we have a kitten who likes to walk on my keyboard.

There are many ways to get in touch with me, but pr...@mysociety.org and he...@poplus.org are probably the easiest in these contexts.

[Jorge Saldivar Galli]

Hi all!,

I am Jorge Saldivar, a Paraguayan PhD student from the University of Trento (Italy) and a Computer Scientist. As part of my PhD thesis I'm study how technology can be used to involve society at large into e-democracy practices. A topic that seems to be very aligned with this community. 

In a first phase of my PhD, I participated in a project, called Agora 2.0, in which we developed a platform that combined onsite access (via a digital display in public spaces) with online access (via a web application) to engage citizens in addressing local problems and thus reduce the current digital divide. From this experience, we understood that taking the right instruments to where people actually are — both offline and online — is crucial to achieve participation.

Understanding that the largest virtual communities today are to be found in popular social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, now, my research focuses on designing instruments to tap these “online public spaces” to broaden and increase participation in e-democracy practices. As part of an on-going collaboration with the team of the project The California Report Card (CRC) of UC Berkeley, I'm working on a tool that expands the boundaries of CRC by allowing California citizens to grade state issues directly from Twitter using only Twitter’s native features, like tweets, retweets, replies and hashtags.

More information about the tool and how it works can be found here. Looking forward to reading your feedback, comment, and suggestion and if you live in California you are more than welcome to test the tool and grade your state government from Twitter!

Best,

Jorge Saldivar

@jorgesaldivar

[Steven Clift]

For all our awesome new members, you can see all the fresh intros
here: http://bit.ly/poplusintros (we just started them last month)

For those planning to participate in the Hangout/Tweetup in about 10.5
hours, why not take a moment to introduce yourself to this friendly
group of now 416 members.

Of course, even if you can't make the Hangout, you should say hello too.

Steven Clift
Poplus Engagement Lead

[J.M. Porup]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

I'm looking for an angle to write about Poplus, so I thought I'd stick
up my hand.

I'm a former programmer turned journalist. I've covered privacy and
security tech for a number of publications, including The Economist.
(I also used to write Lonely Planet guidebooks to Latin America, but
that's another story.)

The Internet has, by and large, redistributed power from the people to
the state. This is crazy dangerous, so finding ways to re-redistribute
that power back into the hands of the people is urgent if we wish to
be anything other than serfs.

I'll be watching the hangout tomorrow, but if you're working on
something awesome, please feel free to get in touch.

cheers
Jens

- --
J.M. Porup
www.JMPorup.com

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[Jorge Coelho]

quarta-feira, 7 de Janeiro de 2015 às 14:42:01 UTC, Steven Clift escreveu:
> Welcome everyone.
>
>
> This is the topic for friendly introductions. 
>
>
> This is where new and long-time Poplus participants and everyone around the world interested in sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects can connect and collaborate.
>
>
> So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some links.
>
>
> If you like, you can answer these questions. 
>
>
>
>

> 1. Who are you? Be conversational.
>
>
>
>
> 2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)
>
>
>
>
> 3. Share any contact details and links you wish.
>
>
>
>

> By posting your introduction here, on the public web-view, this topic will always be at the top to welcome new members to our ongoing exchanges.
>
>
> If you'd like more information on Poplus before saying hello, see: http://poplus.org
>
>
>
> Thanks,
> Steven Clift
> Engagement Lead, Poplus.org
>
>
> P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to start a discussion.

Hi!

I'm Jorge and I believe that I fit among the minority who doesn't have a clue to coding... anyway I get high on openness and am an enthusiast of ICT fuelling the process.
I work in an inter-municipal association (local gov) and am actively involved in project management in the field of ICT, bridging common interests, arranging ERDF funding and managing the community of municipal CIO.
Congrats for your intiative and... Godspeed!

Regards
--



*Comunidade Intermunicipal do Algarve*


Rua General Humberto Delgado, 20

8000-355 FARO

Tel: 289 880 800

Fax: 289 880 809


Esta mensagem é confidencial e dirigida apenas ao destinatário. Se a
recebeu por erro, agradecemos que o comunique ao remetente e a elimine,
assim como qualquer documento anexo. Não há renúncia à confidencialidade
nem a nenhum privilégio devido a erro de transmissão.


A AMAL pauta-se por prestar um bom serviço, por este motivo, se em qualquer
altura considerar que o mesmo pode ser melhorado, contacte-nos através do
email ge...@amal.pt.

[Ton Zijlstra]

Hi all,

My name is Ton, am based in the Netherlands and working on open government data for the past 7 years or so, through my open data consultancy company The Green Land. Most of my open data work is in various European countries, and sometimes beyond when the World Bank asks me to join one of their projects as an open data consultant.

My expertise is in guiding change processes, and building the network, relations and community needed for that. My background is in technology and philosophy. I'm mostly driven by what happens when instruments and technology become available to individuals that previously did not have access to them, and the new affordances that brings. There are many of those instruments already out there that haven't reached everybody that could benefit from them yet.

best,
Ton

[Hassan Schroeder]

I’m Hassan Schroeder (about.me/hassanschroeder), currently living in San Jose, California. I’ve been developing web sites and apps since 1993, and currently work on a consulting basis primarily in Ruby on Rails. 

Involvement with a Deliberative Discussion startup (zilino.com) has made me more aware of all the civic coding going on, and I’d like to explore both leveraging that and contributing to it. 

Suggestions welcome!

[Guglielmo Celata]

Hi all,
my name is Guglielmo,
I am one of the founders at Openpolis, an italian indepedent association established in 2006
to enable free and transparent access to public information.

We're a group of political analysts and civic hackers, with skills ranging from story-telling to software development.

This improvised group of friends turned, during the course of almost ten years of activity,
into a civic observatory on italian politics, developing projects and analysis,
and helping media and citizens to shape their own view on critical issues.

Our activities and projects are extensively descibed here: http://www.openpolis.it/eng/.

We try to have an active role in the international communities revolving around parliament transparency,
and opening data and knowledge.

We strongly believe in open source software and in the validity of sharing ideas and solutions, not only to avoid
re-inventing the wheel, but in order to have peer reviews at work and improve the final outcome.

We're proud winners of a Poplus grant (http://poplus.org/posts/poplus-proposals-outcome/) and are currently
implementing a tool specifically dedicated to the developers out there, who want to rapidly build
software solutions based on multiple poplus components' data.

I'll add more details in a soon-to-be-sent message dedicated to the tool.

Guglielmo Celata
Technologies & Wizardries
Associazione Openpolis: http://www.openpolis.it
e-mail: gugl...@openpolis.it
gplus: guglielm...@gmail.com
skype: guglielmo.celata
irc://irc.freenode.net#openpolis

> Il giorno 07/gen/2015, alle ore 15:42, Steven Clift <cl...@e-democracy.org> ha scritto:
>
> Welcome everyone.
>
> This is the topic for friendly introductions.
>
> This is where new and long-time Poplus participants and everyone around the world interested in sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects can connect and collaborate.
>
> So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some links.
>
> If you like, you can answer these questions.
>
>
> 1. Who are you? Be conversational.
>
>
> 2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)
>
>
> 3. Share any contact details and links you wish.
>
>
> By posting your introduction here, on the public web-view, this topic will always be at the top to welcome new members to our ongoing exchanges.
>
> If you'd like more information on Poplus before saying hello, see: http://poplus.org
>
> Thanks,
> Steven Clift
> Engagement Lead, Poplus.org
>
> P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to start a discussion.
>

> --
> Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved

> Notes: https://popluscon.hackpad.com IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net

> ---
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Poplus - Collaborative Civic Coding" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to poplus+un...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to pop...@googlegroups.com.
> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/poplus.

> To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/0d4dbe96-cf44-4255-950f-58e6de83676a%40googlegroups.com.

