So, here the thing :

We have a tremendously useful tool, Memopol, and we have a bunch of organisations starving for a practical way to collect data from their parliament(s).
At the moment, Memopol is very much designed for La Quadrature du Net’s purpose. That’s why it is now so shinny and relevant… for us. But, it is not what other organisations are looking for. Organisations fighting for spreading farmer seeds want relevant data on last votes about food processing or agriculture, French organisations on transparency need data from the French Parliament etc.
La Quadrature du Net doesn’t have nor time nor ressources nor interest to provide all of those data. It is then these organisations’ responsibility to deal with this job. Though, it doesn’t mean we can’t help them.
So here is the aim of this post: part of the Memopol current team volunteered to make this fantastic tool transferrable for other use than the fight for fundamental freedoms online. But we need more people ready to get dirty in the process.

We are looking for :

• django developper (most important for the moment)
• front end developpers (we aren’t using any specific framework, just jquery)
• webdesigners
• people who like to play with data and make datavisualization

We know a lot of organisations are interested in Memopol, but often, they don’t have the skills yet to use it. It would be great if we could “package” it, making it really easy to handle and then spread it among the world. We would see dozens of little Memopol growing up all around the Internetz and making thousands of happy activists call and track their representatives. That’s how we spread datalove

<3

What did we say? “the new design will be soon presented to you“? It’s live now!
Thanks to all the people present at the QCC and after for their work :)

You can see how pretty is Memopol now here → memopol.lqdn.fr
We hope you’ll enjoy this new version –proudly powered by the QCC!– the same as we enjoyed improving it: we have a brand new design and a new search engine!

We changed a lot of things:

• You can see the homepage is now organized. In one single glance you can grasp everything that is at stake (the last tracked votes, news… and a random MEP to make you discover the wonderful population of the European Parliament :D)
• We have a new menu, to help you find very quicly the information you need: you can new have direct access to MEPs by commitee, country, political group…
• The MEP’s lists have changed too: https://memopol.lqdn.fr/search/?q=is_active%3A1, they are clearer, and easier to use for activists. Don’t miss the customization part by clicking on “advanced” next to the search bar ;)
• The MEP’s profile page is also prettier! You can see that you are now able to add public positions: things that the MEP said, in a newspaper, on the radio, concerning digital rights. Here is an example → https://memopol.lqdn.fr/europe/parliament/deputy/MarielledeSarnez/ You can also click on the tabs for further information.
• The trophies are live too: we will be able to assign a “trophy” to the MEPs who did a very good job, but also to the very bad ones :p You can see an example here → https://memopol.lqdn.fr/europe/parliament/deputy/RaulRomevaIRueda/ (his trophy is: best score)
• We have now MEP’s assistants’ profiles pages, we are able to see with which MEP each assistant worked
• Internally with have started to “de-projectify” memopol in a effort to make is more easy to tune for your own needs

BUT…!

There is still a lot to do (we’ll never stop improving Memopol!), like :

• positions (it’s live, but the internal part of it needs more love to work well)
• the new scoring system
• more dataporn
• making Memopol internals more generic for it to be easier to us by other citizen groups

…for example. I’m sure there’s even more to do (we didn’t thought about everything we could do :p)!

So, if you are interested in continuing this great effort, don’t hesitate on joining us!

• You can join #lqdn-memopol on the freenode server, we’ll be there to help you ;)
• You can find the code here → https://gitorious.org/memopol2-0

Here we finish this good news announcement. We hope we’ll announce other great news like this in the future ;)

We come with great news!

The QCC : a starting block.

You know that we were at the QCC from the october, 19th, to the 21th. It was good to be all of us, at the same time, at the same place, to work on Memopol. A lot of things were done this weekend. Bram and Ybon, mostly, are finishing the work.

The design is almost integrated in dev. We keep working on the new scoring for the MEPs, we are importing assistants in the database, adding achievements, de-projectifying memopol, fixing public positions and working on adopting our new standard for representatives.

We can say that this weekend was kind of a « starting block » : we could unite the right people at the right moment and place, and this made the project reboot : more people are involved in Memopol now, a lot of things that were blocking us are now solved too and helped us to keep on moving.

We went to Barcelona in this state of mind.

