TheyWorkForYou.com asks the question “Is your MP working for you in the UK’s Parliament?” An important question for every representative democracy. While, we the people elect our representatives, how do we know that they are actually looking out for our rights? How do we ensure that we as constituents are not lost amongst the demands of big donors? Well, these folks have found an answer:
> Everything MPs say in the House of Commons is recorded in a document called Hansard.
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> TheyWorkForYou.com helps make sense of this vital democratic resource and, crucially, allows you to add your own comments and links to the official transcripts of Parliament.
Beyond providing this amazing amount of access, the folks at TheyWorkForYou.com have opened up their source code and data feeds to make Parliament even more accessible to other wanting to expand upon the project.
Now we just need to find a way to do this for the U.S. Congress.
Update: See Screenscraping the Senate for information who is doing this in the U.S.
Via Boing Boing