Fwd: OpenHouseNS.ca

[James McKinney-2]

Open North is happy to be working with Springtide Collective, a Nova Scotia nonprofit, on their http://www.openhousens.ca/, a site like http://openparliament.ca/ for their provincial legislature, which launches today on International Democracy Day. We encourage you to check it out!

With more funding, the site can expand to do a lot more interesting things (notably email alerts), but for now it focuses on making the hansard (transcripts) more easily searchable and accessible. This work largely involved transforming the legislature’s HTML into Akoma Ntoso, an international XML format for legislative documents. As more legislatures modernize their hansard production and adopt structured XML formats, launching sites like OpenHouseNS.ca will become even easier, allowing groups like Open North and Springtide Collective to focus on more interesting problems than restructuring text.

Another interesting aspect of the project is how the informal cooperation of civil society organizations from around the world made the project feasible. We transformed the legislature’s HTML using Pupa.rb [1], a Ruby library written by Open North but based on a Python library [2] written by the Sunlight Foundation (US). Once transformed, the data is imported and managed using SayIt [3] by mySociety (UK). For data on people and ridings, the data is again collected by Pupa.rb and stored in Popolo [4] format, an international specification for legislative data authored by Open North and used by at least two dozen organizations. We load and manage the data on people and ridings using another library written by OpenPolis (Italy).

OpenHouseNS.ca is a great example of how standardized data formats make it easier for organizations in our space to write reusable code, which drives down the cost of developing government monitoring websites. It took a lot of time and effort to set up this type of ecosystem, but it’s beginning to bear fruit, here in Canada and elsewhere.

Cheers,

1. https://github.com/opennorth/pupa-ruby

2. https://github.com/opencivicdata/pupa

3. http://sayit.mysociety.org/

4. http://popoloproject.com/

5. https://github.com/openpolis/django-popolo

James

Begin forwarded message:

From: Mark Coffin - Springtide <[hidden email]>

Subject: OpenHouseNS.ca

Date: September 15, 2014 at 9:13:16 AM GMT-4

To: James <[hidden email]>

Reply-To: Mark Coffin - Springtide <[hidden email]>

Your window to Province House.

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Happy International Day of Democracy!

 

Today we’re launching a new tool that will make it easier than ever to keep tabs on the work of the Nova Scotia Legislature. Thanks to our partners at OpenNorth.ca, we’re launching OpenHouseNS.ca - your window to Province House. 

 

Why we built it: 

Virtually everything an MLA says in Province House is recorded in the Hansard - a word for word record of the proceedings of the legislature. The volume of Hansard content produced in a typical sitting of the legislature ranges from one-to-two times the total word-count of all seven of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. The Hansard isn’t easy to search through, and unsurprisingly, the proceedings of the legislature are in no way as captivating as Rowling's Harry Potter novels. 

Our website fixes one of those things. 

 

Here’s what you’ll see when you visit OpenHouseNS.ca: 

- Find your MLA by entering your address or postal code
- Every MLA has a page listing all comments they’ve made on the Hansard record while in the legislature (dating back to 2011) 
- A powerful new search function allows you to monitor the issues you care about and how they’re being discussed in the legislature. 
- A user-friendly, visually intuitive design allows you to link to and share content from the site 
- Easy-to-browse debate records that allows users to focus in on specific members comments, and also pull-back to see the context of those comments 

Visit the site here and read our blog on why we built the site. 

 

The startup funding for the site was provided by the Democracy 250 Youth Engagement Legacy Trust. 

 

If you find our site useful, you can help us maintain and improve it by becoming a monthly donor to Springtide. 

 

Sincerely, 

Mark and the Springtide Collective team



 

FIND US @ The Hub Halifax 1649 Barrington St., 2nd Floor  |  Halifax, Nova Scotia  |  B3J 1Z9 [hidden email] 902 237 6275 facebook.com/SpringtideCollective @SpringtideCo youtube.com/SpringtideCo
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Springtide Collective · 2nd Floor - 1673 Barrington Street · Halifax, NS B3J 1Z9 · Canada 

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[Tracey P. Lauriault]

Fantastic!  Congras ya'll!