Barcelona loves Memopol (and we love Barcelona)

Some people from La Quadrature were at the FC Forum  in Barcelona. This event is made for hackers and artists to help building a world less censored, with more free culture and open knowledge. We presented Memopol there and it occured that some Spanish hacktivists wanted to add their parliament to Memopol!

So we are working with them –now that we have a « Memopol core » version that can be adapted for any project, to make this Spanish memopol work.
You will soon be able to see the first result of this team work. ¡Gracias to Anders, Coldwind, Pablog, and the ones we forgot!

We are glad to see this happening : this was part of the aim of this project, letting every organisation using their own Memopol for their causes.

So so so?

The new design will be soon presented to you so that you’ll see how hard we worked to have a better app for activists, and, sure, there’s still a lot to do :)

You probably know that the whole Memopol team is here at the #QCC to work on the tool. Being reunited all together in the same place, at the same time, gives us the energy necessary to reach our goal!

Here is a quick summary of what we achieved over the week-end.

Thanks to Bram, the new scoring system is ready at the backend level. It should be way more logical and easy to understand: Members of the EP now start at 0, and they gain or lose points with each vote. This will be integrated after the new design is ready.

Jonathan has started to work on adapting the charts to the new scoring system, he will send us the results of his work during the week.

Some work has also been done on translating, most notably on charts.

Capslock has progessed in the implementation of public positions. It will allow us to add press articles or quotations regarding a representative to track his/her public position on our subjects.

Tarnefys is working on importing Members of the EP’s assistants from Parltrack, which will provide us with useful campaigning information.

Zorun and Gawel have been working on an achievement system to attribute trophies to MEPs: the backend implementation is mostly ready. An achievement can be either positive or negative, and represents subjective data on a MEP, for instance “ACTA killer”, “top 10 score”, ”most abstentionist MEP”, “has signed amendments on Net Neutrality”, and so on.

Stef fixed the map of Europe for Respect My Net and Memopol: the maps were really slow to display, so he optimized them!

Ybon helped both teams and allowed us to communicate smoothly. He fixed a funny bug with the search system: we couldn’t understand why searching for countries like Belgium (BE) and Austria (AT) didn’t work. The reason is that “BE” and “AT” were taken as separator words by Woosh, our searching framework… You can look at the commit fixing this.

On the design side, we (currently Ybon and myself) warmly welcomed Serguei, who helped us a lot \o/ For instance, I drafted some HTML that he then integrated on the templates.

If everything works well, we’ll have our beta-design by Sunday night!

As you can see, a lot has been done. We’ll come back to you pretty soon with what was finally achieved and pushed to production and also what’s planned next!

We did a lot these days for Memopol !

Spreading Memopol anywhere

First, we did some work in order to let you use Memopol for any other cause! We believe this tool is awesome, so we want to spread it! Image if you could go on the political memory of every citizen groups that represents your interests and have an accurate idea on how well your representatives are effectivly representing you?

It is now possible to personalize Memopol for your own project → https://github.com/Psycojoker/memopol2#personalization

We also worked on make it easier to update Memopol data → https://github.com/Psycojoker/memopol2#updating-memopols-data

Updates

Speaking about updating Memopol we are proud to announce you that now, Memopol is up to date concerning the French deputies data \o/
Thanks to Tarnefys for that!

QCC, Day 1

As you probably already know, Memopol team is here at the QCC to improve Memopol.

We are working on new features for the tool, like trophees that we could put on the profiles of the MEPs : if they have voted a lot for Net Neutrality, for example.

We also have –which is great– a little design team that made already some work for Memopol. Maybe we’ll have a brand new design to present you after the weekend!
Thanks to quota_atypique, ybon, cocodaemon for their work \o/

We’ll come back to you tomorrow and tell you what was done today!

Like you, Memopol is back from holidays! Let’s come back to work happily with some news of our beloved project.

More and more data

What occured this summer? Ah, ACTA. We enjoyed the victory importing the data of the votes about the treaty. You can see them here → https://memopol.lqdn.fr/europe/parliament/vote/acta_final/

We are also working on merging memopol1 opinion’s code with the new one.

An easier and faster tool

We did a lot of queries optimization, memopol is now way faster than before. Also we have made some internal code refactoring for a better organisation. (Thanks to the coders \o/) We are happy to welcome new contributors !

