Just how quickly can we hit the 200 countries mark on EveryPolitician? That’s what we’ll be finding out this week, and one thing’s for sure — we’ll get a lot further with your help.

This week is GLOW, the Global Legislative Openness Week, and we’re marking it with a concerted drive for more data.

Tony, the project lead, has consistently added one new country every day since EveryPolitician launched four months ago, and now it’s time to put a rocket behind our efforts.

The site currently contains data for 134 countries. We’ll be going flat out to see how quickly we can reach 200, and as the excitement ramps up, we hope you will help spread the word and get involved, too. Tony will carry on working as hard as he can to fill in the gaps, but we need your help to get further, faster.

What is EveryPolitician?

EveryPolitician is our project to store and share open data on every national-level legislator in the world — all in a standard format that can be used by anyone. We wrote about it here.

How can I help?

• Help us find data for more countries! We don’t currently know where to find the politician data for many countries. Here’s a list of the ones we need and here’s a page about how to contribute. If you get stuck, give us a shout.
• Write a scraper If you have the know-how, you can help us enormously by helping scrape the data from the places we do know about. See this page for guidance on how to go about writing a scraper. You’ll find lots of examples here.
• You can also help by spreading the word – tell your friends, tweet, blog, get up on a platform and talk, and just generally share this post. Thank you!

Why do we need this data?

Politician data is readily available for most countries, but it comes in a massive variety of inconsistent formats. Most of those formats aren’t ‘machine readable’, that is to say, the data can’t readily be extracted and re-used by programmers, and pretty much every country differs on what information it provides about each politician.

That being the case, anyone who wants to build an online tool that deals with politicians from more than one country, or who would like their tool to be available to people in other places, or would like to adapt an existing tool to be used elsewhere, would first have to adapt their tool to cope with the data.

EveryPolitician saves them the trouble, and the structured format also means that the tools they build will be compatible with any other tools that use it.

What kind of tools?

EveryPolitician data will be useful for all kinds of projects.

It’ll be much easier to build a website that shows people how to contact a politician. Or one that holds a government to account and educates people about what politicians are doing. Or one that helps voters make choices by displaying facts about what their politicians believe.

It can go further than that, though — with these building blocks in place, developers can really use their imagination to put together all kinds of projects, many of which we haven’t even begun to imagine. And don’t forget that, if a tool has been built to use the standardised data, it’ll also be easy for others to redeploy elsewhere.

If you’d like to see a concrete way in which the data’s already being used, check out Gender Balance.

How can I keep up to date?

We’ll be putting out regular updates via Twitter as the number of countries covered increases — plus you can watch the map turn green on http://everypolitician.org/countries.html as we progress.