dublinstreams: Irish Government Legislation Exhibit

Sunday, 2 January 2011

Irish Government Legislation Exhibit

Trying to put together something that shows the progress and types of Oireachtas Bills through the Irish parliamentary and see how many they have fulfilled from the Government Legislation Programme, an attempt at a less good IBM Many Bills. It shows details of bills progress through the Dail, Seanad and committees from the life for the government from 2007 to 2011. As always its ugly, heavy and there too much information on screen, but just trying to figure it out, I still love the faceted browsing on timelines made with Smilie Exhibit its allow you drill down through so many options and its so easy to make. It atleast gave me something to find out what other information I would need for a better version later.

My rough Calculations give these totals and averages
254 total bills
105 total enacted
0 total opp enacted

278 avg days everything
104 avg days to enact
149 avg opp bills life days
89 total opp bills

Im still trying to learn how bills are made so try these two guides
How legistation is enacted
How a Bill is made Video.

Bills
Collected details of the oireachtas bills here onto a Google Docs spreadsheet based on many already gathered by The Story

Panels with LEGISLATION • PARTIES • DEPARTMENT • COMMITTEE • DETAILS • ALL DATA

Stages
1st First Stage 1st Second Stage 1st Third (Committee) Stage 1st Fourth (Report) Stage 1st Fifth (Final) Stage 2nd First Stage 2nd Second Stage 2nd Third (Committee) Stage 2nd Fourth (Report) Stage 2nd Fifth (Final) Stage Enacted

Bills go through one house then the other.

Displaying progress of bills
Spent ages trying to get a percentage completed bar to show in Smilie Exhibit, I got Timeline percentage extension partly working then broke it, but in the end just used different colours but its hard to have enough spread in the colours. Obviously there problems with contrast and too much text on screen. I just wanted to create a filter every differentiation I could find.

Simile Gannt Timeline

latest start earliest end

Scraping
Had to scrape the info from the Oireachtas site.

Used a combination of the previously gathered info from the story, Google docs import html, laborious copy and paste and scraperwiki

Scraped the source code with the help of Alvin who made a ruby scraper and another with help from Julian Todd the creator of scraperwiki.
2010-statutory-instruments-ireland irish-legislation bii-p-url Need to make some auto updating running totals of the various stages which would be more useful for people and look better, using this scraperwiki example, but the Oireachtas sites is very changeable and not easy to pinpoint the stage it is at.

How a bill becomes law Some good examples of infographics to the explain the complicated process.
bill to law
how our laws are made

How A Bill Becomes Law

I'll have to make my own version of this, I started the very basic of it on a google doc drawing