[irth orbits]

On Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at 6:42:01 AM UTC-8, Steven Clift wrote:

> Welcome everyone.
>
>
> This is the topic for friendly introductions. 
>
>
> This is where new and long-time Poplus participants and everyone around the world interested in sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects can connect and collaborate.
>
>
> So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some links.
>
>
> If you like, you can answer these questions. 
>
>
>
>
> 1. Who are you? Be conversational.
>
>
>
>
> 2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)
>
>
>
>
> 3. Share any contact details and links you wish.
>
>
>
>
> By posting your introduction here, on the public web-view, this topic will always be at the top to welcome new members to our ongoing exchanges.
>
>
> If you'd like more information on Poplus before saying hello, see: http://poplus.org
>
>
>
> Thanks,
> Steven Clift
> Engagement Lead, Poplus.org
>
>
> P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to start a discussion.

So great to see such a community spirit around technologizing government.

As tech advances, there will become a rising need for standards.. virtual weights and measures, if you will. The primary standard that we'll likely all need is identity verification. I think we should use blockchain technologies so that the ledger of citizens is public and relatively immutable.

As our gov becomes more lean, we should use the savings to invest in teams looking to change the world. A government that acts like an angel investor would benefit society, pay for its own existence, and repeat in profitable ways. All the while, including citizen interest and ability to invest.

I'm here to help develop the software and hardware necessary to achieve ends like these.

[Dave Whiteland]

Hello everyone

I'm Dave and I work as part of mySociety's international team. I'm
based in Egham, which is (conveniently) close to Heathrow, the UK's
biggest international airport.

Some of you I've been lucky enough to meet outside the UK. I was at
PoplusCon when this all formally started; but I've met quite a lot of
Poplussy people before and since, because I've travelled a lot for
mySociety (often with mySociety's other hardcore globetrotters Jen and
Paul) over the last couple of years or so. Especially last year, when
I spent a lot of time out and about spreading the word about Poplus in
the free software or civic tech communities.

I come from a CompSci background, so I can talk nerdy. I joined
mySociety about five years ago as a developer, although these days I
don't really cut much code. Instead, I help by being a human bridge
across the technical-nontechnical divide on lots of our international
projects... and spend the rest of my time working on the documentation
of mySociety platforms [1]. I am that rare creature, a programmer who
actually likes to write helpful human-facing docs (mainly because I
don't get stack dumps when it goes wrong, er, unless you count
Jekyll).

We know from harsh experience with platforms like FixMyStreet and
Alaveteli that good documentation can be critically important --
because quite often in civic tech the success of new installations
depends on it at two key stages -- firstly the installation and
customisation, which the tech teams want to know about quickly and
easily; and secondly and crucially the ongoing admin which is often
being undertaken by heroic people who don't have or need a technical
understanding of how the software is really working. The cost of the
first case failing (where installation/customising is not well
explained) is that the devs attempting it decide to write their own
code instead of using what they were trying to deploy -- and this is
clearly something we are fighting against with Poplus. And the cost of
the second case is that the project the software has been installed
for can fail because the world of civic tech is largely powered by
volunteer teams that are especially vulnerable to being discouraged by
tasks that are frustrating or difficult to understand. We've got
better at providing documentation and help for overcoming both
circumstances, but we're still working on it. Of course, the point of
all this is that we bring this experience to Poplus too. TL;DR of all
that is: I believe that simply sharing a git repo is not enough ;-)

Yours
Dave

http://www.mysociety.org/team/dave

[1] see
http://fixmystreet.org/overview/
and
http://alaveteli.org/docs/
(which I am currently focussed) for examples of how extensive some of
this can be; still, a work in progress :-)
(also, not *all* my own work, obviously!)

[Steven Clift]

A fresh week! Time for more fresh introductions.

Dave talked about better documentation on civic tech software and here we are documenting a generation of civic tech builders creating good with collaboration.

So please reply and introduce yourself.

We've already seen the power of these simple introductions leading to action and useful connections that would not have happened otherwise.

Go for it.

Thanks,

[Wendy Norris]

Hello everyone. My name is Wendy Norris and I'm from Boulder, Colorado, USA.

My interest in civic tech comes from a rich, never-boring and varied a career path from social work, investigative journalism and now Founder/CEO of tekhne.co, a NGO product development and data services consulting firm.

I depart in April for an ICT project placement in The Republic of Vanuatu for Peace Corps Response.

I'd also like to echo Dave's call for better documentation. I've found it is THE factor on whether civic and humanitarian/development technology is adopted by the NGO/Social Venture/ICT4D sector.

Also, for those of us in the NGO sphere (even in the US), please consider building complementary low-tech options, like SMS/text applications, symbols vs text for low-literacy communities, and web applications in low-bandwidth/3G environments, to accomplish your good work.

When I return from the South Pacific in the fall, I hope to begin the Atlas Institute PhD program at the University of Colorado to study collective intelligence, crisis informatics and human computer interaction design.

Very pleased to meet all of you!

Wendy

--

wendy norris

ceo + founder | tekhne.co

the art + craft of making data useful

--

Poplus.org - Get involved: http://poplus.org/get-involved

IRC: #poplus https://webchat.freenode.net
Docs: http://bit.ly/poplusdrive

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[Edward Saperia]

Hello Poplus!

• I ran Wikipedia's global conference "Wikimania" in London in 2014. I chose the themes: Social Machines, Democratic Media, The Future of Education, Open Scholarship and Open Data.

• I have been hired as community strategist for The Green Party, which is currently the fastest growing political party in the UK. I have been tasked with figuring out how we could best implement digital direct democracy within the party - any advice gratefully received.

• I am currently planning the launch of a non-profit residential incubator and community space focusing on civic foss projects, based in London's tech cluster near Old St. This will be interesting to you if you have a project which is mvp functional but needs to grow its user or developer community. Branding is still in progress, but it will probably be called NWSPK.

• Open Access Reader is a side-project of mine to create a social machine to systematically cite all open access papers in Wikipedia. It has received grant funding from The Wikimedia Foundation.

• Here are some silly things I've done: Betrayers' Banquet / Cryptofloricon / Trotify 

• Add me on Facebook!

Edward Saperia

Community Strategist for The Green Party

Proprietor Top Office Machines
Creative Director Original Content London

email • facebook • twitter • 07796955572

133-135 Bethnal Green Road, E2 7DG

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[to...@mysociety.org]

Hi all,

I guess it's time I introduced myself here too…

I'm Tony, from mySociety. I’m originally from Northern Ireland, but I moved to Estonia just over eight years ago. (If you haven’t already heard me expound at length on why it’s one of the best countries in the world, ask me some time!)

A large chunk of my role at mySociety has been to get groups collaborating on civic tech, and it’s great to see so many people here interested in that.

But I’m concerned that it’s still too difficult to even do a lot of the very basic stuff, and fear that we’re only just slowly starting to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem. We have some great data standards around parliamentary data now (particularly with Popolo): but getting data into those formats can still be a tricky process, and without good tools to operate on them it’s often not worth the effort. But unless lots of groups already have data in those formats, there isn’t really as much value as there could be in having standardised tools either.

So I’m currently working on improving both halves of that — making it easier to create Popolo data, and ensuring there’s more value in doing so.

These are both being wrapped up in a new project: EveryPolitician.org — of which more later — but for now the thing I want to show off is a new CSV to Popolo converter:

http://everypolitician.org/upload

If you can get a list of your legislators into CSV, then this will do its best to convert it to Popolo for you (and also add them into a PopIt, if you like). I’d love for lots of you to throw data at it, to help find out what works, and what doesn’t. It doesn’t try to cope with all sorts of complex modelling situations — it just lets you get up and running quickly, and then tweak the edge-cases within the PopIt editing interface. But there are undoubtedly lots more things that it _could_ do, so all feedback will be very gratefully received!

We’re also building a map of which countries already have Popolo format data for their legislators:
http://everypolitician.org/#map

I’m fairly certain that there are countries that should be coloured in, but aren’t yet — so, again, please let me know what’s missing!

