First of all let me start with very interesting developments in terms of relationship of Sejmometr.pl team with local authorities. Following their commitment to openness, Daniel posted on Sejmometr’s blog:

“Sejmometr team was invited for a meeting by a Polish Ministry of Economy. Ministry of Economy is preparing a system for publishing and consulting legislative initiatives on a level of Polish Government (Sejmometr focuses on a legislation on a level of Polish Parliament). People from the Ministry wrote that they are observing Sejmometr, they like it, and they want to talk about some cooperation in the future.”

It’s exciting news and I really hope we will hear more about the meeting soon. For now though let me get back to the weekly routine of update on the work itself. Daniel and his team created a mechanism of presenting content of bills from PDF files according to the part suggested by Polish law (proposition of a new law, justification, impact assessment) to publish them this way:

Tabs: Przebieg prac/Workflow, Treść/Proposition of a new law, Uzasadnienie/Justification, Ocena skutków/Impact assessment, Dokumenty/Documents

He needs your advice on the second tab (Treść/Proposition of a new law) though:

“The tab presents proposition of a new law. We’ve created an administration panel which makes possible to convert a plain text of a new law propositions to a database structure, where each article, paragraph, point and so on, is represented as a separate entry. This is just a first step on a road to introduce a future major Sejmometr feature: presenting propositions of a new law in a form of “commits”, well known from a social coding portals (like a GitHub). This would require a huge amount of an additional, manual work with describing a role of each entry (for a various reasons – it can’t be done fully automatic, although advanced technology could be used to support the manual work of a human moderator).

We didn’t make a final decision whether to start manual processing of these data – it’s just a proposition of a future Sejmometr progress. In your opinion – would this feature be valuable?”

Do let him know, as I am sure he appreciates all your feedback!