My name is Pierre Mesure, I am a French 🇫🇷 engineer based in Sweden 🇸🇪 since 2017. I work with many things, most of which have in common to try and improve our democracy ✊🏼. On my Github profile, I try to publish all the code that I produce. 😊
I'm currently leading a datalab at an agency under the Swedish ministry of finance 💰. Unfortunately, Swedish public sector is not a leader in publishing data nor open source code so I don't have so much to share here (yet! 🙋🏻♂️) but you can find our projects (in Swedish) at datalabb.esv.se.
I also work on a number of projects to create more transparency and accountability through open data ♻️ in Sweden. These projects are either under my profile or at one of the organisations I'm a member of (Civic Tech Sweden, Open Knowledge Sweden). Between 2018 and 2023, I mainly worked with citizen participation as a co-owner of the democracy lab Digidem Lab 🙋🏽♀️. All the code I wrote there can be found here on Digidem Lab's Github page. I was also an active contributor to projects such as Decidim and Consul.
Open Up! aims at making public procurement and invoicing data open in Sweden. You can read more on the project's website.
Relevant repos:
- website
- data parser
- another data parser
- text classification using BERT for procurement ads
- playbook to install metabase
- geo assets
A website to list all available vaccination times in Sweden. It is inspired and forked from a similar project in France that got around 200 millions visits and quickly became the entry door to vaccination. In Sweden, the project was blocked by the regions but got some early success and media coverage (SVT, SvD, etc.).
Relevant repos:
- website
- scraper and data
- iOS, Android apps and Firebase
An OSINT investigation and a website (hejulf.se) for 1-click complaints to the Swedish data protection agency (IMY) following mass targeted advertisement by several political parties during the 2022 election in Sweden. The site was used to send over 150 complaints in one day which led to a formal investigation behind launched by the agency against the conservative party (Moderaterna). Most national media reported about it (ex: SVT) but you can also read my blog post about the project and a more detailed interview in Resumé/Dagens Media. In an unrelated matter, I also sent a complaint against Regeringskansliet's use of Cloudflare (more in my blog post and an interview in Ny Teknik).
Relevant repos:
Sweden is the only country in the Nordics and the Baltic region without a petition platform for citizens to bring up their ideas to the legislation process. Din Riksdag was an attempt at correcting that by making it easy to create rich citizen remiss answers or citizen motions using a user-friendly petition platform (based on Consul first then Decidim). You can read more about the project in this presentation.
To integrate data from the actual legislation process, I created OpenRemiss, a powerful scraping service able to fetch unstructured information from the government's website and thousands of PDF documents to create structured open data.
Relevant repos:
- OpenRemiss (scraper)
- Customised Decidim instance
- Decidim module to import content from the parliament's open data
- Old code for the CONSUL-based version
- Almedalsdata, Almedalsveckan's program as open data (blog post)
- Öppna Luftfartygsregistret, the Swedish aircraft register as open data
- Öppna MPRT-tillståndsregistret, the Swedish TV, radio, press agency's license register as open data
- Öppna återvinningsdata, Swedish recycling stations as open data
- Skyddsrumsdata, Swedish public shelters as open data