Different roles in diffusing
Legislative Data


2014-05-07
OGP Asia Pacific Regional Conference




Eunjeong (Lucy) Park

The "V-M loop"

As in many other countries, citizens in South Korea 
vote, monitor, vote and monitor, ...
 





But do we?

More than 40% 
don't know their representative



More than 40%
don't show up for elections






What's the problem?

For the average citizen, legislation is:







Enhancing citizen engagement
in Team POPONG


Make it easy 
  • The more understandable, the more knowledge
  • The more the knowledge, the more the engagement
 

Make it feel closer (to our lives)
  • Many people may not be interested in general legislation
  • Most are already engaged with their regional issues, personal interests

Make the data easier to access

 
  • Enhance user experience
  • Don't wait for the citizens to come; make the data go to them

"Politics in Korea"


Faster page loads, no ActiveXs, RWD

Make it feel closer

Customized bill information based on region and interests

@pokrbot 


  • Realtime bill publishing to Twitter
  • Generates nearly 1/3 of traffic to Politics in Korea
  • Mention MPs




What we had to do to build

"Politics in Korea"

Scrape the data
and build APIs of our own


  • Gather and merge data fragmented among multiple Gvmt. resources
    • http://popong.com/sources
  • Generate unique IDs for people & bills
  • Build Open APIs

  • But why have the data to ourselves?



  • Open APIs & data downloads for R&D
    • http://data.popong.com
    • https://github.com/teampopong/data-for-rndmultiple Gv




But wait,

Is this something
Team POPONG 
should do?

The different roles in diffusing data


Assumptions:
  • Everyone in a modern society has different characteristics, interests, ways of understanding the world.
  • Legislative data can be diffused in various formats, perspectives, user experiences.
  • People may want to make apps based on his/her own perspective.

What Team POPONG thinks:
  • One person/organization is sufficient for building easy to use APIs and opening data for public usage  -- and the best org is the government.

Gvmts can focus on
building building blocks

(i.e., Open APIs, data downloads in machine readable formats)




"... so that civil society can spend less time transforming data and more time applying it to the problems they face" 





The South Korea based voluntary group 
that automates everything

http://facebook.com/teampopong
http://twitter.com/teampopong
http://github.com/teampopong
http://*/teampopong

Diffusing Legislative Data

By Eunjeong Lucy Park

Diffusing Legislative Data

Slides for the 2014 OGP Asia Pacific Regional Meeting.

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