Thanks,

Tony

[James McKinney]

Hi Tony,

It’s great to hear how EveryPolitician.org is advancing! The CSV uploader looks similar to what Sunlight built for OpenCivicData. They have a guide [1] and the tool itself requires a free Sunlight account [2]. It’s an open source Django app [3].

A related initiative - Since the beginning of this year, Open North has been corresponding with local governments in Canada to publish their elected officials’ contact information as CSV (instead of having us scrape the data), and 25% of the governments with open data have now added this dataset. The CSV headers are described at [4], which are a compromise between Popolo terms and the needs and use cases of government data catalogs.

With respect to "making it easier to create Popolo data, and ensuring there’s more value in doing so” - what sort of problems does the first half refer to? Are you including the problem of getting the data at all, in any format? If so, I’d point people to Pupa.rb (Ruby) [5] and Pupa (Python) [6], which are two scraping frameworks which store results in Popolo format. The example Pupa.rb scrapers [7] show how Pupa.rb eliminates all the boilerplate caching, logging, retrieving, saving, reconciling, etc. steps, so that you can just focus on the scraping.

James

1. http://opencivicdata.org/upload/guide/
2. http://opencivicdata.org/upload/
3. https://github.com/opencivicdata/opencivicdata.org/tree/master/upload
4. http://represent.opennorth.ca/government/
5. https://github.com/jpmckinney/pupa-ruby
6. https://github.com/opencivicdata/pupa
7. https://jpmckinney.github.io/pupa-ruby/docs/cat.html

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[Tony Bowden]

On 16 March 2015 at 14:13, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> It’s great to hear how EveryPolitician.org is advancing! The CSV uploader looks similar to what Sunlight built for OpenCivicData. They have a guide [1] and the tool itself requires a free Sunlight account [2]. It’s an open source Django app [3].

I like how they do the labels with brackets: "Phone (home)" vs "Phone
(office)" etc — I suspect I'll steal that!

FWIW, I divided the problem into separate steps: the converter itself
is a standalone ruby gem[1], which is then wrapped in a lightweight
Sinatra app[2] to do the conversion. (And no accounts needed unless
you want to submit to PopIt!)

> A related initiative - Since the beginning of this year, Open North has been corresponding with local governments in Canada to publish their elected officials’ contact information as CSV (instead of having us scrape the data), and 25% of the governments with open data have now added this dataset. The CSV headers are described at [4], which are a compromise between Popolo terms and the needs and use cases of government data catalogs.

Very interesting. Did any changes to Popolo itself come out of this
approach, or is it simply a matter of being able to translate the
extra terms behind the scenes?

> With respect to "making it easier to create Popolo data, and ensuring there’s more value in doing so” - what sort of problems does the first half refer to? Are you including the problem of getting the data at all, in any format?

No, here I'm mostly referring to the problem of working out how to
express in Popolo the data you do already have. I know that some
people are able to just read the spec and follow it all, but my head
starts hurting every time I try to do that, and from talking to a few
other people, and surveying the data that already exists out there, I
know that others have gotten confused too. Over time that'll become
easier when we have lots more examples to copy, but I'm also hoping
that a range of tools will appear that take care of the basics for
you, so you only need to think about the edge-cases.

Mostly here I'm thinking of groups who have already built up useful
data for other purposes, maybe even just in a spreadsheet, but don't
necessarily have a lot of tech skills or modelling experience etc, or
who don't really have a strong enough need yet to convert their data
to Popolo. If we can make it so they can fairly trivially move, for
example, from having nothing more than a CSV file, through to creating
a Popit, and then connecting that to get a working WriteIt — all in
under 15 minutes — then that seems like a major step forward for
Poplus!

Tony

[1] https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/csv_to_popolo
[2] https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/popolo-creator-sinatra

[James McKinney]

Did any changes to Popolo itself come out of this
approach, or is it simply a matter of being able to translate the
extra terms behind the scenes?

Popolo was not changed. The CSV schema is just a very specific mapping of Popolo to include the use case of a government publishing point-in-time data that needs to make sense when opened by a non-techie Canadian in Excel. In the CSV schema, we also break up the address into components in order to get consistent addresses after import (since Popolo currently only stores full addresses, though an issue was re-opened recently to store address components [1]).

If we can make it so they can fairly trivially move, for
example, from having nothing more than a CSV file, through to creating
a Popit, and then connecting that to get a working WriteIt — all in
under 15 minutes — then that seems like a major step forward for
Poplus!

Indeed!!

1. https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/10

J

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[James McKinney]

By the way, if you and others were to put together a list of common questions you seek answers to in Popolo’s documentation, I can work on a guide that answers them in a less confusing way!

James

[Tony Bowden]

On 16 March 2015 at 19:54, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> By the way, if you and others were to put together a list of common
> questions you seek answers to in Popolo’s documentation, I can work on a
> guide that answers them in a less confusing way!

A few random thoughts:

One thing that I've been meaning to suggest for a while is that I
think the top level examples could be more helpful if they were all
more closely tied to the 'open government' space. Trying to puzzle out
whether to model something as Posts or just with roles on Memberships,
for example, might be slightly easier if the primary examples were
about Parliaments or equivalent, rather than a kitchen assistant in a
diner.

The appendix examples are great, but they're mostly about exceptional
cases — it would also be good to have a couple of relatively complete
examples of more common set-ups leading into that — though that's
probably more suited to a tutorial approach, building up from
something super-simple, and then showing how Popolo gracefully handles
all sorts fringe cases, especially compared to the naive single-table
database approach.

I think the hard thing for me to get my head around is often not
simply how I _could_ express something, but what the trade-offs are
between different ways of modelling the same thing. It would be very
useful to accumulate some collected wisdom around things like "Doing
things like <this> adds more complexity, but makes it simpler to run
<this> sort of query", or "This way is technically more precise, but
unless you actually need to track X, then it might be simpler to just
do it this way instead". We might not actually know the answers to
these sorts of things yet, but it would be useful to hear from people
who are actively using Popolo what they wish they'd done differently,
or had known earlier, etc.

Tony

[James McKinney]

Good point about better examples :) I’ve created an issue [1].

Regarding the trade-offs of modelling things in different ways, I think (among the Person, Organization, Membership and Post classes), the main decision is whether to use Posts or not. If you don’t use Posts, I think there’s only one way to do it.

If you do use Posts, then you need to decide whether to store a property value (like the “role”) on both the Membership and the Post or on only one. Have you encountered other questions about Memberships and Posts where it wasn’t clear which way to go?

Another question might be about where to store contact details - whether on the person, membership or post.

I’ve collected these questions in a second issue [2]

1. https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/89

2. https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/90

James

[Tony Bowden]

On 16 March 2015 at 21:25, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> Have you encountered other questions about Memberships and Posts where it
> wasn’t clear which way to go?

I remember getting myself tied in knots at one point on how to
represent legislators' connections to their political parties, and
whether that might differ in countries where there's little or no
official recognition of parties by the legislature (e.g. UK) vs those
where faction membership is deeply ingrained to the extent that
someone who changes party must become a single-member-faction if they
do anything in the interim (e.g. Finland).

The way this tends to be represented so far is with two completely
unrelated memberships that happen to share dates: one of the
legislature, and one of the party. This never seems quite right to me,
especially as there doesn't seem to be an automatable way to tie those
together at the minute without external knowledge of modelling
decisions and naming patterns[1].

The Membership page notes that there's an "on behalf of" property
(though the example JSON serialisation doesn't show an example), so I
got quite waylaid by wondering whether there are circumstances in
which someone might hold their parliamentary position on behalf of
their party (e.g. in countries with a closed list system).

---

The other one that caused me trouble was how to represent
Deputies/Replacements, especially in a country that doesn't have
single-member constituencies. Each MP individually has a deputy who
would automatically replace them if they resigned/died/took other
office, etc. Representing that would be fairly easy if there were
individual Posts, which each could hold with a different role, but
working out how to do that without those made my head hurt.


