Support Us
Open Knowledge Foundation Open Knowledge
Foundation Blog

You are browsing the archive for WG Open Government Data.

Avatar of Mark Wainwright

by Mark Wainwright

European Union launches CKAN data portal

February 25, 2013 in CKAN, Open Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

On Friday, to coincide with Saturday’s International Open Data Day, the European Commission (EC) unveiled a new data portal, which will be used to publish data from the EC and other bodies of the European Union.

This major project was announced last year, and it went live in December for testing before today’s announcement. The portal includes extensive CKAN customisation and development work by the Open Knowledge Foundation, including a multilingual extension enabling data descriptions (metadata) to be made available in different languages: at present the metadata is offered in English, French, German, Italian and Polish. The portal was originally planned for EC data, but it will now also hold data from the European Environment Agency, and hopefully in time a number of other EU bodies as well.

The EU has been a key mover in driving the Open Data agenda in member states, so it is fitting that it is now promoting transparency and re-use of its own data holdings by making them available in one place. It has for some years been encouraging member states to publish data via dedicated portals, and it also supports the OKF’s work on publicdata.eu, a prototype of a pan-European data portal harvesting data from catalogues across the Union, via the LOD2 research project.

The portal currently makes 5,885 datasets available, most of which come from Eurostat. In their blog post announcing the launch the European Commission say they are “confident that it will be a catalyst for change in the way data is handled inside the Commission as well as beyond”, and promise more to come:

More data will become available as the Commission’s services adapt their data management and licensing policies and make machine-readable formats the rule. Our ambition is to make an open licence applicable across the board for all datasets in the portal. Furthermore, in 2013, an overarching pan-European aggregator for open data should federate the content of more than 70 existing open data portal initiatives in the Member States at national, regional or local level.

We’re looking forward to helping make it happen.

Comments Off

Avatar of Theodora Middleton

by Theodora Middleton

European Commission Vice President Neelie Kroes praises work of Open Knowledge Foundation Greece

February 21, 2013 in OKF Greece, OKFN Local, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

Great News! Neelie Kroes, the Vice President of the European Commission, has sent her personal best wishes to the OKF team in Greece who launched their brand new open data portal last week! She said:

“Open data is a very powerful lever for both a better economy and society. Open data is fuel for innovation, it is a tool for transparency, for better government and policy. At a time when many Greeks are looking for new sources of inspiration and hope, I am pleased to say that the Open Knowledge Foundation is one of those sources. I encourage all public bodies to support this effort. Whether the task is finding a job or spending tax money wisely, open data can help.”

Here, here!

Comments Off

Avatar of Rufus Pollock

by Rufus Pollock

The Open Data Census – Tracking the State of Open Data Around the World

February 20, 2013 in Events, Featured, Featured Project, Open Data, Open Government Data, Our Work, WG Open Government Data

Recent years have seen a huge expansion in open data activity around the world. This is very welcome, but at the same time it is now increasingly difficult to assess if, and where, progress is being made.

To address this, we started the Open Data Census in order to track the state of open data globally. The results so far, covering more than 35 countries and 200 datasets, are now available online at http://census.okfn.org/. We’ll be building this up even more during Open Data Day this weekend.

This post explains why we started the census and why this matters now. This includes the importance of quality (not just quantity) of data, the state of the census so far, and some immediate next steps – such as expanding the census to the city level and developing an “open data index” to give a single measure of open data progress.

Why the Census?

In the last few years there has been an explosion of activity around open data and especially open government data. Following initiatives like data.gov and data.gov.uk, numerous local, regional and national bodies have started open government data initiatives and created open data portals (from a handful 3 years ago there are now more than 250 open data catalogs worldwide).

But simply putting a few spreadsheets online under an open license is obviously not enough. Doing open government data well depends on releasing key datasets in the right way. Moreover, with the proliferation of sites it has become increasingly hard to track what is happening.

Which countries, or municipalities, are actually releasing open data and which aren’t?1 Which countries are making progress on releasing data on stuff that matters in the right way?

Quality not (just) Quantity

Progress in open government data is not (just) about the number of datasets being released. The quality of the datasets being released matters at least as much – and often more – than the quantity of these datasets.

We want to know whether governments around the world are releasing key datasets, for example critical information about public finances, locations and public transport rather than less critical information such as the location of park benches or the number of streetlights per capita.2

Similarly, is the data being released in a form that is comparable and interoperable or is it being release as randomly structured spreadsheets (or, worse, non-machine-readable PDFs)?

