As I have promised in my first post about KohoVolit.eu, we will give you a little bit more insights into the current work of the project focussing on on-going monitoring of parliamentary work.

The project focussing on evaluation of MP’s is using the information available on parliamentary website:

“the information like attendance or activity (e.g. submitting laws proposals or questioning the government) is on the webpage of the Parliament (the webpage actually got some prize for being one of most informative and well-designed (meaning features and user experience)), but it seems nobody (no organization) really uses this opportunity except us…”

The team has developed applications using the data from this website and feeding it directly to their site, which provides the audience with comparisons and data analysis.

“What we then do is that we take data of individual MPs and we’re looking for interesting facts. Czech MPs are elected regionally. So we prepare kind of ‘set’ for each MP which contains easy-to-understand table with data AND most important hints stressed – we send those to regional media, always matching the regions and MPs elected in that region. We also do some comparisons cross-regionally.”

In terms of the work on Write To Them clone, the team is working on:

“- analyzing appropriate ways how to choose MP(s) one wants to contact (based on geographical proximity, parliamentary groups, etc.) reflecting the way MPs’ responsibility is perceived in Czech republic and in Slovak republic. The challenge is to provide the best user experience,
– designing the underlying database model – identifying the necessary data and the way how they are structured and organized into database tables,
– discussing the form of cooperation and sharing the work with teams in other countries working on their WTT application.”

Big thank you to Veronika for the update, but stay reading – we will learn more about the international cooperation soon!