johnbowman.net

Thanks to The Phantom Observer for reminding me of the idea of online vote tracking for MPs. I e-mailed the guy who runs (or ran) howdtheyvote.ca months ago. It is a lot of work to get that voting data in a usable form. And what votes do you track? Every little motion and amendment? Or just the important stuff? How do you write code that can differentiate that?

I believe he mentioned using a version of Parliament Parser which is used behind the scenes for sites like TheyWorkForYou.com and The Public Whip, both British. The latter’s Ministerial whirl (a Java app that isn’t working for me right now) is a very interesting visualization of cabinet shuffles.

Of course, in the States, all this data is readily available on sites such as the Washington Post’s Votes Database, written by, of course, Adrian Holovaty. It helps that the U.S. government makes so much of its data available in usable (or, at least, scrapable) forms.

Clearly we need to elect more nerds in Canada.