TDs Oireachtas attendance 2013

google docs folder with attendance data and stats

Source of data
Deputies Attendance Publication for 31st Dáil - 1st January 2013 - 31st December 2013

Attendance record can be imperfect as sometimes TDs forget to fob in, needs to be reconciled with dail record and committee atttendance at end of year.

I use Scraperwiki Table Extract to turn pdf into csv file but there is still alot rearranging to do.
with NotePad++ and Open Office Calc with Combining multiple columns into Column formula

Parliamentary Standard Allowance Rules TD Attendance 2013 Dail Sitting and Non-sitting recorded only up to only 120 days in total Number of Friday Sittings attended by TDs (within the 120 days recorded)

Total number of sittings days in the period 124
Total attendance recorded for allowance purposes 120

The number of attendances may be altered for attendance reconciliation adjustments before the end of year period. The regulations provide for reconciliation for (1) ill health reasons, (2) attendance by a member abroad in the performance of his/her duties as a member or office holder, or elsewhere in the state on behalf of a committee or (3) extraordinary circumstances which the appropriate authority determines are good and sufficient and could not have been foreseen. Administrative reconciliations are recorded based on specified evidence of attendance in Leinster House.

*includes non-sitting days on which committees may have sat.

so it counts up sitting and non-sitting attendance days (which include committee days) till both that reaches 120 and then stop counting (even sitting days). Also they could be marked in even when they havn't gone to Dail.

Flextime.ie Oireachtas/Irish Parliament - Case Study
Parliamentary Standard Allowance useful as it groups TDs by distance to Dail.

example of data being wrong ministers (and junior ministers) attendance not recorded. eg Lucinda Creighton early 2013 replaced by Pascal Donaghue, Tom Hayes late 2013.
)

Total Number of sitting days Attended (up to 120) by Distance Group to show how oftem most distance TDs show up for sitting days.

Total Number of non-sitting days Attended (up to 120) by Distance Group to show how oftem most distance TDs show up for sitting days. The lighter the more distant, so the higher the more days attended by the further TDs.

TD Attendance 2013 Dail Sitting and Non-sitting (up to 120) in total by Distance Group

Houses Of The Oireachtas Annual Report 2013 Sittings stats page 46.

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Irish Seanad, members of Ireland's senate information exhibited, mapped, charted, listed and editable.

Update 2015
Seanad Reform 2015

This screen shot shows how I have used Simile Exhibit Widget to display Ireland's 60 Senators, members of Ireland's Seanad, (upper house) information exhibited, mapped, charted, listed and editable. Using information I gathered on this google spreadsheet and used google maps to display the 8 panels the senators seat on.

Seanad Eireann is the upper house of the Oireachtas (Irish parliament). It has 60 Senators, 43 are nominated on to 5 panels by professioanl bodies,having special knowledge of particular vocation, Administrative, Agricultural, Cultural and Educational, Industrial and Commercial, Labour and voted on by members of councils, the Dail and the previous Seanad elections, must be held within 90 days of the dissolution of the Dail. 11 are nominated by the Taoiseach, 6 are voted on by university graduates.
Its roles is to initiate, advise and revise legislation, senators also participate in Oireachtas committees.

Administrative Panel	7
Agricultural Panel	11
Cultural and Educational Panel	5
Industrial and Commercial Panel	9
Labour Panel	11
Taoiseach	11
University	6

I hope the shape and the interactivity of the exhibit may help to explain the Seanad and its make up better to people.

I have made panels showing

PANELS • SENATORS • PERCENT VOTE • ELECTIONS • SENATORS DETAILS • NOMINATED BY • NOMINATING BODIES • POSITION • COMMITTEE • CONTACT • PANELS
which you can combine with the sliders
Terms - Age - Percent Vote - Gender

can you think of any more ways to display the data?

I have listed which professional organisation of member of the Dail or Seanad has nominated, which senator to which panel, and percentage vote they got from TDs, Senators and Councillors.

I have listed the nominating bodies, their websites, member numbers, their sub-associations and who they nominated to which panel.

Still to do
There are some mistakes on this, I have to review the Seanad byelections since 2007, can't find details of them and the oireachtas.ie won't respond and details of new senators, office locations, I added salary expenses, and should add donations, distance from Dail.

Questions
Is it just the boards of the nominating bodies who nominate?