There is also a new clean tool to remove added data from LQDN to make Memopol clean for another citizen groups : this will be useful, because we want our tool to be used and reused by others. Good idead have to be spread everywhere :)

On the UX and design side, we are proud to announce we have a WIP advanced search form that will replace all the current listing. This will allow everyone to do advanced research. You can play with it here: http://mempol2.serverside.fr/europe/parliament/search/ Many thanks to Yohan for this great work!

Spreading the word

Bram did a lot to spread the word : he did two presentations about Memopol, at the FNF2012 (Freedom Not Fear) and at the SFD2012 (Software Freedom Day).

You can see them here :

Software Freedom Day :
→ https://hackerspace.be/Software_Freedom_Day_2012#Hack_the_democarcy_with_the_Political_Memory_of_la_Quadrature_du_Net
→ http://worlddomination.be/blog/2012/software-freedom-day-2012-slides-political-memory-la-quadrature-du-net-dierentheater.html

Freedom Not Fear :
→ http://worlddomination.be/blog/2012/fnf2012-slides-how-to-lobby-the-eu.html
→https://wiki.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/Freedom_Not_Fear_2012/Schedule#Sunday_.2816-Sep-2012.29

One last thing

Memopol will be one of the projects we’ll work on at the Quadrature Communication Camp that will occur in Paris the 19th to the 21st of october. If you want to code all night long for the project, design it, and –of course– have fun, please come over ! → http://www.laquadrature.net/wiki/Quadrature_Communication_Camp

We’ll be back soon with news \o/

A nicer and nicer Memopol full of datalove!

You know we want Memopol to be beautiful. We’ve worked on it and we now have finished the display of the opinions! Here is an example, another example, and a third example.

Elections? Oh wait /o/

You probably heard about the french elections in june…Which means update for memopol on the french deputies’ side!

So, we made various fixes on french deputies pages, there is still more work needed, we also use the new nosdeputes.fr widget (example here).

And we are now working on importing the new deputies in Memopol.

In addition we now have custom pages for french votes (for eg) and are planning on displaying more informations on it.

Another big project

Since the beginning of memopol we want to allow people to do custom queries on our dataset and we recently made some progress, you can play with our prototype here.

Datalove without borders

Memopol, prettier for the summer

First of all, let us introduce you to our brand new logo! \o/

It is on prod, and as we warned you last time, it has been modified a bit to be more parliament-like. Now it won’t change and we’re quite proud of it!

Let’s all thank Alban for this great work!

Another great news with pictures : please check the new very nice map on the homepage!

Nice, isn’t it ?

Documentation, moar documentation

Also, we have published documentation that explains how to read the graphs that we use in Memopol to allow you to have a better vision of what has happened.

You can see it here → https://memopol.lqdn.fr/trends/documentation/.

Rest API

Good news everyone! Memopol now offers most of its data via a Rest API so you can build applications related to it! You can find all the informations in the related documentation page.

Don’t hesitate in giving us feedback and to build awesome things with it!

Feeding Memopol with data

On the data side, we retrieved opinions from memopol1, this allows us to distinguish between French deputies’ opinions and eurodeputies’ opinions, this informations was lost in the previous data importation. For French deputies’ opinions, correct interfaces to display data are still needed.

The next step now is to make a better interface to display them. We want you to get the most of it, opinions beeing a very important part of Memopol!

Memopol now speak French!

We have just finished the translation of the interface! Thanks to our awesome french team!

You still might see text in english there and there, this is because it’s dynamic data either coming from parltrack or from our project, this will need further work to tacle it but we’ll sure handle it one day.

Also, we have just created teams on transifex to translate Memopol in Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Swedish.

I you feel confident in any of those languages don’t hesitate to ask to join a team on transifex and if you want to see Memopol translated in another language don’t hesitate to contact us about that!

As we love Memopol, we chase bugs

To insure that we can fix bugs as soon as they appear, we have deployed a sentry to get a detailed repport each time a new bug shows up! It has already been useful, as we have already found and fixed bugs thanks to this!

We also fixed the csv link that was’nt working.

We fixed other minor bugs -we won’t bother you with the list, but be sure that we take care of Memopol!

That’s it for this post \o/

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/



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

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!