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
- 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
