Phillip Smith

Open, transparent, government in Canada? Check out: openparliament.ca

This just in from Michael Mulley via Civic Access:

I've put up a new Parliamentary data site you may be interested in:
http://openparliament.ca/

At the moment, it's largely an interface and search engine on top of
scraped Hansard data, with some aggregation of politician information.
I'm also really happy to be making available parsed XML and JSON
versions of House debates dating back to 1994.

Congratulations and big kudus to Michael for bringing another Open Data and government transparency initiative to Canada (where it's much needed!). You can help ensure that his project gets the kind of support it needs to grow and thrive:

This site is free software. We run on Python and Django. Patches to add functionality and fix bugs are, of course, gratefully accepted. (Reports and suggestions should go to our issue tracker, or e-mail.) 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.

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

Get involved!
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About

Hi, I'm Phillip Smith, a veteran digital publishing consultant, online advocacy specialist, and strategic convener. If you enjoyed reading this, find me on Twitter and I'll keep you updated.

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