Salary and Expenses Not sure best way to shows salary and expenses the figures I have from The Story FOI's, go year to year, including senators who were just elected, I tried to reflect that in my calculations

Corrections, for instance do you know where the town the senators operates from or his office?, go to maps.google.com centre over it then take the latitude and longitude from the link, double check by pasting those coordinates back into the google maps search and then change in the TD spreadsheet and leave a comment on the cell too.

This is follow up to my previous Dail TD exhibit

MIT Exhibit
Made with Exhibit from MIT which...

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, charts and more.

I have been very impressed with MIT exhibit, there is a whole suite of systems for displaying large amounts of data simply and lightly. Though its a fair few years old and isn't being updated any more I wasn't sure whether it was worth pursuing and using to create my Irish Politics displays but I haven't seem anything as impressive and easy to adapt for a copy and paste coder like me. Looking around for visualisations, faceted search (which is usually associated with semantic web) and mapping systems. Some directions and files to help run it off your own server.

You can use exhibit with in a semantic mediawiki install, or simpler table wibbit version. You can embed exhibit and timelines in wordpress using Datapress or Drupal once you converted some data to static json file. .json file example with Babel.

The best part of Exhibit is using faceted sidebar menus to display lots of categories of data and combinations of data. And being able to call that from google spreadsheets which you can leave open for editing and correction.

You can pick out any element or facet of the info from the list on the left, click on map or sliders, deselect it by un-checking on the sidebar list or use your browser's back button. You click on any icon to get an info bubble on that TD. You can zoom into the map by clicking on the constituencies map on the right or turn off the constituency polygons below, you can click any of the panels at the top to show, charts and voting maps, look at list of information on the TDs or see all the data on them.

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 exhibit friendly form.

I rearranged my information into this google doc file with {labels} so that the Exhibit script can read it as JSON. How to make an exhibit from data fed directly from a Google Spreadsheet You copy code from the examples and Exhibit wiki and add panels that are coded like this

ex:role="exhibit-view"   id="map1"  ex:collectionID="bothcollection2"  
   ex:viewClass="Exhibit.MapView"
   ex:label="Irish TDs"
   ex:eventlabel=".td"
   ex:size="large"
   ex:zoom="7"
   ex:mapHeight="600"
   ex:center="53.45,-8.0"
   ex:overviewControl="true"
   ex:showSummary="true"
   ex:latlng=".latlng"
   ex:polygon=".constpoly"
   ex:pin="false"
   ex:borderOpacity="1.0"
   ex:borderWidth="1"
   ex:borderColor="purple"
   ex:opacity="0.0"
   ex:showToolbox="false"
   ex:icon=".imageURL"
    
   

...calling the named columns from the google spreadsheets.

Description of how I made the government travel exhibit.

Because senators don't have constituencies, I have arranged them into the 8 panels, Administrative, Agricultural, Cultural & Educational, Industrial & Commercial, Labour, National University of Ireland, Taoiseach and University of Dublin, arranged somewhat how they would be seated in the Seanad, usually voting with the government or the opposition.

Info
Oireachtas Senators
Seanad Eireann on Wikipedia
Committee
Members of the 23rd Seanad
List of senators at oir.ie
How Seanad is elected
Report on Seanad Reform
seandcount.ie internet archive
Seanad at Citizen Info
electionsireland.org Results
2007 Candidates
Register of Nominating Bodies 2009
Register of Nominating Bodies 2007
Seanad Electoral Roll pdf
List Nominating Bodies

Information

Timelines
I've created a time line of when the currents Senators were first elected. The time line extension is part of its own Simile timeline system which can get more info on how to use on its wiki. Although its not easy to show the times Senators didn't get elected and then returned a following election. (to stop and start the timeline on the same line with the same person). So for the moment it does not show that and goes straight first election to most recent.

Collections and Types
I have multiple collections in this exhibit to call the types and collections 60 senators in one spreadsheet and nominating and associated info in another spreadsheet. Thankfully David Huynh provided the code to call from one the other or both collections in the mailing list. I'm not sure if can write code to add a third one (partys).

The Data
I have split the senator google spreadsheet into different sheets, bio,time,websites,locations,positions,panellatlng,elections,nombods,nom2007 that are read by the main senator sheet,you edit the the subpages and they will be renewed by the main page, do not re-sort them.

