Good Practice
From Berlininaugust
The following is a list of many of the the features that transparency sites across the world have, including some that are very common, and some that are quite unique.
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transparency sites
- Rob McKinnon noted that there are really two sorts of thing that transparency sites do:
- Present and re-use information that is created by government and that is already known.
- Create new forms of information from scratch (ie user comments)
Most common features:
- List of all politicians and parties in one assembly or parliament
- A search to help people find politicians. We have seen several kinds, including:
- Search by name
- Search by party
- Search by location
- Search by age, gender and other personal information like what pets they own
- Find MPs by how much they agree with your views
- Find MPs by how they voted
- aggregation of different information from different sources on politicians and parties
- The ability to compare one politician or party with another on a variety of factors
- A list of all votes in a parliament and who voted which way
- The text of debates
- The text of bills and acts and explanatory materials from parliaments
- Maps that overlay information such as who voted on what, where
- Making information easier to understand by:
- Using clear language when parliament refers to complex language (ie Private members bill vs 'This Bill was started by an individual MP, not the government')
- Putting numbers in context, ie This person voted 20% of the time, which is well below average
- Combining many votes into 'policies', ie "A person who was for the war in Iraq would have voted like this on these 8 votes" in order to take complex information on voting and make it very simple to understand.
- information about financial interests, which lobbyist donate money to which people and parties, and clever ways of recombining this information to look for patterns of influence
- Features that allow users to contribute transparency information e.g. on OpenPolis
- Quotes from politicians in the press
- Information on what previous jobs they have done
- Information on whether politicians have been accused or convicted of criminal activities
- Features to make the transparency sites themselves trustworthy and trasparent, including:
- making source code available for inspection
- publicize interests of your projects, who funds them etc
- If there is moderation, make it quite transparent
- Using Freedom of Information (FoI) laws to make information available, e.g.
- finances and expenses of politicans;
- travel information
- studies conducted by government that are private
- direct access to electronic voting records in countries with electronic vote counting in parliament
- Official lists of who is a politician in which area
- Email addresses and mobile phone numbers for politicians
- To obtain information that would otherwise have to be paid for, ie lists of all the NGOs in Romania
- Measurements of the presence of MPs, e.g. how often they show up to talk and vote
- These can be cross-referencing with travel information
- You can try to obtain lists approved absences from votes, and cross correlate these with other information about the wherabouts of politicians
- Transparency sites can also focus on:
- offical petitions (e.g. how long does it take etc.), in germany
- government expenditure (ie in the USA)
- It is a good feature to document your transparency project, e.g. blog about progress/problems
- Customised news alerts are immensely valuable, and supply 50% of TheyWorkForYou's users. They can be run via email, RSS, even Facebook. e.g. They can include:
- Alerts when any politician says a certain word
- Alerts when a specific politician says anything
- Alerts when a politician votes on anything
- Alerts when votes are held on specific topics
- Alerts when politicians rebel against their party
- Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) mean that other people can get at your data and re-use it easily (see www.theyworkforyou.com/api)
- Information can be made available on different devices, ie mobile phones
- Tools to let people communicate with their politicians and other decision makers, including:
- Lists of email addresses
- Lists of postal addresses
- Lists of phone numbers
- Forms which send messages via fax or email directly from the website
- Anti-abuse tools to stop people sending spam or abusive email to their politicians
- Systems for contacing politicians can also be used to gather information on how good those politicians are at responding to messages, by surveying the users and asking if they got replies, ie http://www.writetothem.com/stats/2006/zeitgeist
- Information on pay and pensions of politicians
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General
- transparency of the eDemocracy project
- simple and persistent URLs (for every instance of information) and available to Google
see also What_is_still_missing about projects that someone should do!