Tables like this are easy for humans, but difficult for machines.

This example of a table from US Bureau of Labor Statistics are easy for humans to interpret but very difficult for machines. (But at least it’s in plain text not PDF).)

The essential point here is that it is about quality as much quantity. Datasets aren’t all the same, whether in size, importance or format.

Enter the Census

And so was born the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Data Census – a community-driven effort to map and evaluate the progress of open data and open data initiatives around the world.

We launched the first round of data collection last April at the meeting of the Open Government Partnership in Brazil. Since then members of the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Open Government Data Working Group have been continuing to collect the data and our Labs team have been developing a site to host the census and present its results.

ogd census table

The central part of the census is an assessment based on 10 key datasets.

These were selected through a process of discussion and consultation with the Open Government Data Working Group and will likely be expanded in future (see some great suggestions from David Eaves last year). We’ll also be considering additional criteria: for example whether data is being released in a standard format that facilitates integration and reuse.

We focused on a specific list of core datasets (rather than e.g. counting numbers of open datasets) for a few important reasons:

  • Comparability: by assessing against the same datasets we would be able to compare across countries
  • Importance: Some datasets are more important than others and by specifically selecting a small set of key datasets we could make that explicit
  • Ranking: we want, ultimately, to be able to rank countries in an “Open Data Index”. This is much easier if we have a good list of cross-country comparable data. 3

Today, thanks to submissions from more than thirty contributors the census includes information on more 190 datasets from more than 35 countries around the world and we hope to get close to full coverage for more than 50 countries in the next couple of months.

ogd census map

The Open Data Index: a Scoreboard for Open Government Data

Having the census allows us to evaluate general progress on open data. But having a lot of information alone is not enough. We need to ensure the information is presented in a simple and understandable way especially if we want it to help drive improvements in the state of open government data around the world.

Inspired by work such as Open Budget Index from the International Budget Partnership, the Aid Transparency Index from Publish What You Fund, the Corruption Perception Index from Transparency International and many more, we felt a key aspect is to distill the results into a single overall ranking and present this clearly. (We’ve also been talking here with the great folks at the Web Foundation, who are also thinking about an Open Data Index connected with their work on the Web Index).

obp screenshot

As part of our first work on the Census dashboard last September for OKFestival we did some work on an “open data index”, which provided an overall rankings for countries. However, during that work, it became clear that building a proper index requires some careful thought. In particular, we probably wanted to incorporate other factors than just the pure census results, for example:

  • Some measure of the number of open datasets (appropriately calibrated!)
  • Whether the country has an open government data initiative and open data portal
  • Whether the country has joined the OGP
  • Existence (and quality) of an FoI law

In addition, there is the challenging question of weightings – not only between these additional factors and census scores but also for scoring the census. Should, for example, Belarus be scoring 5 or 6 out of 7 on the census despite it not being clear whether any data is actually openly licensed? How should we weight total number of datasets against the census score?

Nevertheless, we’re continuing to work on putting together an “open data index” and we hope to have an “alpha” version ready for the open government data community to use and critique within the next few months. (If you’re interested in contributing check out the details at the end of this post).

The City Census

The first version of the census was country oriented. But much of the action around open data happens at the city and regional level, and information about the area around us tends to be the most meaningful and important.

We’re happy to say plans are afoot to make this happen!

Specifically, we’ll be kicking off the city census with an Open Data Census Challenge this Saturday as part of Open Data Day.

If the Open Data Census has caught your interest, you are invited to become an Open Data Detective for a day and help locate open (and closed) datasets in cities around the world. Find out more and sign up here: http://okfn.org/events/open-data-day-2013/census/

Get Involved

Interested in the Open Data Census? Want to contribute? There are a variety of ways:

Notes

  1. For example, we’ve seen several open data initiatives releasing data under non-open licenses that restrict, for example, derivative works, redistribution or commercial use. ↩

  2. This isn’t to say that less critical information isn’t important – one of the key reasons for releasing material openly is that you never know who may derive benefit from it, and the “long tail of data” may yield plenty of unexpected riches. ↩

  3. Other metrics, such as numbers of datasets are very difficult to compare – what is a single dataset in one country can easily become a 100 or more in another country, for example unemployment could be in a single dataset or split into many datasets one for each month and region). ↩

Comments Off

Avatar of Jonathan Gray

by Jonathan Gray

Andrew Stott joins OKFN Advisory Board

January 24, 2013 in Open Data, Open Government Data, WG Open Government Data, Working Groups

