About this site

For all its routine and formal trappings, Parliament remains a crucial engine of our democracy. And lots of its workings—votes, speeches, committees—take place in the open. But, too often, information that's technically available is difficult to find and use. This independent, non-governmental site aims to make some of that information more easily accessible.

Hi. I'm Michael. (You can reach me via e-mail.) This site is a volunteer, spare-time effort of mine. I built it because I think Parliament's goings-on are important—alternately fascinating, boring, and depressing, but important—and because I believe that public information should be meaningfully public, which today means shareable and computer-readable.

In building the site, I had no shortage of inspirations. In particular, TheyWorkForYou.com does wonderful things in the UK. Thanks also to How'd They Vote, Canada's OG Hansard scraper, whose API I'm gratefully using to match postal codes with MPs, and PoliTwitter.ca, whose API helps me keep up-to-date on MPs' use of social media. And thanks to whoever in Parliamentary IT made vote information available in XML; you saved me much time and hair.

Here's how you can help.

Programmers

This site is free software. We run on Python and Django. If you notice a bug or want to add functionality, patches are wonderful things. Reports and suggestions should go to our feedback forum, or e-mail. I've listed some ideas for projects. You're also very much encouraged to build your own projects on top of our code and data. We have a bare-bones API for Hansard transcripts, and I'm happy to add requested API functionality.

Graphic/Interface Designers

Design is crucial to making information accessible. This site is my amateur effort; suggestions and contributions are deeply welcome.

Everyone

Send suggestions and problem reports via our feedback forum or e-mail. Use our data. And encourage your representatives and communities to support open data.

Even if the battle's far from won, the case for transparency in government is clear: of course we should know how our representatives are representing us, of course we should be able to see what's being done with our tax dollars. But, as information and data become increasingly synonymous, making information available isn't enough. To be useful, it has to be usable. It has to be freely available, in a flexible digital format. It has to be open.

Take the House of Commons transcripts that make up the bulk of this site. Parliament has transcripts since 1994 online, which is great. But they're available only as pre-formatted Web pages, which means that to get the data I had to construct a wobbly tower of rules—if it's a 14-pixel font, it's probably a person's name, as long as it's not within a table and it doesn't contain the words The, Some, One, or An, or Assistant—that took many days and more frustration to get right. And if Parliament starts to use a different font size, this site stops working.

Meanwhile, the House is kind enough to make vote information available in a simple, open format. I used that data on this site, where it's presented in a way that I find clearer than on Parliament's site. It took me an afternoon.

But this isn't about making things convenient for me. It's about the innovation that data can unlock—and the obstacles closed data puts in democracy's way. In 2003, the federal government declared that travel and hospitality expenses would be public. But then each department made its reports available in different places, and in different clunky, error-ridden, non-open formats.

Opening up data ain't all that hard. Once I had the House transcripts processed—that is, back into the kind of structured form in which it lives, hidden from the public, in Parliament's computers—opening the data took a couple of hours. But, despite the benefits, too often government just doesn't care. When transit agencies in Halifax and Toronto wouldn't make their schedule information open, brilliant programmers reverse-engineered the schedule data and built immensely useful trip-planning sites. The transit agencies' reaction? Continued indifference.

You can do great stuff with prosaic municipal data, and some cities, from Nanaimo to Toronto, are passing open data resolutions and starting to share information. Things are looking up. Communities are forming. But, unlike other countries, Canada doesn't yet have a federal open data plan or culture. We can do better.