As you’ll remember from our previous blogpost, the Global Legislative Openness Week — AKA GLOW — provided us with a great opportunity to support events and spread the word about our ambitious Wikidata project with groups around the world.

In the end we sponsored nine events (in Slovenia, Sweden, Croatia, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Spain, Wales and, amazingly, Nepal) and sent representatives to support seven of them in person. This meant that Tony, the lead for the EveryPolitican project, had an interesting 10 days getting the most out of budget airlines and managing to attend six of the events. He would have liked to have made it seven but EasyJet don’t go to Nepal! Also special thanks to Lucas who represented the project in Greece and Bulgaria taking a little of the pressure from Tony.

#Sofia Tony Bowden @tmtm wikidata workshop makes light on @mySociety vision of a "democratic commons" #mediafreedom pic.twitter.com/gvg0IrJu4o

— OBC Transeuropa (@BalkansCaucasus) November 27, 2017

Five of the countries (Croatia, Greece, Italy, Slovenia and Spain) moved from very little or no coverage of political data in Wikidata to our two-star (or better) indicator — this is a (very) rough guide to how good the data is in a country; we are tracking what information already exists for the primary house of a national legislature which you can learn more about on our Wikidata project page. Wales was already a ‘three-star’ country and the others are coming along nicely.

Many thanks to this awesome Wiki geeks for joining us yesterday at Wiki Data-a-thon to celebrate #GLOW17 in Nepal. Kudos @mySociety for supporting the Workshop. pic.twitter.com/DT7fdL8zlL

— Open Knowledge NP (@okfn_np) December 1, 2017

We couldn’t be happier with the response and contributions made to the Democratic Commons by the participants  — and we’re extremely keen to do more events early next year, collaborating with Wikimedia communities to make this happen. If that sounds interesting take a look at our original blogpost about the events and get in touch if it seems up your street.

Ahora @tmtm nos introduce al wikiproyecto @everypolitician, toda la info aquí >> https://t.co/8w1EhNNd9Q ¡En esta sesión vamos a añadir los primeros datos españoles! @mySociety @medialabprado pic.twitter.com/NyKX3AVmLG

— Wikimedia España (@wikimedia_es) November 29, 2017

All in all these events really felt like a culmination of all the learnings and activities undertaken in the project so far. The strides we have taken in understanding the best way to model this kind of data in Wikidata and the tools that have been built are what made it possible to make such a big impact in each of the countries in just a day or two. Not all of these lessons were easy to learn but they are really starting to pay dividends now.

We really want to keep this momentum up and build even more relationships with Wikimedia communities who are interested in contributing to the Democratic Commons in their countries so I can’t reiterate it enough – please do get in touch if you would like to get involved.

One more thing

If you’ve read this with great interest to the very end, then you are just the sort of person who we’re looking for! We currently have a vacancy for a Political Researcher to help us kickstart this kind of work in up to 100 countries, supporting our ambitions in the Democratic Commons project. See the job description here.

Photo by Margo Brodowicz on Unsplash