A blog about things that interest me, politics, news, media, architecture, development, environment, local history, secularism, web, dublin ireland, tara
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
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.
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-irelandirish-legislationbii-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
I made the 2008 and 2009 travel exhibits last year when Ken Foxe put up the Freedom of Information requests of the Ministers Air Travel it hasn't got many views although I haven't promoted it a lot, but it didn't get as much notice or use as I hoped,I thought it could be a prototype for visual data journalism in Ireland I'm not sure of displayed entirely correctly or usefully for people but the one thing that was incomplete is the purpose of the visits, its unfair to show the travel without context of why they travelled, I should have spent as much as much time searching for that information, it takes a lot of work to go find the reason for the trip, even when the St Patrick's day ministerial travel was put out it was only one line of information they gave out to news organisations to explain what the ministers were doing when the flew around the world for March 17th. I couldn't hope to find details of every last trip myself and left it to other people to help find it, but its been difficult to find a quick and easy way to allow people add info to the Exhibit on the web page itself as opposed the google doc.
Its pity there no way to batch search, so I could quickly find why Mary Harney was in Helsinki in 2009 and Michael Martin went to New York in July 2010, although google Timeline has been useful Brian Cowen New York
If there was a way to search for trip keywords and return the top and allow people 1 click to confirm the relevant result? To gamify data correction. This hasn't been possible with google docs, but maybe possible with google apps. The only place I've seen something like that is Freebase's,acre apps like matchmaker
They could drown you in information but they don't? Government communications is still stuck in the notion of giving info to the press rather then the public, or its hard to find on their websites, although merrionstreet.ie may now make it easier to find information on the government. I need regular engaging posts to get links that's hard to do with old information thats incomplete, I guess that's where the actual journalism of the Sunday Tribune's Ken Foxe's comes in. I could suggest that the amount of trips and therefore the costs has reduced significantly from 2008 to 2010, although Im missing the data from the last months of 2009 and 2010, so I can't compare definitively as yet.
The source Ken Foxe of the Sunday Tribune has been requesting information (FOIs) about government minister's travel and particularity noticed the excessively costly travel arrangements of John O'Donoghue the Ceann Comhairle (also when he was Minister for Tourism). Because of his and others journalism and rather then justify the costs he resigned as chair of the Irish house of parliament (Dail) in October 2009.
The change Ken Foxe in a very unusual move for a professional journalist has shared the raw information he got in his FOI's with the public. The information from the Ministerial Air Transport Service is voluminous so with more eyes and perhaps my exhibit of the information in a more visual and manipulatable manner we can comprehend more of what politicians are doing with government resources. He used FOI'd government aircraft travel data to write ...Living on our jet plane, at a cost of €10.6m (18 Oct 2009, Sunday Tribune).
TRANSPORTING government ministers aboard the government jet over the past four years has cost the taxpayer more than €10.6 million.
Figures from the Department of Defence show that the €7,890-an-hour Gulfstream IV jet has been in use for 1,214 hours since the beginning of 2006.
The government's Learjet – the running costs of which now come in at almost €3,000 an hour – has been in the air for 826 hours at a cost of €1.89 million.
Exhibit enables you to create html pages with dynamic exhibits of data collections without resorting to complex database and server-side technologies. The collections can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Assorted views are provided including Timelines, tiles, maps, and more.
I modified the Presidents Births and Death example of which you can see it's simple JSON file. You can use MIT's Babel to convert your data to JSON or XML (create live XML with editgrid.com) or any google spreadsheets form.
The exhibit
You can pick out any element or facet of the info from the list on the left, the central tag cloud, the timeline, map or Flight time slider below the map, deselect it by un-checking on the sidebar list or use your browser's back button. You can zoom into the map under Ireland or Europe or view the Details of the trips in a table.
Your help
I need to add the purpose of the trip and a contemporaneous news article to give them fair context. Anyone can help me to do that by going to the google spreadsheet and editing the 'purposeoftrip' or 'contexturl' and 'urllabel' columns for each row/trip. I also need fill in the unnamed Ministers of State in the person column.If there is a another way to arrange the data to make it more comprehendable by people please suggest it.
