EveryPolitician: Open dataset on politicians (opens in new tab)

Lawrence Kestenbaum, attorney, politician, and the creator and webmaster of The Political Graveyard website.

In terms of utility to effort ratio, I think it's right to start with national legislatures. However, I hope there will eventually be a dataset that's as deep as Political Graveyard for the entire planet, even if just to satisfy my inner data nerd :)

Why? UK is comprised of countries with their own legislatures (with devolved and varying powers). England doesn't. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have parliaments, and their own politicians so need an entry. They all elect MPs to the Westminster UK parliament as well. Just as all these areas elect EU MEPs too.

CGP Grey explains UK: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNu8XDBSn10

For Australia we get our information primary from http://www.openaustralia.org.au/ — if you can give any pointers to where things are wrong, we can correct them.

Unfortunately, in the vast majority of countries, this data is largely only available by scraping — and often parliaments completely revamp their websites when a new term starts, meaning our scrapers need rewritten then. We're aware we're behind in some countries, but we're up to date in most, and help with bringing us forward on the others is always appreciated! (This is an unfunded project run by a tiny team within a charity). Or, when people let us know that they're using the data for a country (or would use it if it were up to date!), then we prioritise working on that.

It's also possible that we simply haven't noticed that there's a new term somewhere. There's an average of one general election per week throughout the world, and sometimes we miss one, especially if there's a long gap between the election and the term starting, or even the list of legislators being published. So please let us know where we're missing something.

> If you want to bother at all, you should have data on the level of http://abgeordetenwatch.de

Yes, that's the goal. But it's going to take us time to get there! We also run https://www.theyworkforyou.com/ in the UK, so we know the value of having that level of information available. Our experience in helping groups in other countries set up similar sites led us to create EveryPolitician. Its goal is not to be a replacement for sites like that, which will always need local knowledge and context to be effective — it's to help people building such sites get up and running quicker, and free them up to focus more on holding politicians to account, not in spending all their time fixing broken scrapers etc.

And, by transforming all the underlying data to a consistent format, there can also hopefully be significantly more tool reuse, rather than everyone reinventing the wheel every time. This whole sector is massively underfunded, and so much time, energy, and money is wasted simply replicating what exists in other countries. There'll never be a one-size-fits-all solution for most of this, but being able to get started quicker, and to re-use pieces that already exist (e.g. for letting people write to their representatives, or visualise gender-breakdown over time, or compare attendance records across parties, etc) means that groups can deliver more value within their usually very tight budgets.

We prioritised going broad rather than deep to start with, because there's value in being able to do even very shallow comparisons across multiple countries — even just having the _names_ of the current national legislators in almost every country in the world turns out to be quite useful if, say, you're an investigative journalist needing to filter millions of documents (think Wikileaks, Panama Papers, etc) — and to give people something to build on top of while we work on going much deeper. That's slowly starting to happen now, but largely prioritised by user need, as we don't have the resources to go deep everywhere at once. But help is always very very welcome! Simply even telling us where we can get data for most countries is hugely valuable, though for the 95% of countries that don't supply that in structured formats, helping to write scrapers would be wonderful too…

http://docs.everypolitician.org/contribute.html

Even an email signup wouldn't be fine for me. I don't want any achievements to brag about. I just wanted to learn and/or contribute.

Plus the real purpose of the feature is to showcase that it can return lists of politicians by nationality/body for many countries. At individual politician level, I can find a whole lot more information by typing their name into UK-specific sites (some of them actually run by the same people)