What problem are you solving?:

It is hard to track policy issues in Lithuania:

– there are many actors initiating policy change: government, president, parliamentary committees, the parliament, etc.;

– the changes themselves of the policy documents are not presented in a usable way;

– it is hard to find ways to give feedback to the politicians and government workers on the policy change they are proposing.

Describe your idea:

A website that will:

– aggregate all relevant news from the parliament, government and other websites — easing the pain to individually track all of them.

– let its visitors to filter the news by simple criteria (parliament committee, ministry, political party, politician names) — reducing the effort needed to find relevant news for the visitor.

– provide context information on relevant documents: connect law proposals to valid laws, link to other news mentioning the document and so on.

– allow its visitors to make public comments on each document — thus creating a feedback channel between citizens and politicians.

– provide an API to use the collected documents and meta-information in other applications.

Even in its current form (only aggregation has been implemented) the website is providing a much better overview on what’s going on in the parliament and the government than anything else. Testing version is at:
http://emilis.net/govsrvr/

What country will this operate in?: Lithuania

Who are you?:

I am a 30 year old web developer and political activist in Vilnius:

– have 9 years of professional experience in web development (apps, portals, websites). Some of my open-source code:
https://code.launchpad.net/~emilis-d
http://emilis.info/scripts/

– have participated in political youth organizations and a successful self-organized-on-the-Internet youth protest movement (as one of the leaders);

– for the last 2-3 years I have been actively opposing attempts to introduce Internet voting in Lithuania. Therefore I understand the needs of the potential users of the project I am proposing very well.

We (with Žygimantas Medelis) have organized a meeting (with Tony Bowden) in Vilnius for this project — to invite and encourage more people to participate.

After the meeting we created a Google group (currently 20 members) for the people interested in developing mySociety-like projects in Lithuania:
http://groups.google.com/group/manovalstybe