Added paths so you can see the routes was easier then i thought using werelate.org coder additions and added to my own, didn't even have to run it locally
polylines extension of exhibit made by www.werelate.orgcode changes
To do
I'm also worked on a politicians constituency map and TD exhibit
Snout in the the Trough
Ken Foxe has written a book called Snout in the the Troughbased on his Tribune articles and previously unpublished research and FOI's. I bought it and am reading it by the index, I haven't read much of it yet but it seems to be mostly a exhaustive description of recent political expenses, it may be better used as index reference then to be read front to back. I disappointed he didn't go more behind the scenes into the civil service part in the carrying out the privileged operations of the government but I guess its up to the politicians to take the lead in use and reform, though I still think he could have gone into the operation in more detail on this.
When I got the book I went straight to the issue of the london embassy car hire practice, politics.ie gets a mention in the book, or alteast via Gavin Sheridan..., who said posting a link to his thestory site and the detailed expenses document from his FOI work here helped raise the issue beyond discussion and into the national daily papers.
Ken foxe wrote...
Tens of thousands of euros had been paid to a London-based chaffeur company Cartel Limousines. The costs seemed at times incredibly high often more then £1400 per day The owner of the firm was Terry Gallgher, the son of the late Fianna Fail Minister Denis Gallagher.
The anonymous whispers of the internet forums screamed crony-ism but the reality was somewhat different. Terry Gallgher's firm had been doing business with the Irish Embassy in London for two decades during a series of governments, including Fine Gael led administrations.
disappointed with the view taken, he should know that establishment cronyism goes beyond party politics, the civil service will favour the establishment across parties and allow for such costly practices to go on for years untackled.
The book spends most of first half detailing the exposure of John O'Donoghue's excessive spending and of the other ministers who also overspent but eventual resignation of the Ceann Chomhairle overshadowed the expenses of all members of the Dail and their resistance to reform and the resignation of Tom O'Higgins who was supposed to in charge of reform, the eventual reform when it came made things even more opaque
Spokespeople
Just putting up my spokespersons spreadsheets making them more visible, if you see any mistakes, you can go straight the docs and edit them yourself, or leave a comment below.
If TDs are to be seen as national politicians, then you should contact them on national issues, I know that you should also contact your local TD on national issues so the party can get an idea of where the issue is being raised, but usually the TD just says they'll pass it on to their issues spokesperson, so if you want a quicker response you can should email the spokesperson directly on your topic of interest as well.
shadow spokespeople shadow spokespeople
There's less of clear showing of cabinet positions in Ireland, but I think I have most of them right,(actually i made this 6months ago and its probably in need of an update) if it open the spreadsheets and change em.
I've been wanting to make a contact form site like contact.ie
Been meaning to try to make my own, probably with civcrm, I surprisingly hard to find a simple module to do this, plus I have found Drupal's backend horrible to use and all over the place.
Exhibit enables you to create html pages with dynamic exhibits of data collections without resorting to complex database and server-side technologies. The collections can be searched and browsed using faceted browsing. Assorted views are provided including Timelines, tiles, maps, and more.
...calling the named columns from the google spreadsheets.
The source Ken Foxe of the Sunday Tribune has been requesting information (FOIs) about government minister's travel and particularity noticed the excessively costly travel arrangements of John O'Donoghue the Ceann Comhairle (also when he was Minister for Tourism). Because of his and others journalism and rather then justify the costs he resigned as chair of the Irish house of parliament (Dail) in October 2009.
The change Ken Foxe in a very unusual move for a professional journalist has shared the raw information he got in his FOI's with the public. The information from the Ministerial Air Transport Service is voluminous so with more eyes and perhaps my exhibit of the information in a more visual and manipulatable manner we can comprehend more of what politicians are doing with our government resources. He used FOI'd government aircraft travel data to write ...Living on our jet plane, at a cost of €10.6m (18 Oct 2009, Sunday Tribune).
TRANSPORTING government ministers aboard the government jet over the past four years has cost the taxpayer more than €10.6 million.