Tony

[1] In general, I wonder whether a lot of the set-up around these
sorts of things would benefit from code lists of terms that should be
used by preference (e.g. on labels and roles etc) — if one of the
primary goals of Popolo is to enable reusable tools, that becomes
significantly more difficult if fundamental concepts can be
called different things in every dataset.

[James McKinney]

> On Mar 17, 2015, at 3:54 AM, Tony Bowden <to...@mysociety.org> wrote:
>
> On 16 March 2015 at 21:25, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
>> Have you encountered other questions about Memberships and Posts where it
>> wasn’t clear which way to go?
>
> I remember getting myself tied in knots at one point on how to
> represent legislators' connections to their political parties, and
> whether that might differ in countries where there's little or no
> official recognition of parties by the legislature (e.g. UK) vs those
> where faction membership is deeply ingrained to the extent that
> someone who changes party must become a single-member-faction if they
> do anything in the interim (e.g. Finland).
>
> The way this tends to be represented so far is with two completely
> unrelated memberships that happen to share dates: one of the
> legislature, and one of the party. This never seems quite right to me,
> especially as there doesn't seem to be an automatable way to tie those
> together at the minute without external knowledge of modelling
> decisions and naming patterns[1].

There’s an important distinction because caucus and party here. A party is an organization that exists independent of the legislature, and which a person may be a member of, whether they are a representative or not. A caucus is a political group within a legislature, and which only a representative may be a member of.

When I model party memberships, the dates of party membership are not the same as those of legislative membership. A person's party membership doesn't start and end with each election; it survives elections. Caucus membership, on the other hand, does start and end with each election (and each change in caucus membership).

In Westminster systems and other countries like the US, a person’s party membership determines their caucus membership. It’s typically less maintenance to model just the party membership and the legislative membership in these cases, since party memberships change less infrequently than caucus memberships.

In places like Finland which cares about caucuses (also known as faction, fraction, club, group, etc.), you are better off modelling the caucus membership and legislative membership, and maybe ignoring party membership. In these cases, the legislative membership survives as long or longer than the caucus membership - since a legislative membership survives a change in caucus, for example.

Do these models make sense?

> The Membership page notes that there's an "on behalf of" property
> (though the example JSON serialisation doesn't show an example), so I
> got quite waylaid by wondering whether there are circumstances in
> which someone might hold their parliamentary position on behalf of
> their party (e.g. in countries with a closed list system).

The onBehalfOf property was originally added to point to the party that a legislative membership was tied to. In 2012, US presidential candidate Ross Anderson ran with different parties in different states. Looking at his party memberships wouldn’t tell you which party he was running with in a given state; so, onBehalfOf tells you.

Also, if you want to query, “find me all members of Parliament of party X”, you can do it in one query if all memberships of Parliament store the party in onBehalfOf. In such a model, you’d typically end the membership if a person were to change party midterm, which doesn’t exactly model reality (they aren't starting a new membership in Parliament when they cross to another party), but it’s often simpler than recording both current and historical party associations on that legislative membership.

> The other one that caused me trouble was how to represent
> Deputies/Replacements, especially in a country that doesn't have
> single-member constituencies. Each MP individually has a deputy who
> would automatically replace them if they resigned/died/took other
> office, etc. Representing that would be fairly easy if there were
> individual Posts, which each could hold with a different role, but
> working out how to do that without those made my head hurt.

To clarify: Are you saying things break down in multi-member constituencies, but hold together in single-member constituencies? Or that it’s unclear how to model the deputy-MP situation entirely?

In single-member constituencies, I would have one Post for the MP and one post for the Deputy, and it’d be up to the application’s logic to figure, “well, the MP Post is empty, therefore the person in the Deputy Post now has agency in Parliament.”

In multi-member constituencies, it really depends how the multi-membership is structured. In simple cases you just add one Post for each member representing the constituency. If there’s some sort of timeshare system, it depends on the details.

> [1] In general, I wonder whether a lot of the set-up around these
> sorts of things would benefit from code lists of terms that should be
> used by preference (e.g. on labels and roles etc) — if one of the
> primary goals of Popolo is to enable reusable tools, that becomes
> significantly more difficult if fundamental concepts can be
> called different things in every dataset.

What labels and roles would you propose for a code list?

James

[Tony Bowden]

On 18 March 2015 at 02:28, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> There’s an important distinction because caucus and party here.

*nod* — I understand that. I don't think it makes much difference to
my main question (though your second answer does, so more on that
below), though you neatly provide another answer here to your earlier
question of what other decisions other than "Posts or not?" do you
need to make... :)

> The onBehalfOf property was originally added to point to the party that a legislative membership was tied to. In 2012, US presidential candidate Ross Anderson ran with different parties in different states. Looking at his party memberships wouldn’t tell you which party he was running with in a given state; so, onBehalfOf tells you.
> Also, if you want to query, “find me all members of Parliament of party X”, you can do it in one query if all memberships of Parliament store the party in onBehalfOf. In such a model, you’d typically end the membership if a person were to change party midterm, which doesn’t exactly model reality (they aren't starting a new membership in Parliament when they cross to another party), but it’s often simpler than recording both current and historical party associations on that legislative membership.

Ah, that's very interesting. Is that documented somewhere? It seems
that that would fix quite a lot of issues (I noticed yesterday that
YourNextMP has a related open question about this too:
https://github.com/mysociety/yournextmp-popit/issues/78 ). Is there a
reason why that isn't the default recommended way to do this, that we
should add to all the examples etc?

> To clarify: Are you saying things break down in multi-member constituencies, but hold together in single-member constituencies? Or that it’s unclear how to model the deputy-MP situation entirely?

That I can see relatively simple ways to do it for single member
constituencies that make sense (though I'm not sure how to evaluate
which is better between one Post (MP) with two people holding it, one
with a Role of member, and one with a Role of deputy; vs two separate
Posts (MP + Deputy)).

> In multi-member constituencies, it really depends how the multi-membership is structured. In simple cases you just add one Post for each member representing the constituency.

So let's take an example:

Country with 100 MPs, divided into 10 multi-member constituencies. The
rules of the PR system mean that there aren't a fixed number of seats
per constituency, though in practice they all tend to have 10+/-2.
Each MP has an individual Deputy who has effectively no role at all
unless the MP vacates their seat, at which point they automatically
replace them.

You're suggesting, for example, posts like "MP #1 in District X", "MP
#2 in District X", "MP #1 in District Y", "MP #1 in District X's
Deputy", etc?

> What labels and roles would you propose for a code list?

Any of the things surrounding these core concepts of people holding
positions in a legislature or executive (via a Party). How they
_display_ should certainly be capable of being different for every
country/situation, but the queries required to find out the key
information should really be the same everywhere if standardised
tooling is ever going to become possible.

Tony

[James McKinney]

On Mar 18, 2015, at 4:15 AM, Tony Bowden <to...@mysociety.org> wrote:

On 18 March 2015 at 02:28, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:

There’s an important distinction because caucus and party here.

*nod* — I understand that. I don't think it makes much difference to
my main question (though your second answer does, so more on that
below), though you neatly provide another answer here to your earlier
question of what other decisions other than "Posts or not?" do you
need to make... :)

Indeed - I’ve added more topics to the issue: https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/90

The onBehalfOf property was originally added to point to the party that a legislative membership was tied to. In 2012, US presidential candidate Ross Anderson ran with different parties in different states. Looking at his party memberships wouldn’t tell you which party he was running with in a given state; so, onBehalfOf tells you.
Also, if you want to query, “find me all members of Parliament of party X”, you can do it in one query if all memberships of Parliament store the party in onBehalfOf. In such a model, you’d typically end the membership if a person were to change party midterm, which doesn’t exactly model reality (they aren't starting a new membership in Parliament when they cross to another party), but it’s often simpler than recording both current and historical party associations on that legislative membership.

