Among municipalities, cantons and the national level there’s a variety of different structures and quality for parliamentary data. Some data is not machine-readable, some are not fully accurate, some lack documentation and data is hardly comparable. Political monitoring and analysis tools need to update their crawlers for the same parliamentary websites and clean the same data, rather than focusing on their core competencies. Interoperability across the three levels of government is not guaranteed, with negative consequences for the legislative and executive branches themselves. A data standard to which smaller cantons and municipalities in particular could orient themselves is not in sight.
As a citizen, I would like to be able to follow a specific topic or parliamentary affair from A to Z. For our democracy to work, we need an overview of the political agenda and how parliamentarians have voted. To build this infrastructure, we bring together people from different backgrounds (business, civil society, governments, parliaments, academia), use synergies and collaboratively work towards an open standard and an open API for parliamentary data across all federal levels. In short: We make harmonized Swiss parliamentary data accessible as an open web service.
- obtain already machine-readable and up-to-date information from the source (e.g. parliamentary service API) and harmonize it.
- make non machine-readable information published by the parliamentary services machine-readable and harmonize it.
- follow an Open, collaboratively defined standard taking into account international good practices like OParl and (if possible) involve eCH
- be federated.
- provide Open Data.
- publish only information that is already available.
- provide e.g.
- parliamentarians with ID, party, commission,...
- parliamentary affairs with ID, title, description,...
- voting behavior
- vested interests: confederation and cantons (if available)
- ...
- not provide any calculated values and derivatives.
- not create additional interlinking.
- provide data as a bulk download.
- provide data as an open API.
- not be a gatekeeper.
- be financially and organizationally sustainable.
- be lean (not too much overhead).
- work with and not against the parliament and the government.
- be handed over to an official body in the future.
- What's the right level of abstraction/detail for the data standard?
- How do we harmonize existing data models?
- How do we build on existing international standards like...
- OParl
- European Legislation Identifier (ELI)
- Popolo
- (to be extended)
- How can we make efficient decisions as an interdisciplinary, heterogenic group?
- How do we establish and monitor governance according to ethical principles?
- Data quality
- Data and API management
- Reliability
- How do we react to changing data and data structures or if a service becomes obsolete or no longer available? caching vs. simply reflecting the "reality"?
- Trustworthiness
- Multilingualism
- How do we fund this infrastructure that many will benefit from but no single public body is currently willing or able to sustain on its own?
- Intercantonal Legislative Conference? State Writers Conference?
- Digital Public Services Switzerland? They annually fund "e-participation projects and innovations"
- SRG SSR?
- Interreg: would need DACHLI context
- foundations?
- Is there be a business case in the long term to cover the maintenance and operational costs and updates?
- What’s a fair price for the work already done and maintenance provided in the future?
- How and when do we include the parliamentary services?
- How do we incentivize parliamentary services and their suppliers to adapt the data standard?
- How do we foster a culture of openness?
- Who provides what data?
- Who provides support? Questions, anomalies, bugs,...
- Is there a process or a backlog/board/roadmap of the service? If so, can potential users also request features or report bugs here?
The Team (Onion)
- The core team builds the open API:
- Collaborators define the open standard
- Supporters...
Send us a message if you want to join our mission! Contribute to this document by creating a pull request.