Figures from the Department of Defence show that the €7,890-an-hour Gulfstream IV jet has been in use for 1,214 hours since the beginning of 2006.
The government's Learjet – the running costs of which now come in at almost €3,000 an hour – has been in the air for 826 hours at a cost of €1.89 million.
The exhibit
You can pick out any element or facet of the info from the list on the left, the central tag cloud, the timeline, map or Flight time slider below the map, deselect it by un-checking on the sidebar list or use your browser's back button. You can zoom into the map under Ireland or Europe or view the Details of the trips in a table.
Your help
I need to add the purpose of the trip and a contemporaneous news article to give them fair context. Anyone can help me to do that by going to the google spreadsheet and editing the 'purposeoftrip' or 'contexturl' and 'urllabel' columns for each row/trip. I also need fill in the unnamed Ministers of State in the person column.If there is a another way to arrange the data to make it more comprehendable by people please suggest it.
To do
I need to figure out functions to add up totals...
I'm also working on a politicians constituency map and TD/Dail diary similar to the above.
The Story
A couple of young (ish) journalists have set up thestory.ie to gather and release data about Irish politics for crowd sourcing and crowd reviewing. Gavinblog and Mark Coughlan have, as have I, been inspired by the work of projects like the UK's mysociety.org in opening up shared data resources for citizen journalism. They are working towards creating an Irish version of whatdotheyknow.com, which makes it easier to request and share 'Freedom of Information' requests. Another MySociety project created a more accessible and manipulatable parliamentary record called Theyworkforyou, programmer John Handalaar has already created a version called kildarestreet.com for the Irish parliamentary debates.
The visualisations
I have taken some of thestory's spreadsheets of data and made visualisations (I'll describe how in another blog post).
APIs, feeds and linked data
I had been using some of the above methods to follow the Howth Malahide council elections and hope improve with use of RDF and XML and geocoded feeds.
With free collaboration and document sharing sites, RDF and XML and feeds and API's its becoming easier for non-programmers to serve, slice and link data.
I haven't been following the issue at Tara/M3 very much lately it just seems doomed (M3 route likely to open ahead of 2010 deadline), although when people reference the nature reserve in California that had roads and lamp posts installed yet was saved from development it does hearten me, as does the video of people still disrupting the work of the construction sites.
See in this video how to handle constructions workers who misdirect their aggression.(Skip to 13 mins).
The protest haven't been getting very much coverage even by the tabloids in alarmist way. You wouldn't know it but they have been people standing in front of bulldozer every other day for weeks, disrupting work for hours until the police come take their names and they leave voluntarily, today people locked on to a bulldozer and had to be cut out they were arrested. You can follow updates from the direct actioners and campers at their blog at http://www.tarapixie.net
Excellent letter to the Indo debunking the myths about "best archaeological practice".
Debunking Tara debate myths
Wednesday January 23 2008
It seems times haven't changed since former minister Michael Smith bravely faced, with "no practical evidence", a decision to act on allegations of planning corruption and untoward pressure being put on councillors on re-zoning.
All communication with the government on the M3 planning tribunal explaining the errors made during the process has also been met with anger and denials based on the following incorrect facts.
1. The decision was made with the best archaeological advice -- incorrect. both the Discovery Project and Conor Newman objected at the tribunal
2. It is further from Tara than the old N3 and therefore better-- incorrect. The intrusive 52-acre Blundelstown Interchange is the same distance from Tara. The Lismullen monument is just over a mile from the Hill. The motorway is a mere 20 metres from Rath Lugh. Does this sound better?
3. It is good to excavate. Let me quote from the Time Team in 2003 when they revisited Athelney, in Somerset, after 10 years. Looking at the new geophysical survey, they extolled the advances in the technology since their first visit in 1993. They remarked: "In a few years we won't need to dig".
Sadly this is now looking too late for Tara. There is still time for our politicians to take a stand, based on their own personal consciences, and bestow the greatest gift they can to their grandchildren, a remodelled Lismullen national monument interpretive site and an pristine, intact valley.