We’re very pleased to announce that Andrew Stott, the UK’s former Director for Transparency and Digital Engagement who pioneered data.gov.uk, has joined the Open Knowledge Foundation’s Advisory Board.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with him already from our events or from our open-government mailing list, here’s a brief bio:

Andrew Stott was the UK’s first Director for Transparency and Digital Engagement. He led the work to open government data and create “data.gov.uk”; and after the 2010 Election he led the policy development and implementation of the new Government’s commitments on Transparency of central and local government. Following his formal retirement in December 2010 he was appointed to the UK Transparency Board to continue to advise UK Ministers on open data and e-government policy. He also advises other governments on Open Data both bilaterally and through the World Bank and the World Wide Web Foundation. He is an expert adviser on Open Data strategy to the EU Citadel On The Move programme and co-chairs the OKFN Open Government Data Working Group.

Andrew has extensive knowledge – from the inside – about the challenges and obstacles to opening up government data and how to overcome them (for more on this you can see the litany of excuses he mentions in his talk from Open Government Data Camp in 2011) and he has been very active in the international open government data community over the past several years.

Welcome aboard Andrew!


Comments Off

Avatar of Theodora Middleton

by Theodora Middleton

ePSI Open Data Days, Warsaw, February 21-23

January 22, 2013 in Events, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

The ePSI platform team have announced “three days of open data fun” in Warsaw next month. The big day is the 2013 ePSI platform conference on 22nd February, but you’re also all invited to a workshop on the 21st, and a hackday on the 23rd!

At a glance

  • What?: ePSI conference, workshop and hackday
  • When?: 21st-23nd February
  • Where?: Warsaw University, Warsaw, Poland
  • Programme: in development here
  • Register: here for the workshop and here for the main conference. And it’s Free (but places are limited)!

The conference will focus on the theme “Gotcha! – getting everyone on board”. PSI re-use is in the process of reaching a certain degree of maturity and uptake. However, this uptake differs significantly between Member States, PSI domains and stakeholders. The ePSIplatform Conference will therefore be aimed at those that should embark, but have (partly) failed to do so far.

Meanwhile in the workshop we’ll be looking at the value of open data to the public sector itself. The workshop is especially aimed at those who work in the public sector.

And on the 23rd, the hackday will coincide with International Open Data Day, so you’re invited to join the Warsaw open data community for a day of building apps, cleaning up data, or building better connections to data holders. This will take place at Centrum Cyfrowe. Find out more on the Open Data Day in Warsaw here.

Get all the info on the Conference Page or download the Conference Infopack here.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Comments Off

Avatar of Regards Citoyens

by Regards Citoyens

Let’s defend Open Formats for Public Sector Information in Europe!

December 3, 2012 in Access to Information, Campaigning, Open Data, Open Government Data, Open Standards, Open/Closed, Policy, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

Following some remarks from Richard Swetenham from the European Commission, we made a few changes relative to the trialogue process and the coming steps: the trialogue will start its meetings on 17th December and it is therefore already very useful to call on our governments to support Open Formats!

When we work on building all these amazing democratic transparency collaborative tools all over the world, all of us, Open Data users and producers, struggle with these incredibly frustrating closed or unexploitable formats under which public data is unfortunately so often released: XLS, PDF, DOC, JPG, completely misformatted tables, and so on.

The EU PSI directive revision is a chance to push for a clear Open Formats definition!

As part of Neelie Kroes’s Digital Agenda, the European Commission recently proposed a revision of the Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive widening the scope of the existing directive to encourage public bodies to open up the data they produce as part of their own activities.

The revision will be discussed at the European Parliament (EP), and this is the citizen’s chance to advocate for a clear definition of the Open Formats under which public sector information (PSI) should be released.

We believe at Regards Citoyens that having a proper definition of Open Formats within the EU PSI directive revision would be a fantastic help to citizens and contribute to economic innovation. We believe such a definition can be summed-up to in two simple rules inspired by the Open Knowledge Foundation’s OpenDefinition principles:

  • being platform independant and machine-readable without any legal, financial or technical restriction;
  • being the result of an openly developped process in which all users can actually be part of the specifications evolution.

Those are the principles we advocated in a policy note on Open Formats we published last week and sent individually to all Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the committee voting on the revision of the PSI directive last thursday.

Good news: the first rule was adopted! But the second one was not. How did that work?

ITRE vote on Nov 29th: what happened and how?

