Hey, thanks for having us, thanks for being here.
We are going to talk about how they vote today, which is an open source online platform
which we've been maintaining since around 2020 and which we make roll call votes in the European
Parliament more accessible.
My name is Venus and original software developer and now do some stuff related to policy
and data science and the other half of the project is still who's also a software developer.
So the general idea about this project is that we take a bunch of data related to roll call
votes or things happening in Parliament and combine them into a single data set that you
can then search on our website and we also do that quite fast.
So once a vote has happened in the plenary approximately one hour later you will find it on
our site where you can then search for it for example by using keywords whatever is of interest
to you but we also provide a bunch of more advanced filtering options for example you can
look for votes based on the responsible commission of the whole procedure in Parliament
or you can also look for votes regarding specific topics for example climate change or taxation.
Once you found the vote that is of interest to you you can of course see how each individual
MEP voted this is to all of whom roll call votes is a meaningless term that exactly the deal
of the votes that we scrape votes where it's open like where it has been recorded how each individual
MEP voted so you can take a look at that but you can also take a look at like aggregates of that
so see how individual parties have voted or MEPs from specific countries and we also have a
page for each individual MEP where you can then see how for example the conservative leader
voted on climate change or your local MEP and the whole data we we collect for that we also
republish in and say in our format and the original data and under an open license for using
and we do that because like the European Union is very important in all of our lives
some examples we have already talked about today right you have the chat control thing
that will eventually come back to the Parliament you will have the digital omnibos that will
come back to the Parliament we had the Macrosure vote last week and the special thing about
the European Parliament as opposed to the other large institution of the union like the commission
and the council is that these are people that have been directly elected by all of us or most of us
and we think this is why it's especially important for people to be easily look up
what MEPs voted on and how they vote but republishing this data we also make it available for others
to do interesting stuff with that and which is something that luckily a lot of journalists do
and for example we brought one analysis by the Europe server that I really deep into who votes
in favor of Russian interest in the European Parliament you can also do a lot of other interesting
things with the data this is a voting device application built by a German NGO focused on
the politics for the last European elections and by using the actual roll call vote data from the past
term this is super cool because the result in the end will not depend on what parties right
in their manifesto they will do but it's actually based on what they did in the last term
yeah that's what the project is about basically and now to tell us a bit about how it works
well yeah thank you so as you know said like roll call voting resides are recorded and they are
published on the Parliament website so this is an example of one of these voting lists for a single vote
and the top left there is a small reference number and for the text that this vote is about
and then in the gray header you see a big plus sign which means all the names that are listed
below that you can probably not read them but it's names of MEPs these are the names of MEPs
that voted in favor for example of this votes and then it's actually grouped by the political
groups so that's a little helpful but it's still difficult to for example find out which MEPs
from a specific country voted in a particular way thankfully this data is also
published in the machine read of the format as X magnifiers right but the contents are still pretty
much the same so we use these X magnifiers and we combine it with a bunch of other data sources
so for example we use information about MEPs nationality or their political group and party
affiliation from profile pages which the European Parliament publishes on its website and also
Parliament publishes short press releases about at least interesting or somewhat relevant
votes and we try to match these press releases to the actual voting results so we can show
short summary of what vote was actually about and then there are a bunch of other data sources
I won't go into detail about all of them but here's we use data from all of these different
data sources and aggregate integrate that together into a single data set that is searching
but on our website but as Linus already said we also published that so others can build upon
this work and don't have to go through all of this data cleaning and integration process again
and so taking just a bunch of data sources that are already available and combining them
might sound relatively easy but actually you can be quite challenging for example not all of
these data sources use consistent identifiers cross source so it's difficult to combine data from
one source and match it data from another source and just in general not all of the data that
might be relevant is published in machine readable formats we've only talked about planetary role
quote votes but vote results from the committees in the European Parliament for example
as the only published in PDF format I think and then more recently we've also run into a
problem with the Parliament's websites or so was blocking us because they started using some sort
of bot detection or NTI tools we are our software we are actually quite responsible in how
we scrape and download data but apparently we're just some sort of collateral damage in this AI
arms race here so these are just a few of the challenges we've encountered and if you're
in the same boat as us if you're also working with planetary data or if you're working in the
administration on planetary data then we'd really like or left talk to you and exchange knowledge
and talk about these challenges also if you have a very good and deep understanding of for
some of the rules of procedure of the European Parliament that would be really useful to us
because sometimes as an outsider it can be quite difficult to understand all the details of the process
and then if you are a journalist if you are a researcher if you're an activist working in an NGO
and you think that data could be useful for you or the true could be useful for you please talk to us
we'd love to hear about your use case especially if you're working in NGOs to make it more useful
for your work and finally if you know of any funding options or grant programs there could be
good fit for us please also let us know most of the work on this project is on a voluntary base
although we've been lucky enough to receive some funding as program programs in the past
we will be here for the rest of the day or at least for a couple more hours so if you want to talk
to us please approach us or just reach out via one of these contact channels and we can meet up
of course you can also reach us after the conference as I said we'd love to hear from you
you can also follow us on blue sky or mustard on where we post short updates about the project
when we add new data on new features but we've also started posting short summaries of
planetary sessions and highlighting interesting votes there so if you're interested in that
you might want to consider following us and that's already the end of our presentation thank you very
much for coming
you