Ah, that's very interesting. Is that documented somewhere? It seems
that that would fix quite a lot of issues (I noticed yesterday that
YourNextMP has a related open question about this too:
https://github.com/mysociety/yournextmp-popit/issues/78 ). Is there a
reason why that isn't the default recommended way to do this, that we
should add to all the examples etc?

It’s not the default way, because while it makes some use cases less complicated, it makes others incorrect. For example, in the US, journalists are often curious about who leaves Congress before the end of the term. If a person changes party or becomes independent during their term, the above model would make it look like the membership that started the term ended before the end of the term. In other words, you could be asking the right question and getting the wrong answer. You might say the question wasn’t right for the data model, but asking the right question shouldn’t depend on details of the data model. When not using onBehalfOf, the right question gets the right answer - it’s just harder to answer.

But, yes, all this should be added to the docs as part of issue #90 and I’ve linked the issue you mention.

To clarify: Are you saying things break down in multi-member constituencies, but hold together in single-member constituencies? Or that it’s unclear how to model the deputy-MP situation entirely?

That I can see relatively simple ways to do it for single member
constituencies that make sense (though I'm not sure how to evaluate
which is better between one Post (MP) with two people holding it, one
with a Role of member, and one with a Role of deputy; vs two separate
Posts (MP + Deputy)).

With one Post, it’s easier to find the two linked memberships. If, by the conventions of parliament, the deputy is truly imbued with MP-ness, then I suppose there’s no reason to make two Posts.

In multi-member constituencies, it really depends how the multi-membership is structured. In simple cases you just add one Post for each member representing the constituency.

So let's take an example:

Country with 100 MPs, divided into 10 multi-member constituencies. The
rules of the PR system mean that there aren't a fixed number of seats
per constituency, though in practice they all tend to have 10+/-2.
Each MP has an individual Deputy who has effectively no role at all
unless the MP vacates their seat, at which point they automatically
replace them.

You're suggesting, for example, posts like "MP #1 in District X", "MP
#2 in District X", "MP #1 in District Y", "MP #1 in District X's
Deputy", etc?

In my own work (and I think Sunlight does similarly), if there are many members-at-large in a city council, for example, their Posts are numbered, e.g. “Vancouver (seat 1)”, “Vancouver (seat 2)”, etc.

In your example, is the number of seats in a constituency fixed for at least the length of a legislative session, or can the number of seats change if there’s a by-election?

For the sake of sanity, I would probably just have one Post for both the MP and deputy in this case, as it seems complicated enough without adding more Posts.

What labels and roles would you propose for a code list?

Any of the things surrounding these core concepts of people holding
positions in a legislature or executive (via a Party). How they
_display_ should certainly be capable of being different for every
country/situation, but the queries required to find out the key
information should really be the same everywhere if standardised
tooling is ever going to become possible.

The label is generally reserved for display, and its pattern may differ for different memberships even within the same legislature - if a member adopts a particular style, for example.

For role, candidates for a code list are: member, candidate, deputy. Any others? I’ve opened an issue: https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/91

James

[Tony Bowden]

On 18 March 2015 at 14:28, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> For role, candidates for a code list are: member, candidate, deputy. Any
> others? I’ve opened an issue:
> https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/91

Some standardisation around classifications on Organisations would be
very useful too: e.g. around political parties / factions, a
legislature (or house of one) etc.

Tony

[Cristhian Daniel]

Hi James, 

This all looks really interesting. 

I am wondering if you have are thinking about (or know of others who are doing so) "deliberative and decision making processes". Do you have any models and suggestions about this? (e.g., how to model an "argument" in support of "proposal"? what's a "claim" and how can we model notions being in "favor" or "against" an argument? how can "evidence" be highlighted to support "ideas",etc.? these kind of things). 

Cheers, 

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[James McKinney]

I’ve added that to the issue as well. Please contribute what you’ve witnessed as a best practice!

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[James McKinney]

Hi Cristhian,

Academic projects are often a good source (because they cite their sources and research prior work - unlike much open source!), so maybe have a look at http://cci.mit.edu/klein/deliberatorium.html and the related papers. Also, if you put some keywords into http://lov.okfn.org/ (I can’t access it right now, but it’ll be back!) you may find an appropriate vocabulary.

Cheers,

James

[Tony Bowden]

On 18 March 2015 at 14:28, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> It’s not the default way, because while it makes some use cases less
> complicated, it makes others incorrect. For example, in the US, journalists
> are often curious about who leaves Congress before the end of the term. If a
> person changes party or becomes independent during their term, the above
> model would make it look like the membership that started the term ended
> before the end of the term. In other words, you could be asking the right
> question and getting the wrong answer. You might say the question wasn’t
> right for the data model, but asking the right question shouldn’t depend on
> details of the data model. When not using onBehalfOf, the right question
> gets the right answer - it’s just harder to answer.

This makes me think there's a concept missing somewhere. We have two
rather different ways of expressing a quite foundational thing in the
domain (that a person's membership of a legislature is usually
connected to a political party/group), each of which has confusing and
surprising complications or trade-offs. This makes it difficult to
know how to model it — especially if you're just starting, and want to
express little more than list of current legislators as (person +
party + constituency) — and even more difficult to construct a
standardised way of expressing the very common questions that people
will want to ask of this sort of data.

> In your example, is the number of seats in a constituency fixed for at least
> the length of a legislative session, or can the number of seats change if
> there’s a by-election?

In my example there's no such thing as by-elections: the seats
allocated to each Party are based on share of the national vote, and
the point of having Deputies is to know who will become the
replacement MP if an incumbent vacates their seat. So, yes, the number
of seats representing each District is fixed until the next general
election.

> In my own work (and I think Sunlight does similarly), if there are many
> members-at-large in a city council, for example, their Posts are numbered,
> e.g. “Vancouver (seat 1)”, “Vancouver (seat 2)”, etc.

For reasons I can't adequately articulate yet this seems slightly odd
to me. It feels like this is shoehorning something in that the Spec
doesn't cover properly, even though this will, in practice, be a very common
scenario. This might just come down to documenting that this is the
preferred approach, but I get the same reaction to this as I do to seeing
variables called seatOne, seatTwo, seatThree etc in code, rather than
an array[1].

Tony

[1] I suspect part of what's bothering me here is that they're usually
a Set, not even an Array, with no ordering involved or implied. But
that feels secondary to something bigger, even if I can't put my
finger on what that bigger thing is!

[James McKinney]

Good questions! Inline:

> On Mar 20, 2015, at 10:50 AM, Tony Bowden <to...@mysociety.org> wrote:
>
> On 18 March 2015 at 14:28, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
>> It’s not the default way, because while it makes some use cases less
>> complicated, it makes others incorrect. For example, in the US, journalists
>> are often curious about who leaves Congress before the end of the term. If a
>> person changes party or becomes independent during their term, the above
>> model would make it look like the membership that started the term ended
>> before the end of the term. In other words, you could be asking the right
>> question and getting the wrong answer. You might say the question wasn’t
>> right for the data model, but asking the right question shouldn’t depend on
>> details of the data model. When not using onBehalfOf, the right question
>> gets the right answer - it’s just harder to answer.
>
> This makes me think there's a concept missing somewhere. We have two
> rather different ways of expressing a quite foundational thing in the
> domain (that a person's membership of a legislature is usually
> connected to a political party/group), each of which has confusing and
> surprising complications or trade-offs. This makes it difficult to
> know how to model it — especially if you're just starting, and want to
> express little more than list of current legislators as (person +
> party + constituency) — and even more difficult to construct a
> standardised way of expressing the very common questions that people
> will want to ask of this sort of data.

The “right” way is to not use onBehalfOf, and to model party memberships independent of legislature memberships. This is how it’s done in reality; and in reality it is just as hard to determine what party a person was a member of for any past date. If you want to know, “what party was Morgan a member of on this date?” then you’ll find the table on the legislature’s website with their party memberships, and you’d read the table until you find the date range that covers your date, and you’d have your answer. This is what the code does.

