Using EveryPolitician data: contact details

Our EveryPolitician project makes data on the world’s politicians available in a useful, consistent format for anyone to use. If you’ve been following our progress, you’ll know we’ve already collated a lot of data (over 72,000 politicians from 233 countries). The work on adding to the depth and breadth of that data is ongoing, but EveryPolitician data is already being used to do interesting things.

Previously we looked at Politwoops as an example of EveryPolitician data being used to augment existing data.

In that case, the useful data for Politwoops was the politicians’ party affiliation. But our team (a handful of humans and one very busy bot) collects richer data than just that. EveryPolitician data includes contact information for politicians.

At mySociety, we know how powerful this particular kind of data can be. For example, our WriteToThem site makes it easy for UK citizens to contact their representatives (WriteToThem grew out of the earlier online service FaxYourMP, and uses the now more common technology of email).

Of course, there’s nothing especially radical about collecting email addresses of politicians… or phone numbers, Twitter handles, or Facebook pages. Indeed, many individuals and groups do just that. But an important difference with EveryPolitcian is that we’re not just collecting data (which happens to include those things, as well as a host of others) but also making it available so it’s easy to use. We do that by putting it out in consistent, useful formats.

For many projects, downloading a CSV of current politicians from EveryPolitician will be enough. That can be opened as a spreadsheet, and if one of those columns is called email, you’re good to go.

Opening a spreadsheet is just one way of accessing the data. Our own use of EveryPolitician data to power the “Write in Public” MajlisNameh site for ASL19 (see this blog post for more about that) demonstrates a more programmatic approach.

But the whole point of making data available like this isn’t so that we can use it. It’s for other people, other groups. Anyone can build more nuanced or complex services with this data too.

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For example, the people at Represent.me have built a sophisticated platform for gathering opinions and votes that can be shared with politicians and constituency MPs. It’s a system of information-gathering that has a network of citizens at one end feeding into their political representatives at the other. They use EveryPolitician’s data to populate their system with information about those representatives, including contact details, for each country they operate in.

And, because we make sure our data is consistently formatted, it’s a good general solution. As they cover more areas, they can expect the code they’ve written to ingest the EveryPolitician data in the countries they’re already operating in to also work as they expand into others.

If you’re running a project that needs such data, you could invest time and effort finding and collecting it all yourself. But it’s almost inevitable that you’d be using the same public sources that we are anyway — after all, we try to identify and use all the sources we can, merging them together into one, collated whole — so really it makes sense to simply take the data from EveryPolitician. Remember, too, that once our bot has been told about a source, it checks it daily for changes and updates too. So instead replicating the effort we’re already doing to gather the same data you need, you’re free to focus on developing the way your project uses that data… while we hunker on down and get on with collecting it.

Inevitably, as with all software projects, there’s always lots more to do, but already the value of providing useful data — and especially contact information — in a consistent format is clear.


Image: Telegraph Chambers (Montreal) CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 by Andre Vandal