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What’s new on memopol dev n°1

Hmm, what did we do last week ?

We are still working on the design. We gathered a bit more feedback from the ones that worked on it at the last quadratelier. Webdesigners need more poking around, but we have no worries, quota_atypique pokes around a lot.

We are about to have a new logo, thanks to cocodaemon \o/

logo

This may not be the final version, we are waiting for feedback, validations, and all that stuff before saying to the world that we have a beauuuutiful logo.

We thought about the users who love beautiful things, we thought also about the administrators and the developers :  we updated the README with new informations, so you won’t get lost in all this data. The goal is to make it useful to you!

You can see it here → https://github.com/Psycojoker/memopol2#introduction

And we also updated the contributors list, here → https://gitorious.org/memopol2-0/memopol2-0/blobs/master/CREDITS.txt

We also wrote some documentation to help you understand the trend charts you can see on Memopol.
It’s still on dev, we are waiting for feedback before publishing it. We’ll keep you in touch.

We also fixed some little useful points :

  • we finish retrieving missing deputies’ opinions data from the first version of Memopol, split them between European Parliament and French Nationnal Assemblee and fix the displaying!
  • SEO stuff: when the server is on debug mode, the robots.txt displays a disallow : / for each robot.
  • we pushed i18n support and are translating it to french, don’t hesitate to come and help us (ask to join the team, we’ll approve you ASAP)!

So, next steps :

  • Design, design, design
  • Write moar documentation

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Categories: Development diary.

By Bram
— May 11, 2012 at 2:00 pm

What’s new on memopol dev n°0

Hello everyone, this is the beginning of a series of development diaries to report on the progress of our project!

Latest improvements:
As part of the latest improvements we have:

A great patch by new contributors: emel and benoitb. They have managed to reduce the incredibly high number of queries on every page where we list european deputies.

Now eurpdeputies’ score is displayed in the listings, so you’ll see in a quick look how net-neutrality friendly your deputy is.
See, notes are colorized from red to green depending on the value of the score :

 

And we can make .csv exports ! Which is great, if you want to download the data and have it in your favourite spreadsheets editor. This can help to prepare talks, or to play with the data a bit.
See (it’s on the top right of every list) :

 

Another important piece of news: the whole European Parliament website has changed. This is both good and bad news.

Good news, because this new version offers some new information and is better overall.

Bad news, we have less data now, especially the previous commitment of a deputy in a commitee, delegation or mandate, and the starting date of the current commitment.

Upcoming:

News about the design ! We’re working on it :)

Memopol is still looking for more contributors, so send us an email or drop by on IRC (#lqdn-memopol on Freenode or via the webchat if you don’t have a client) if you want to start participating!

2 Comments

Categories: Development diary, News.

By Bram
— April 30, 2012 at 8:11 pm

[video] Presentation of Political Memory at ConstantVZW

The following presentation was made at ConstantVZW for a mix of artists, activists and hackers.

Memopol 2 presentation at ConstantVZW

Thanks to ConstantVZW for this opportunity!

You can also watch Stefan’s presentation of Parltrack and Pippi Longstrings as well as a debate about ACTA here. Look for the “Pipilongstrings” .ogv videos, the 5th being the one above about Political Memory.

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Categories: News.

By Bram
— December 13, 2011 at 11:54 am

An Introduction to the project

The best way to explain what Political Memory is, is by explaining where it came from.

So, let’s start by a bit of context. Political Memory is a tool built by La Quadrature du Net. It is its major campaigning tool.

La Quadrature du Net is a citizen group defending fundamental rights on the Internet by:

  • raising citizen awareness about their political representatives’ actions
  • trying to get citizens involved in the political life and demand of their representatives that they represent and defend their rights
  • acting very closely with these representatives
  • organising campaigns during which citizens contact their representatives before certain votes or for given occasions, educating or warning MPs about issues
  • getting MEPs to sign written declarations (for instance, La Quadrature campaigned on a written declaration about ACTA which over half the MEPs signed)
  • and most importantly, trying to increase the political cost of decisions. Making sure elected representatives think long and hard about what their constituents will think of their decisions. The Hadopi “three-strike” law in France is a very good example of that.

In order to reach these goals, Political Memory tries to make it easy for citizens to:

  • follow la Quadrature’s work, and campaigns
  • understand their representatives’ actions
  • make it easy to contact their representatives
  • raise the political cost of representatives’ decisions by keeping them under close scrutiny

 

In order to work, Political Memory gets its data from two sources:

  • The European Parliament, via Parltrack, for the European MPs
  • The French Parliament, via NosDeputes.fr, for the French MPs

This data is then used for several things:

  • MEP listings and contact details
  • voting data
  • show these representatives’ score according to our voting recommendation

Once all this data is input, MEPs are rated, votes are recorded and citizens can see what a given MEP has been up to, how they’ve voted on specific issues (those on which la Quadrature works).

Citizens can easily reach out to their representative, at any time, or during a specific campaign.

Eventually, this will increase the connexion between citizens and their representatives, putting citizens’ concern back at the centre of politics.

For a more lengthy and detailed explanation about what Political Memory is about, you can read Changing Democracy with Code: a Word from the Developpers.

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Categories: About.

By Bram
— June 5, 2011 at 11:34 am

Political Memory blog is starting

Welcome to the Political Memory blog.

Political Memory 2.0 is a free software tool to track and remember Members of the European Parliament’s actions and votes.

On this site you will find more information about how Political Memory came to be, what it is and what it can be used for, how to install it and how to take part in its development, as well a regular news about ongoing development, straight from the development team.

 

Please join us in changing and upgrading democracy!

 

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Categories: News.

By admin
— June 2, 2011 at 9:05 pm