This model encodes exactly as much information as there is in reality. On the other hand, onBehalfOf encodes more (since as I described it requires adding spurious memberships if there are changes in party membership), and the simple person + party + constituency model of only current legislators you describe encodes less, because it’s not modelling changes over time.

So, I don’t think there’s any concept missing; reality is just that complicated. Perhaps what’s missing are reusable queries so that you don’t need to think about what question to ask, but I would have thought PopIt had already figured those out.

>> In your example, is the number of seats in a constituency fixed for at least
>> the length of a legislative session, or can the number of seats change if
>> there’s a by-election?
>
> In my example there's no such thing as by-elections: the seats
> allocated to each Party are based on share of the national vote, and
> the point of having Deputies is to know who will become the
> replacement MP if an incumbent vacates their seat. So, yes, the number
> of seats representing each District is fixed until the next general
> election.
>
>> In my own work (and I think Sunlight does similarly), if there are many
>> members-at-large in a city council, for example, their Posts are numbered,
>> e.g. “Vancouver (seat 1)”, “Vancouver (seat 2)”, etc.
>
> For reasons I can't adequately articulate yet this seems slightly odd
> to me. It feels like this is shoehorning something in that the Spec
> doesn't cover properly, even though this will, in practice, be a very common
> scenario. This might just come down to documenting that this is the
> preferred approach, but I get the same reaction to this as I do to seeing
> variables called seatOne, seatTwo, seatThree etc in code, rather than
> an array[1].
>
> Tony
>
> [1] I suspect part of what's bothering me here is that they're usually
> a Set, not even an Array, with no ordering involved or implied. But
> that feels secondary to something bigger, even if I can't put my
> finger on what that bigger thing is!

Yes, procedurally, most legislatures treat multi-member constituencies as a set without order. However, I know several municipalities in Canada that number their seats – I assume because they’ve modelled their legislature in code and ran into similar issues as below.

An alternate model can have Posts for single-member constituencies, and PostSets for multi-member constituencies, where the PostSet is, in terms of modelling, the same as a Post, except it has a property to set the maximum number of concurrent members of the set. In terms of logic, however, it would be different. We can go through the use cases:

1. Counting total seats:
When counting the number of seats in a legislature, a Post would count for one, but a PostSet would count for the number of seats it represents.

2. Determining empty seats:
To determine the empty seats, in a Post-only legislature, you just count the Posts without a current membership. In one with PostSets, you’ll compare the number of current memberships in each PostSet with the maximum number.

3. Determine who represents a constituency:
If the area is stored on the membership, this doesn't change. If it’s stored on the Post, then it’s still the same: get all current memberships for the Post or PostSet with the matching area. If no area is stored, for PostSet, you just get all current memberships in the PostSet. For Post, however, you first find all numbered Posts, then get the current memberships.

4. Enforcing a maximum number of concurrent memberships:
A post would never have two memberships that overlap in time, but a PostSet would allow up to the maximum number of overlapping memberships (though the memberships must be checked to refer to unique people).

5. Adding a new member:
With a PostSet, run use case 4, then assign the person to the PostSet if use case 4 passes. With a Post, you need to find the appropriate empty seat (use case 2), and then assign the person to that Post.

(Jumping back to modelling quickly, I suppose you can add the additional property on Post, but then you would have a property that, if set to a value other than “1”, magically transforms the logic of the class, which suggests to me that PostSet should be an independent class, as otherwise you can have code that doesn’t recognize the additional property and then fails spectacularly to interpret the data.)

So, is adding PostSet worth it? It better models reality. But considering the confusion around Membership and Post, I’m sure adding PostSet will make things more confusing. Adding additional logic to applications to handle both single-member Posts and multi-member PostSets may also enter “too complex to use” territory. Looking at the use cases, it looks like Post is simpler in nearly all cases, and even in the cases where it’s not clearly the better option, PostSet is not the clearly better option either. In use case 3, the solution is to just use areas to bring Post and PostSet to parity. In use case 5, it’s not clear which is better; they both involve extra steps.

Are there other use cases to disambiguate which is better?

James

[Tony Bowden]

Splitting these in two, as it's hard enough keeping my brain focussed
on a single one of them, without needing to hold both at the same time
:)

On 20 March 2015 at 16:18, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> Perhaps what’s missing are reusable queries so that you don’t need to think about what question to ask, but I would have thought PopIt had already figured those out.

I don't think that's what PopIt is trying to do (it's really just
storing whatever Popolo people throw at it, and making them formulate
their own queries against it), but it's definitely something I need to
do, so coming up with those reusable queries would definitely be a
good thing!

So let's see if I can make up a semi-extreme but hopefully at least
realistic example, and see if we can work out (a) what the pros and
cons are of different modelling approaches, and (b) how to formulate
various standard questions against it.

---

George Bloggs is a politician who has served simultaneously for many
years on Foyle District Council, the Northern Ireland Assembly, and
the UK House of Commons.

He has served multiple terms on all of those (including as Foyle Mayor
in 2007), historically as a member of the Official Unionist Party.
However, on July 12th 2013 he had a serious disagreement with the
party, and resigned from it. For several months he acted as an
Independent in each, but then formed new alliances such that from
October 1st he joined the Traditional Unionists in the Northern
Ireland Assembly, and from October 15th he joined UKIP in the House of
Commons. However he remained independent on the District Council as
elections were due to be held at the start of December — for which he
stood as a candidate for the Traditional Unionists (and lost). In the
May 2014 EU elections he was elected as an independent member of the
AECR grouping, and thus had to resign his House of Commons seat.

---

The two queries we have so far that we need to be able to run against
this are (a) noting that he left the House of Commons before the term
ended; and (b) producing tables of memberships and failed candidacies
along the lines of:

Foyle District Council
Dec 2006-Dec 2010 term: OUP [Mayor 2007-01-01 → 2007-12-31]
Dec 2010-Dec 2014 term: OUP (start → 2013-07-12); Independent
(2013-07-12 → end)
Dec 2014-Dec 2018 term: TUP candidate; not elected

Northern Ireland Assembly:
Nov 2003–Mar 2007 term: OUP
Mar 2007–Mar 2011 term: OUP
May 2011–May 2016 term: OUP (start → 2013-07-12); Independent
(2013-07-12 → 2013-10-01); TUP (2013-10-10 →)

House of Commons
May 2005–May 2010 term: OUP
May 2010–May 2015 term: OUP (start → 2013-07-12); Independent
(2013-07-12 → 2013-10-15); UKIP (2013-10-15 → 2014-05-25 [resigned])

European Parliament
May 2014–May 2019 term: AECR (independent)



Tony

[James McKinney]

Thanks for the example!

Would you agree that, absent the party memberships, the example would be straight-forward? The only missing thing would be relating the membership to the legislative term, but now that I’ve added Event to Popolo, we can consider adding a property to Membership to relate it to a legislative term. (New issue #93)

As for party memberships, my first thought is that the party membership can be related to the legislature, e.g. Bloggs is a member of UKIP in the context of the House of Commons. This would model how we think about the party membership in reality. This new property would mirror onBehalfOf, but instead of onBehalfOf pointing to a party on an legislative membership, the new property would point to an organization on a party membership. I’m not 100% sure about this proposal, but if anyone thinks it’s worth pursuing, I’ll create an issue for it.

I think these would solve the modelling issues. If so, I can think about the querying issue.

https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/93

J

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[Tony Bowden]

On 20 March 2015 at 18:28, James McKinney <ja...@opennorth.ca> wrote:
> Would you agree that, absent the party memberships, the example would be
> straight-forward? The only missing thing would be relating the membership to
> the legislative term, but now that I’ve added Event to Popolo, we can
> consider adding a property to Membership to relate it to a legislative term.
> (New issue #93)

I haven't looked deeply at Event yet, but that seems like a nice approach.

