visiblepolitics.org
I just (this minute) registered: visiblepolitics.org … the idea came up in discussions in the CivicAccess.ca mailing list ages ago, and someone should do something about it. Maybe me. Here’s the proposal (anyone want to help?):
A wiki project, with objective to list all Canadian federal politicians (this could happen anywhere, and could be municipal/provincial as well), and include the following information:
-Party
-Picture
-Riding
-Previous experience
-web site
-political experience
-main issues of interest, and their position on such issues (eg. copyright, climate change, iraq, afghanistan, healthcare)
-voting history (maybe a feed from howdtheyvote)
-funders/financial info (and relationship to policies …)
-links to news items about them (could do it automatically by scraping google news, cbc, globeandmail etc).
-links to blog posts about them (could do it automatically by scraping technorati)
-other things?
NOTE: the information should be objective and not editorial. The purpose is not to be an advocacy site, but an information site.
Most of this info is in the public domain, but available only to those who dig diligently. Eg the financial info is buried in difficult to access government docs, and definitely not all this stuff is in the same place. It should be.
Some people I think might be interested in this: Evan, Robin, Paul, Mike L, Tracey, Sylvain. Others too.
The main problem, for everyone on that list, is time. There must be more who are interested.
My experience with this kind of project, is that once it gets up and running, with an active and committed community, it’ll more or less run itself. But to get there there needs to be tons of work on creating the ground rules, policies, fundemental principals, and just encouraging input, keeping things in good order until a healthy group of contributors evolve their own culture and way of doing things. Then it autoregulates.
So getting this set up should be easy enough. Making it work will take lots of interest and input.
(I keep registering domain names, using Julien’s GoDaddy discount codes for projects that pop into my head. Some are commercial sorts of things, but others are more alturistic projects… I’m going to start trying to be more vocal about what some of these project ideas are).
Pull me back in
Hugh champions another project, the Visible Politics wiki for Civic Access. I’ll have to give this some thought later, but I’m just way too busy right this minute. Of course, it would have to be bilingual… and I’m not sure I sha…
Trackback by IM2 | OQP — January 31, 2007 @ 1:29 pm
hugh is indeed the championeer of a load of projects.
Comment by julien — January 31, 2007 @ 2:50 pm
i’m a f**king idiot is what i am.
Comment by hugh — January 31, 2007 @ 3:03 pm
Sucker, but not idiot :P
Comment by Robin — January 31, 2007 @ 4:22 pm
http://openpolitics.ca/ - Michael Pilling might be someone to talk to for help. He’s using TikiWiki for a very similar project. Seems to have stalled though.
Comment by michael — January 31, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
There was an openpolitics announcement 3 weeks ago, but looking at that and keeping in mind the “Objective” goal of Hugh, the project do seem different. Like theyworkforyou, there’s plenty of room to collaborate I think.
Comment by Robin — January 31, 2007 @ 6:59 pm
mike: thanks looked at openpolitics … seems to suffer from collectik disease aka “what the hell is this supposed to be syndrome” … i’ll be contacting them soon tho.
Comment by hugh — February 1, 2007 @ 6:59 pm