Information categories most of which you can select in any combination.

facet	category	source
label	name
type	type
party	party
panel	panel
longaddress	long address
address	address,town
area	area
county	county
senator	senator
lat	lat
lng	lng
latlng	town coordinates
senconstituency	who votes for them,td councillors,senators
description	description
position	position
spokespersonissues	spokesperson issues
committee	committee
tdcllr	tdcllr
nicestartdate	nicestartdate
start	start
end	end
dailterm	dailterm
terms	terms
oirterms	oirterms
age	age
position	position
knowlpractexp	knowlegde practical experience
nominatedby	nominated by
subpanel	subpanel
electorate	electorate
firstpref	firstpref
electorate	electorate
seats	seats
candidates	candidates
quota	quota
percentvote	percent vote
govopp	govopp
voteswith	voteswith
phone	phone
email	email
govopp	govopp
voteswith	votes with
panellatlng	front map panel
gender	gender
imageURL	imageURL
wikiurl	wikiurl
website	website
partywebsite	partywebsite
ksurl	kildarestreet seanad speeches
partycol	partycol
nombod1	nombod1
nomurl1	nomurl1
nombod1	nombod1
nomurl2	nomurl2
nombod3	nombod3
comment	comment

Nominating Bodies

label	source
nominated
type
nominatingbody
nomurl
panel	<
subpanel
nombodmembers
nombodassoc
nombodassocurl
irishnames

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail Tableau Public Stack Chart Dashboard Style with Days in Gov by Party

Powered by Tableau

View it better wide at Tableau public

Data Spreadsheet at Google Docs.
Source from Wikipedia

Difficult to give proper account of the governments make up and the independents/others opposition or government TDs. Still have to try this with percentages.

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail Tableau Public Stack Chart

Powered by Tableau

View it better wide at Tableuu public

Data Source from Wikipedia Still have to try this with percentages.

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail Google Fusion Time Series

View it better wider at Google Fusion Tables

Select the handles at either end of the bottom bar to zoom into a particular time period. Full Names for initialed parties below.

Luckily all the data I needed was presented in this wikipedia table, h/t to whoever contributed that info, User:Phil_Nolte? and User:Snappy.

This time series is much Better then ManyEyes Stack chart I blogged last night.

It positions the years properly,shows you the party numbers at the key points, you can select the governments, I like it Shows CnaG trailing off and then Fine Gael picking up the line a few years later. Like to have it shaded in and with percentages, I now have all the info and will make that later along with making a timeplot for more customization.

Fianna Fáil	FF
Fine Gael	FG
Labour Party (Ireland)	Lab
Sinn Féin (Pro-Treaty)"	SF (Pro)
Sinn Féin (Anti-Treaty)"	SF (Anti)
Cumann na nGaedhael	CnaG
Farmers' Party (Ireland)	FP
Sinn Féin	SF
Business and Professional Group	BPG
National League Party	NL
Irish Worker League	IWL
National Centre Party (Ireland)	NCP
Clann na Talmhan	CnaT
National Labour Party (Ireland)	NLP
Clann na Poblachta	CnaP
National Progressive Democrats	NPD
Workers' Party of Ireland	WP
Anti H-Block	AHB
Socialist Labour Party (Ireland)	SLP
Progressive Democrats	PD
Green Party (Ireland)	GP
Democratic Socialist Party (Ireland)	DSP
Democratic Left (Ireland)	DL
Socialist Party (Ireland)	SP
People Before Profit Alliance	PBP

Ok now check out my TD Exhibit which I blogged about here.

Irish Political Parties numbers of TDs in Dail stack chart

View it full/wide screen View large static image

Data Spreadsheet

Updated this with 1922 to 2007 figures. Made this to see if politics was diversifying or FF stranglehold on the country continues.

If you want to add the numbers for earlier years you can go ahead and enter them here
Info Government of Ireland

Oh heres the complete data I need, Dail Eireann election summary.

As always constantly trying to see which service does it better. That stack chart isn't very good, it doesn't display the years right,ie the length of the governments...,which mirror its makeup. Although i like that its shaded in and you can show percentage to keep the shape even as Dail numbers change. Im going to make Google Fusion Time Series, a Timeplot and Tableau Public version. I think Timeplot will do the job best but take longer. Come back later.

In response to my tweets was pointed to two other similar Dail Charts.

House A very well made java applet(made in 2006) which shows the make up of Dail since 1918, its shows a colored bar chart, government parties, majorities and seats loses and gains, which you can play in a slideshow.

and

guthanphobail.net An Irish language page with stats and charts back to 1982 and the latest referendums. Very detailed java charts showing counts and transfer of the all the candidates not just the winners.

Next the rate of change of tds over the years, that'll take some work...

Ok now check out my TD Exhibit which I blogged about here.