EP meetingA meeting at the European Parliament
CC-BY-ND EPP Group

The European parliamentary process first involves a main committee in charge of preparing the debates before the plenary session, in our case the Industry, Research and Energy committee (ITRE). Its members met on 29th November around 10am to vote on the PSI revision amongst other files.

MEPs can propose amendments to the revision beforehand, but, to speed up the process, the European Parliament works with what is called “compromise amendments” (CAs): the committee chooses a rapporteur leading the file in its name and each political group gets a “shadow rapporteur” to work together with the main rapporteur. They all study the proposed amendments together and try to sum them up in a few consensual ones called CAs, hence leading MEPs to pull away some amendments when they consider their concerns met. During the committee meeting, both kinds of amendment are voted on in accordance with predefined voting-list indicating the rapporteur’s recommandations.

Regarding Open Formats, everything relied on a proposition to add to the directive‘s 2nd article a paragraph providing a clear definition of what an Open Format actually is. The rapporteurs work led to a pretty good compromise amendment 18, which speaks pretty much for itself:

« An open format is one that is platform independent, machine readable, and made available to the public without legal, technical or financial restrictions that would impede the re-use of that information. »

This amendment was adopted, meaning this change will be proposed as a new amendment to all MEPs during the plenary debate. Given that it has the support of the rapporteur in the name of the responsible committee, it stands a good chance of being carried.

Regarding the open development process condition, MEP Amelia Andersdotter, shadow rapporteur for the European Parliament Greens group, maintained and adapted to this new definition her amendment 65:

« "open format" means that the format’s specification is maintained by a not-for-profit organisation the membership of which is not contingent on membership fees; its ongoing development occurs on the basis of an open decision-making procedure available to all interested parties; the format specification document is available freely; the intellectual property of the standard is made irrevocably available on a royalty-free basis. »

Even though it also got recommanded for approval by the main rapporteur, unfortunately the ALDE and EPP groups were not ready to support it yet and it got rejected.

Watching the 12 seconds during which the Open Formats issues were voted is a strange experience to anyone not familiar with the European Parliament, since most of the actual debate happens beforehand between the different rapporteurs, the committee meeting mainly consists of a succession of raised hand votes calls, which are occasionally electronically checked. Therefore, there are no public individual votes or records of these discussions available and the vote happens very quickly.

What next? Can we do anything?

Now that the ITRE committee has voted, its report should soon be made available online

As the European institutions work as a tripartite organisation, the text adopted by the ITRE committee will now be transferred to both the European Commission and Council for approval. This includes a trialogue procedure in which a consensus towards a common text must be driven. This is an occasion to call on our respective national governments to push in favor of Open Formats in order toc maintain and improve the definition which the EP already adopted.

The text which comes out of the tripartite debate will be discussed in plenary session, planned at the moment for 11th March 2013. Until noon on the Wednesday preceding the plenary, MEPs will still have the possibility to propose new amendments to be voted on at plenary: they can do so either as a whole political group, or as a group of at least 40 different MEPs from any groups.

Possible next steps to advocate Open Formats could therefore be the following:

  • Call on our national governments to push in favor of Open Formats;
  • Keep up-to-date with documents and procedures from the European Parliament: ParlTrack offers e-mail alerts on the dossier;
  • Whenever the proposition of new amendments towards the plenary debate is opened, we should contact our respective national MEPs from all political groups and urge them to propose amendments requiring Open Formats to be based on an open development process. Having multiple amendments coming from different political groups would certainly help MEPs realize this is not a partisan issue;
  • When the deadline for proposing amendments is reached, we should call on our MEPs by email, phone calls or Tweets to vote for such amendments and possibly against some opposed ones. In order to allow anyone to easily and freely phone their MEPs, we’re thinking about reusing La Quadrature du Net‘s excellent PiPhone tool for EU citizen advocacy.

In any case, contacting MEPs to raise concerns on Open Formats policies can of course always be useful at all times before and after the plenary debates. Policy papers, amendments proposals, vulgarisation documents, blogposts, open-letters, a petititon, tweets, … It can all help!

To conclude, we would like to stress once again that Regards Citoyens is an entirely voluntary organisation without much prior experience with the European Parliament. This means help and expertise is much appreciated! Let’s get all ready to defend Open Formats for European Open Data in a few weeks!


Regards Citoyens — CC-BY-SA

Tags: , , , , 3 Comments »

Avatar of Caroline Burle

by Caroline Burle

Open Data Portal for Latin America

November 6, 2012 in OKF Brazil, OKFN Local, Open Government Data, WG Development, WG Open Government Data

Sharing governmental information in open, accessible and structured formats could substantially increase transparency and accountability in public policy design and implementation. Furthermore, it enables broad social engagement in the process. Hence, opening data and acknowledging the demands of the population that arise from this is key to promoting social equality and effective public administration.

