Scottish Parliamentary proceedings are now back on TheyWorkForYou.

Back in August 2014, the Scottish Parliament changed the way it published the Official Report of its debates.

TheyWorkForYou works by fetching data from various parliamentary sources—and in this case, unfortunately, the change at the Scottish Parliament end meant that our code no longer worked. We replaced our ‘debates’ section with an apologetic note.

Well, thanks to the Scottish Parliament kindly republishing the data in almost the format we used to use, we’ve managed to make some small tweaks and restore that content—including debates from the previously missing period. If you’re subscribed to alerts, you should have received an email digest with links to the backdated content (always supposing there was any that matched your chosen keywords).

And if you’re not subscribed to alerts? Now is a great time to rectify that. We’ll send you an email every time your chosen word or phrase is mentioned in Parliament, or every time your chosen representative speaks.

While we were doing this work, we also modified TheyWorkForYou so that it now pulls in ministerial data from the Scottish Parliament API. This is a welcome time-saver for us: previously we were creating a list manually from the official PDFs, while we can now automatically fetch it and reformat it into Popolo JSON, meaning it’s consistent with all our other data.

Thanks for your patience; we know that many people were awaiting this repair, and for longer than we would have liked. Enjoy!

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Image: Mark Longair (CC)