The other thing that I realised in constructing that example is that I
don't know how to link the two halves of the "being elected to the
European Parliament forced him to resign from the House of Commons".
This seems to be the sort of thing that will probably come up quite a
lot — in modelling the Estonian Riigikogu, for example, I have to deal
with it in the context that the executive and legislature are
independent, so accepting a Cabinet position in a mid-term reshuffle
means resigning your seat (and your Deputy taking over), but at the
minute the two are simply connected through abutting Memberships and
can only really be derived by implication and domain knowledge.

> As for party memberships, my first thought is that the party membership can
> be related to the legislature, e.g. Bloggs is a member of UKIP in the
> context of the House of Commons. This would model how we think about the
> party membership in reality. This new property would mirror onBehalfOf, but
> instead of onBehalfOf pointing to a party on an legislative membership, the
> new property would point to an organization on a party membership. I’m not
> 100% sure about this proposal, but if anyone thinks it’s worth pursuing,
> I’ll create an issue for it.

So in the example, George would have three separate OUP memberships
before his falling out with the party, each pointing at the separate
legislatures?

My gut reaction is there's probably a question here that mirrors the
problem of doing things the other way around, but I'm not sure what
that might be. Something around finding people who change party
mid-term?

Tony

[Tony Bowden]

Going back to the onBehalfOf property...

> It’s not the default way, because while it makes some use cases less
> complicated, it makes others incorrect. For example, in the US, journalists
> are often curious about who leaves Congress before the end of the term. If a
> person changes party or becomes independent during their term, the above
> model would make it look like the membership that started the term ended
> before the end of the term. In other words, you could be asking the right
> question and getting the wrong answer. You might say the question wasn’t
> right for the data model, but asking the right question shouldn’t depend on
> details of the data model. When not using onBehalfOf, the right question
> gets the right answer - it’s just harder to answer.

I'm not really following this example.

Assuming someone switching party would look like:

{
'person_id': 1010,
'organization_id': 'congress',
'on_behalf_of': 'party X',
'start_date': '2010-02-04',
'end_date': '2011-03-03',
},
{
'person_id': 1010,
'organization_id': 'congress',
'on_behalf_of': 'party Y',
'start_date': '2011-03-03',
},

Then surely finding out if someone has left Congress is still
answerable? Yes, it means that you have to ask the question
differently, and possibly in an iterative manner, but that's what you
currently have to do for the (much more common) question of "What
party was this Person a representative of on this data?" question, and
it seems like it would be better to optimise for the latter rather
than the former.

This approach also seems to more clearly reflect how people actually
think about the domain. Very few groups are ever going to track 'true'
party membership details (e.g. that someone joined the party when they
were a student 40 years ago) — generally it's really the parliamentary
party / caucus details that are important, and in practice that's
tightly bound to their legislative membership, rather than a
completely separate thing. Being able to express it in a single
Membership seems much more natural to me (for both modelling and
querying).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what sorts of queries can't be asked
against this model?

Tony

[Tony Bowden]

> 2. Determining empty seats:
> To determine the empty seats, in a Post-only legislature, you just
> count the Posts without a current membership. In one with PostSets,
> you’ll compare the number of current memberships in each PostSet
> with the maximum number.

How would that work in Constituencies with a variable number of seats
per term? i.e. if Tartumaa had 7 seats in the last Riigikogu, but now
only has 6, and one of the MPs has stepped down (and their replacement
hasn't yet taken their seat), how do you differentiate that "Tartumaa
(7)" doesn't exist this term, but "Tartumaa (6)" does (and is empty)?
If this should be done with an elimination date on the Post, what
happens next term if it has 7 seats again?

> Are there other use cases to disambiguate which is better?

As a minor tweak on #3, I would think that a common case would also be
to see the history of the Memberships for a given constituency. In a
multi-member scenario, the expectation would presumably usually be to
see an undifferentiated list of all members:

Lääne-Virumaa:
XII Riigikogu: Siret Kotka (K), Hanno Pevkur (RE), Marko Pomerants
(IRL), Indrek Saar (SDE)
XI Riigikogu: Kristiina Ojuland (RE), Marko Pomerants (IRL), Indrek
Saar (SDE), Toomas Varek (K)
X Riigikogu: Tõnu Kõiv (SDE), Mart Laar (IL), Marko Pomerants (RP),
Märt Rask (R), Toomas Varek (K)
etc.

It probably doesn't change much (the logic is the same as your #3) —
I'm just flagging it as it seems like a common enough thing, that it's
important that the standard modelling approach shouldn't make that
sort of query difficult.

> But considering the confusion around Membership and Post, I’m sure
> adding PostSet will make things more confusing

Yes, that worries me considerably too.

Tony

[dale....@wevoteusa.org]

Hello all, my name is Dale McGrew and I am the Executive Director of We Vote, a volunteer driven nonprofit based in Oakland California. We are building social voting tools that help voters discuss what is on the ballot with their social networks, and encourage their friends to get out and vote.

We are currently focused on the United States, but would love to work with international partners in the coming years. Thank you for launching Poplus.org!

You can learn more about We Vote here: http://www.WeVoteUSA.org

https://www.facebook.com/WeVoteUSA
Twitter: @WeVoteUSA

[Martín Szyszlican]

Guys, this conversation is great, but I think it's mind-boggling to most humans.
I see James asking for use cases and only Tony providing an example.

Do you think we can conduct a process to survey all use cases? Do you already have that? Documented or in your heads?

In my case I use two separate memberships, which causes incompatibility with both legislative and cargografias. So I understand that it's my fault in some way, or that clients should be improved to handle this case. So I think this conversation is very relevant and should result in clarification of the standard, improvement of the tools and updating of the data sets.

Also about modifying the standard... Is there a way to to express which version of the standard we used when we coded our products?

Is there a risk that data becomes inconsistent after updates?

Thanks.

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[Tony Bowden]

On 24 March 2015 at 15:19, Martín Szyszlican <mart...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I see James asking for use cases and only Tony providing an example.

Guglielmo has joined in too on a few of the tickets[1], but it would
definitely be great to hear from more people too!

> In my case I use two separate memberships, which causes incompatibility with
> both legislative and cargografias. So I understand that it's my fault in
> some way, or that clients should be improved to handle this case.

Yeah — Popolo has two goals here that are somewhat in tension: it
needs to be flexible enough to cope with modelling lots of different
types of systems, but it also aims to do things in a way that enables
shared tooling. Right now I'm more interested in the second half of
this, as I feel the first half has dominated so far, at the expense of
making it _possible_ to do lots of stuff, but really difficult to do
things that should really be much simpler.

So, for example, this week we want to add the functionality to
WriteIt, so that when you import people from a PopIt, it defaults to
letting you only contact the currently sitting members. This is
exactly the sort of query that many different Components might want to
make — but it's remarkably difficult to do in a generic manner.

I suspect the general approach here will be to say "If you model your
data like <this>, then these tools can Do The Right Thing
automatically, otherwise you'll have to tweak everything yourself
manually" — but for lots of common scenarios the <this> part isn't
well defined yet, and so that's what I'm focussing on right now.


Tony

[1] https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/90 +
https://github.com/popolo-project/popolo-spec/issues/93

[James McKinney]

> Also about modifying the standard... Is there a way to to express which version of the standard we used when we coded our products?
>
> Is there a risk that data becomes inconsistent after updates?

Just to respond to these questions separately: In my own work, I’ve been using the dates in the Change history as version numbers:
http://www.popoloproject.com/specs/#history

The changes to Popolo have so far been backwards-compatible, except in a few cases - but those backwards-incompatible changes were done shortly after introducing a class or property. For example, I originally added a “valid_through” property to ContactDetail, but the next day got feedback to change it to “valid_until.”

Software using more recent versions of Popolo will have more properties and classes available to them, which software using older versions won’t have support for. But the new properties being added to old classes are mostly for narrow use cases, like when nationalIdentity was added to Person.