Based on this premise, the project Open Data for Development in Latin America and the Caribbean has been implemented in partnership with W3C Brazil, the European Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), within the scope of the Observatory for the Information Society in Latin America and the Caribbean (OSILAC) and the International Development and Research Center of Canada (IDRC).

The OD4D has 6 specific objectives:

  • To map out the main initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean for structured economic, social and environmental data sharing and to design a methodological framework to examine the relationship between opening data and the quality of public policies.
  • To study and discuss alternative strategies to foster technical training in governmental agencies and observatories in the region, thus implementing open data repositories for the design, monitoring and assessment of public policies.
  • To support research networks in Latin America and the Caribbean in producing new information and creating innovative applications and services based on open data.
  • To examine the relationship between more inclusive economic development and the opening of data in key economic segments.
  • To raise awareness among the community of public policy makers, public servants and researches of the potential of Open Data and appropriate strategies for its successful implementation.
  • To assess the potential of Open Data strategies in the design and implementation of public policies aimed at promoting economic development and social inclusion in Latin American countries and in the Caribbean.

The Portuguese version of this post is available on the OKF Brazil blog

2 Comments »

Avatar of Guillermo Moncecchi

by Guillermo Moncecchi

Towards a public digital infrastructure: why do governments have a responsibility to go open?

November 1, 2012 in Featured, Ideas and musings, Open Government Data, WG Open Government Data

The most common argument in favor of open data is that it enhances transparency, and while the link may not always be causal, it is certainly true that both tend to go hand-in-hand. But there is another, more expansive perspective on open government data: that it is part of an effort to build public infrastructure.

Does making a shapefile available with all Montevideo’s traffic lights make Montevideo’s government more transparent? We don’t think so. But one of our duties as civil servants is building the city infrastructure. And we should understand that data is mainly infrastructure. People do things on it, as they do things on roads, bridges or parks. For money, for amusement, for philanthropy, there are myriads of uses for infrastructure: we should not try to determine or even guess which those uses are. We must just provide the infrastructure and ensure it will be available. Open data should be seen as a component of an effort to build a public digital infrastructure, where people could, within the law, do whatever they want. Exactly as they do with roads.

When you see open data in this light, several decisions become easier. Should we ask people for identification to give them our data? Answer: do you ask them for an identification to use the street? No, you don’t – then no, you shouldn’t. Why should we use open, non proprietary standards for publishing data? For the same reason you do not build a street where only certain car brands can pass. What happens if there are problems with my data, which causes problems for the users? Well, you will be liable, if the law decides that … but, would you avoid demands for accidents caused by pavement problems by not building streets? Of course you are responsible for your data: you are paid to create it, as you are paid for building bridges. Every question about open data we can imagine has already been answered for traditional infrastructure.

But of course the infrastructure required to enable people to create an information society goes beyond data. We will give you four examples.

The most direct infrastructure component is hardware and communications. The Uruguayan government recognises this, and is planning to have each home connected with fibre by then end of 2015, with 1 Gb traffic for free for everybody with a phone line. Meanwhile since 2007, every public school child gets an OLPC laptop and internet connection. This programme should be understood as being primarily about infrastructure: education encompasses much more than laptops, but infrastructure enables the development of new education paths.

Secondly, services. Sometimes it’s better to provide services than to provide data. Besides publishing cartography data, in Montevideo we provide WMS and WFS services to retrieve a map just using a URL. Services, as data, should be open: no registration, no access limit. Open services allow developers to use not only government data, but also government computation power, and, of course, government knowledge: the knowledge needed to, say, estimate the arrival time of a bus.

Thirdly, sometimes services are not enough, and we have to develop complete software components to enable public servants to do their work. Sometimes these software components should also be part of the public digital infrastructure. The people of Brazil are very clear on this: in 2007 they developed the Portal do Software Publico Brasileiro, where applications developed by or for the government are publicly available. Of course, this is not a new concept: its general version is called open source software. We believe that within this framework of public infrastructure, the discussion between open source and privative software makes no sense. Nobody would let a company be the owner of a street. If is public, it should be open.

