1. GLOWing the extra mile

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    Posted in Democracy, Events, EveryPolitician

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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

  2. GLOW is calling: help increase the world’s knowledge of politicians

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    Posted in Democracy, Events, EveryPolitician

    If you know your way around Wikidata, we’d love you to join in with the global string of events taking place for GLOW next week.

    We’re very keen to get as many people as possible helping to improve the quality of Wikidata’s information on politicians. Why? Well, let’s take a quick look at a recent story that hit the news.

    A new Bundestag

    With Germany’s new parliament gathering for the first time on October 24, der Spiegel took the opportunity to examine their male-to-female balance, in the context of legislatures across the world. At around 31% female, they noted, the Bundestag now sits at the better end of the scale: parliaments almost everywhere are male-dominated.

    How were they able to make such an assessment? As they note at the foot of their article, they used data on politicians’ gender from our EveryPolitician project.

    A further exploration looked at age — they discovered that on average their parliamentarians were very slightly younger than in previous years — and they note as an aside that here in the UK, we have in Dennis Skinner the oldest MP in Europe, while Mhairi Black is the second-youngest by a whisker.

    These are the kind of insights we seek to increase through our work with Wikidata as we help to boost the quality of their politician data: we consider such analysis not only interesting, but important. Whether or not countries wish to encourage fair representation across age groups and gender — not to mention many other categories — their decisions should at least be based on facts.

    As things stand, there are only a handful of countries where data is good enough to be able to make such comparisons: in our vision, journalists, researchers — and anyone else — will be able to turn to Wikidata to find what they need. The forthcoming Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) gives us all an opportunity to put a rocket under the quality and quantity of data that’s available to people making analyses like these, that stand to benefit us all.

    How to get involved

    GLOW runs from next Monday until the 30th November, and we’re encouraging people — wherever you live in the world — to get together and improve the data on national-level politicians for your country.

    We’re already expecting a good number of groups to run events. Get-togethers are confirmed in Slovenia, Bulgaria, Italy, Greece, Spain and more — once final details are firmed up, we think there’ll be action in other countries across the globe. Now how about you? As we said in our post last month, a concentrated effort from a small group of people can really make a difference.

    We’re especially keen to encourage folk who have some experience of contributing to Wikidata: we reckon that, for this particular drive, you need to already know your way around a bit. So if that’s you, do come forward!

    Start by having a look at this page, which outlines what we hope to achieve; we’ll be adding more detail this week too.  You can add your country to the list if you’d like to, or explore what’s missing in the data of those countries already listed.

    Or, if Wikidata’s all new to you, why not put out some feelers and see if there’s anyone who can show you the ropes while you work together? One good way is to see if there’s a Wikimedia User Group local to you.

    What exactly will you be doing?

    Here’s a bit more detail on what a workshop will look like.

    The idea is to improve information in Wikidata about members of your country’s legislature. The ‘Progress Indicators’ on this page will give you guidance: typically you’ll be working through tasks like adding any missing “position held” statements and biographical data. We’re asking folk to prioritise current politicians, with information for historic members an added bonus if time permits.

    Once sufficient data is available in Wikidata, the real fun begins! Your workshop attendees will be able to query the data to answer questions such as:

    1) Can the gender breakdown and average age of members of the current legislature be calculated?
    2) Can that be broken down per political party/group, or (where appropriate) by region?
    3) Can you compare those figures for the legislature vs. the cabinet?
    4) How far back can you generate those for?

    And if the ideas start to flow, building queries and visualisations to answer other questions will also be very useful.

    Let us know if you have any questions before the week begins — we’re going to be very busy during GLOW, but we’ll do our absolute best to help.

    —
    Image: Alex Iby (Unsplash)

  3. Join the GLOW: run a Wikidata workshop in your country

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    Posted in Democracy, Events, EveryPolitician

    Global Legislative Openness Week (GLOW) celebrates open, participatory legislative processes across the globe.

    Back in 2015 we marked GLOW by setting up a challenge: could we get politician data for 200 countries up on EveryPolitician within the week, with the help of the global community? The answer was a resounding yes, and the challenge was a massive success. We ended up with data for 201 countries in the end, thanks to help from awesome people from all over the world.

    This year, we’re running another challenge: to get as many Wikidata workshops focusing on political data to happen during GLOW as possible.

    Fancy helping with this challenge? Read on…

    Why?

    This is all part of our Wikidata/EveryPolitician project.

    The project aims to improve political data in Wikidata, so that it can be used more easily for projects, research or investigations that hold politicians to account. Examples of where good political data is vital include in parliament-tracking websites (like in Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Ukraine) and in cross-border journalistic investigations (like the Panama Papers).

    Providing this data in consistent and structured formats across countries means the people running these accountability projects spend less of their time gathering the data and more on actually using and interpreting it, to keep tabs on those in power. This project is all part of our mission to contribute to the Democratic Commons.

    One of the best ways to improve and use political data on Wikidata is to get people together in person to work on their country’s data. So, that’s the aim with this latest GLOW challenge, and we’d love for as many groups around the world to host Wikidata workshops as possible!

    The aim of these Wikidata workshops is to:

    • Improve political information in Wikidata so that developers, researchers and journalists (or anyone!) can use the data in their investigations and accountability projects.
    • Use and query existing political data in Wikidata to see what interesting questions can be answered when data is available in consistent and structured formats.

    Workshop attendees will go away with:

    • Increased knowledge of how Wikidata works and how to contribute to it
    • A better understanding of why good political data is so vital and how it can be used
    • New connections to the global community of people who care about accountability issues
    • A warm, fuzzy feeling of satisfaction that they’ve helped with the global accountability movement 😉 (We hope so anyway!)

    Not sure what such an event might look like? Read up on our recent Wikifying Westminster workshop: it really showed us how much can be done when a few people get together in a room.

    Funding and support available

    Thanks to the Wikimedia Foundation, we’re able to offer some support to individuals/groups who are interested in running Wikidata workshops like these during GLOW. This will differ on a case by case basis but includes:

    • A small amount of funding to help cover event costs
    • A review of your country’s existing political information in Wikidata and some pointers about possible next steps
    • Ideas for how you and your attendees can:
      a) Use the data for interesting research and projects, and
      b) Improve the data for future research queries/projects
    • In-person support during your event – if you’d like one of our EveryPolicitian/Wikidata team to come to your event to present and participate, we can do this (if our budget allows!)
    • Access to a dedicated Slack channel which connects you with other groups around the world who are also running events during GLOW.

    Workshops can take place at any time within GLOW week, which is from 20th-30th November 2017 (yes, that is a long week!).

    Get involved!

    So, if you’d like to be part of this global challenge to improve and use political information in Wikidata, we’d be thrilled to hear from you. Please do get in touch: gemma@mysociety.org