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 4:50 PM, James McKinney <[hidden email]> wrote:

Open North is happy to be working with Springtide Collective, a Nova Scotia nonprofit, on their http://www.openhousens.ca/, a site like http://openparliament.ca/ for their provincial legislature, which launches today on International Democracy Day. We encourage you to check it out!

With more funding, the site can expand to do a lot more interesting things (notably email alerts), but for now it focuses on making the hansard (transcripts) more easily searchable and accessible. This work largely involved transforming the legislature’s HTML into Akoma Ntoso, an international XML format for legislative documents. As more legislatures modernize their hansard production and adopt structured XML formats, launching sites like OpenHouseNS.ca will become even easier, allowing groups like Open North and Springtide Collective to focus on more interesting problems than restructuring text.

Another interesting aspect of the project is how the informal cooperation of civil society organizations from around the world made the project feasible. We transformed the legislature’s HTML using Pupa.rb [1], a Ruby library written by Open North but based on a Python library [2] written by the Sunlight Foundation (US). Once transformed, the data is imported and managed using SayIt [3] by mySociety (UK). For data on people and ridings, the data is again collected by Pupa.rb and stored in Popolo [4] format, an international specification for legislative data authored by Open North and used by at least two dozen organizations. We load and manage the data on people and ridings using another library written by OpenPolis (Italy).

OpenHouseNS.ca is a great example of how standardized data formats make it easier for organizations in our space to write reusable code, which drives down the cost of developing government monitoring websites. It took a lot of time and effort to set up this type of ecosystem, but it’s beginning to bear fruit, here in Canada and elsewhere.

Cheers,

1. https://github.com/opennorth/pupa-ruby

2. https://github.com/opencivicdata/pupa

3. http://sayit.mysociety.org/

4. http://popoloproject.com/

5. https://github.com/openpolis/django-popolo

James

Begin forwarded message:

From: Mark Coffin - Springtide <[hidden email]>

Subject: OpenHouseNS.ca

Date: September 15, 2014 at 9:13:16 AM GMT-4

To: James <[hidden email]>

Reply-To: Mark Coffin - Springtide <[hidden email]>

Your window to Province House.

Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Happy International Day of Democracy!

 

Today we’re launching a new tool that will make it easier than ever to keep tabs on the work of the Nova Scotia Legislature. Thanks to our partners at OpenNorth.ca, we’re launching OpenHouseNS.ca - your window to Province House. 

 

Why we built it: 

Virtually everything an MLA says in Province House is recorded in the Hansard - a word for word record of the proceedings of the legislature. The volume of Hansard content produced in a typical sitting of the legislature ranges from one-to-two times the total word-count of all seven of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. The Hansard isn’t easy to search through, and unsurprisingly, the proceedings of the legislature are in no way as captivating as Rowling's Harry Potter novels. 

Our website fixes one of those things. 

 

Here’s what you’ll see when you visit OpenHouseNS.ca: 

- Find your MLA by entering your address or postal code
- Every MLA has a page listing all comments they’ve made on the Hansard record while in the legislature (dating back to 2011) 
- A powerful new search function allows you to monitor the issues you care about and how they’re being discussed in the legislature. 
- A user-friendly, visually intuitive design allows you to link to and share content from the site 
- Easy-to-browse debate records that allows users to focus in on specific members comments, and also pull-back to see the context of those comments 

Visit the site here and read our blog on why we built the site. 

 

The startup funding for the site was provided by the Democracy 250 Youth Engagement Legacy Trust. 

 

If you find our site useful, you can help us maintain and improve it by becoming a monthly donor to Springtide. 

 

Sincerely, 

Mark and the Springtide Collective team



 

FIND US @ The Hub Halifax 1649 Barrington St., 2nd Floor  |  Halifax, Nova Scotia  |  B3J 1Z9 [hidden email] <a href="tel:902%20237%206275" value="[phone]" target="_blank">902 237 6275 facebook.com/SpringtideCollective @SpringtideCo youtube.com/SpringtideCo
unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences

This email was sent to [hidden email] 
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Springtide Collective · 2nd Floor - 1673 Barrington Street · Halifax, NS B3J 1Z9 · Canada 

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CivicAccess-discuss mailing list
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--

Tracey P. Lauriault

http://traceyplauriault.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/moving-to-ireland/

https://gcrc.carleton.ca/confluence/display/GCRCWEB/Lauriault

http://datalibre.ca/

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