In terms of inconsistency, I think the risk is more around inconsistent decisions about how to use Memberships, Posts, etc. to model a legislature, which is why it’s important to figure out the issues Tony and others have raised recently (and hopefully not change our minds later).

J

> To post to this group, send email to pop...@googlegroups.com.

> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/poplus.

> To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/poplus/CAKTxXVXpijYS_G7L_HfosQYPhSZBX5A7nVZhFsFom8n-UzGw9A%40mail.gmail.com.

[Stephen Ritterbush]

Hey,

I'm Stephen Ritterbush, based in Fayetteville Arkansas. I moved here from Louisiana in 2008 to pursue my education as an entrepreneur, and now work for the university I attended as the information systems and analytics lead for their honors college, which is in turn one of the largest in the nation.

Something that has always been important to me is projects that can change the world for the better. Some call this social entrepreneurship, where profits are secondary to doing good. I've been involved with projects, having that goal in mind, that range from photovoltaic research to dementia treatment to the games for good initiative and even simple efforts in sustainability and community development in my local area. My most recent foray into this interest was when I saw CVs being listed for officials up for election in the UK, and thinking that would be a marvelous resource to have in the US as well.

It is that interest that led me here, through a series of introductions that started in the UK and ended with an opportunity to sphere with Clint and hear about his own projects. I like what he is doing and trying to achieve, and I'm volunteering my support.

I can be reached via email at sritt...@gmail.com, or via skype at smritterbush.

Best,

On Wednesday, January 7, 2015 at 8:42:01 AM UTC-6, Steven Clift wrote:

Welcome everyone.

This is the topic for friendly introductions. 

This is where new and long-time Poplus participants and everyone around the world interested in sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects can connect and collaborate.

So please reply to this topic with a brief introduction and share some links.

If you like, you can answer these questions. 

1. Who are you? Be conversational.

2. Why are you or your project(s) interested in sharing civic technology? (aka Poplus or related concepts)

3. Share any contact details and links you wish.

By posting your introduction here, on the public web-view, this topic will always be at the top to welcome new members to our ongoing exchanges.

If you'd like more information on Poplus before saying hello, see: http://poplus.org

Thanks,

Steven Clift

Engagement Lead, Poplus.org

P.S. Please start a new topic if an introduction inspires you to start a discussion.

[James McKinney]

Welcome, Stephen!

I just want to make sure you’re aware of https://groups.google.com/d/forum/democracy-club where that UK initiative to collect CVs is getting more discussion, so that you can follow its developments. I expect you’ll hear about it in the Poplus group as well, but no harm in joining both groups :)

Cheers,

James

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[Nina Kamali]

Hello everyone,

Nina Kamali here from majlismonitor.com, a Farsi platform monitoring Iran's parliamentarians. I am working with ASL19 Inc. a Toronto-based technology and research lab dedicated to enabling improved access to information online in Iran. The website is currently only in Farsi, but we are working to create an English version of the website too. We're also planning for the next parliamentary election happening in March 2016. You can read more about Majlis Monitor in English here and here. 

Although we believe that monitoring the performance of politicians would be much more effective done inside the country, the government of Iran is unlikely to tolerate/allow such activities. The government also actively censors, controls, and disrupt the free flow of information online; so a part of our mission is to make the limited public parliamentary data more accessible and easier to understand for ordinary citizens, and also to provide an open space for conversation between Iranians around these issues. 

I'm not a very techy person so would love to connect to those with more tech background and learn how to use the existing platforms with the data we have available. We probably need to modify some of these tools to be compatible with Farsi language though. 

Thanks for sharing works/ideas in this group. Looking forward to meeting and working more closely with you all. 

[Julian Tait]

Hi everyone,

My name is Julian Tait from Manchester, UK

I am a co-founder of Open Data Manchester a civil society group that has been running in Manchester for 5 years this April. http://www.opendatamanchester.org.uk

Always interested in the work that people are doing around the world regarding democracy and civic participation, and eager to showcase interesting examples at our monthly Open Data Manchester meetings that happen on the last Tuesday of the month.

The next meeting is an Open Election Special, Tuesday (31st) https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/open-election-special-tickets-15973902372 so if you are in Manchester - or near - please come along and say "Hi'

Cheers

Julian

[James McKinney]

> On Mar 24, 2015, at 10:45 AM, Tony Bowden <to...@mysociety.org> wrote:
>
>> 2. Determining empty seats:
>> To determine the empty seats, in a Post-only legislature, you just
>> count the Posts without a current membership. In one with PostSets,
>> you’ll compare the number of current memberships in each PostSet
>> with the maximum number.
>
> How would that work in Constituencies with a variable number of seats
> per term? i.e. if Tartumaa had 7 seats in the last Riigikogu, but now
> only has 6, and one of the MPs has stepped down (and their replacement
> hasn't yet taken their seat), how do you differentiate that "Tartumaa
> (7)" doesn't exist this term, but "Tartumaa (6)" does (and is empty)?
> If this should be done with an elimination date on the Post, what
> happens next term if it has 7 seats again?

Given that the size of the constituencies changes unpredictably, I guess each term you’d have an entirely new set of Posts, which removes some of their utility. Maybe this is a case where you don’t want Posts at all?

James

[irth orbits]

Do you guys think a public ledger would help organize constituencies? Each citizen could be accounted for by a unique ID and zip code and then a reverse index could be created for zip codes so it's easier to group or regroup into changing constituency boundaries (assuming that zip codes are definitive lines!). 

The system would be fairly secure as long as the citizen ID's aren't attached to their names or other data. A good responsibility of a government agency (Vital Statistics) would be to keep those records and offer an api verification service to ping with an ID that responds with a true value and zip code or a false value if there is no record on gov side.

Are there any gotcha's in that reasoning?

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[Teg-wende Idriss TINTO]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Hi everyone,

My name is Teg-wende Idriss TINTO, from Burkina Faso where I'm a Open
Knowledge ambassador since June 2013.

Most of the time, I'm occupied to raising awarness about open data to
the civil society organisations, private sector and also government.
With civil society organisations, I'm trying to show them how open data
can help them better monitor government and encourage citizen
engagement. With the government, I've worked on the national open data
portal and helped organize the open data ecosystem. With the private
sector, I'm engaged to help them reuse data and to open the data they
have (public tansport, entreprises register, ...).

In Burkina Faso, we had a popular uprising in october 2014 that marked
the end of 27 years of reign of the former regime. So now, people have
the objective to take actions to prevent that someone try to compromise
their future. So I'm in action with the civil society organisations to
monitor the elections that are scheduled for october, and many more
projects.

To monitor institutions and engage people, we need to use tech tools,
and what is important for me regarding this list is to find the best
tools for our needs, and of course, in case of need, help develop.

Regards

- --
Crypter vos email pour limiter la surveillance de masse. Guide :
https://emailselfdefense.fsf.org/fr/

Teg-Wendé Idriss TINTO:
Ingenieur en Informatique
téléphones:
(00226)70102936,
(00226)66283666
email:
tinto.jean[at]titinto[dot]net,
twitter:
@titinto_
skype:
tinto.jean
citation:
« Notre mission est de préserver, protéger et promouvoir la
liberté d'utiliser, étudier, copier, modifier et redistribuer les
programmes informatiques, et de défendre les droits des utilisateurs de
logiciel libre. » FSF

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[James McKinney]

In Canada, postal codes (zip codes) are continually being added, removed, changed and reassigned, so they are not reliable for identifying electoral districts.

Cheers,

James

[Maria Luisa Sotomayor]

Hi everyone, I introduced myself somewhere around the beginning of this thread (I think!), and I just wanted to say OMG! Welcome all the newbies!!! This was a great idea Steven. Thanks so much.

Cheers,

Lucha

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María Luisa Sotomayor

UNICEF Consultant

U-Report Coordinator for Chile
+56992379372

@mlsotomayor