Finally, there is knowledge. We, as the government, must tell the people what we are doing, and how we are doing it. Our knowledge should be open. We have the duty to publish our knowledge and to let others use it, so that we can participate actively in communities, propose changes, and act as an innovation factor in every task we face. Because we are paid for that: for building knowledge infrastructure.

We do not think government should let others do its work: on the contrary, we want a strong government, building the blocks of infrastructure to achieve its tasks, and making this infrastructure available to people to do whatever they want, within the law.

Exactly the same thing they do with streets.

5 Comments »

Avatar of Theodora Middleton

by Theodora Middleton

US Congress data opened

October 9, 2012 in External, Featured Project, Open Government Data, WG Open Government Data

Exciting news on open legislative data from the US. Eric Mills (from the Sunlight Foundation), Josh Tauberer (of GovTrack.us) and Derek Willis have been beavering away on a public domain scraper and dataset from THOMAS.gov, the official source for legislative information for the US Congress. They’ve just hit a key milestone – the incorporation of everything that THOMAS has on Bills going back to 1973 when its records began!

Eric says:

We’ve published and documented all of this data in bulk, and I’ve worked it into Sunlight’s pipeline, so that searches for bills in Scout use data collected directly from this effort.

The data and code are all hosted on Github on a “unitedstates” organization, which is right now co-owned by me, Josh, and Derek – the intent is to have this all exist in a common space. To the extent that the code needs a license at all, I’m using a public domain “unlicense” that should at least be sufficient for the US (other suggestions welcome).

There’s other great stuff in this organization, too – Josh made an amazing donation of his legislator dataset, and converted it to YAML for easy reuse. I’ve worked that dataset into Sunlight’s products already as well. I’ve also moved my legal citation extractor into this organization — and my colleague Thom Neale has an in-progress parser for the US Code, to convert it from binary typesetting codes into JSON.

Github’s organization structure actually makes possible a very neat commons. I’m hoping this model proves useful, both for us and for the public.

2 Comments »

Avatar of admin

by admin

Amendments Liberated: new features for Parltrack

October 1, 2012 in Featured Project, Open Government Data, WG EU Open Data, WG Open Government Data

The following guest post is by Stef.

The European Parliament is one of the most notoriously impenetrable institutions that governs our lives. Shining a light into the murky corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg becomes increasingly vital as the reach of the Parliament grows. Opening up the EU to greater citizen scrutiny will help to improve understanding, participation, and democratic legitimary. Parltrack is one of a number of initiatives seeking to make different aspects of the European Union more digestible, in this case focussing on the legislative process.

Parltrack is a website that republishes detailed information of the European law-making process. It combines dossiers, MEPs, vote results and committee agendas into a unique database and allows the tracking of dossiers using email and RSS. Some of the data – like results of votes – comes from hard-to-process PDF documents. Recently two projects – the European Parliament’s own AT4AM and the German bundesgit – showed the need to have access to the amendments to legislative proposals in an easier to use format. Parltrack now offers this information. The newly added data allows Parltrack to display all the amendments a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) has made in the current parliamentiary term. Such a listing was unavailable to the public until now. Similarly new is the listing of all amendments for a certain law propsoal. Surprisingly, the new feature most warmly welcomed by Parltrack’s users is the ability to send direct links to amendments. This not only allows more direct discussion of the text, but also tweeting.

Parltrack also offers tracking of events concerning any legislative proposal. Users can sign up to get notifications if a proposal is scheduled on a committee, or if amendments are attached to it.

It’s important to note that this data contains errors. Current estimates are around 1%, which come from the fact that the PDFs sometimes themselves contain spelling and formatting errors – in one case the English version contains French text. So this is an informational source – anything serious should be cross-checked with the source PDF which is always linked.

Parltrack currently contains 171612 amendments starting from 14th of July, 2009. Included in this are 976 amended dossiers, and 775 amending MEPs. Some more statistics on the data:

Top 3 most amending MEPS:

  1. Olle SCHMIDT: 2038 amendments
  2. Philippe LAMBERTS: 1974 amendments
  3. Silvia-Adriana ŢICĂU: 1610 amendments

Top 3 dossiers with the most amendments:

  1. 3075: Structural instruments: common provisions for ERDF, ESF, Cohesion Fund, EAFRD and EMFF; general provisions applicable to ERDF, ESF and Cohesion Fund (2011/0276(COD))
  2. 2482: Common Fisheries Policy (2011/0195(COD))
  3. 2310: Public procurement (2011/0438(COD))

Come and check it out!

Comments Off

Please create an account to get started.

Sign up to the Open Knowledge Newsletter

Get Updates