Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician/Timeline
This project is funded by a Project Grant
| proposal | people | timeline & progress | finances | midpoint report | final report |
Timeline for mySociety edit
| Timeline | Date |
| Milestone 1: Proof of concept for head of government (current & preceding) complete for all countries. | 31-07-2017 |
| Milestone 2: Proof of concept for prompts delivered. | 31-08-2017 |
| Milestone 3: At least 1 country has rich data for all current legislators. | 30-09-2017 |
| Milestone 4: 30-40 countries have rich data for all current legislators. | 31-07-2018 |
Monthly updates edit
Please prepare a brief project update each month, in a format of your choice, to share progress and learnings with the community along the way. Submit the link below as you complete each update.
July 2017 edit
Status at 15th July
Main metric (country count): 1 country (Scotland) already has rich data.
- Project publicly launched.
- Team onboarded.
- Proof of concept for 'reports' already in place. Reports will be accompanied by 'missions' which are the public drives to improve data in a given report.
- One set of missions successfully run for the current head of government data.
- Mission for the recent head of government data is ongoing - progress is slower than the drive for current heads of government, but nonetheless getting there.
- Initial work is beginning on the proof of concept for the 'prompts'.
August 2017 edit
Status at 15th August
Main metric (country count):
- Countries for which we have current data: 2 (Scottish Parliament and UK).
- Bonus (not grant metric), for both of the above, we also have several historic terms.
Other main status updates:
- New community coordinator onboarded 👋 Sannita_(mySociety)
- Next phase of missions is in progress. The focus of the current missions is to put in place some of the key underlying data on which data about people relies (e.g. number of seats per house). These missions are taking considerably longer to complete than the original head of government mission (possibly because the concepts are more abstract). Over the next months we'll work at showing what is possible when these key pieces are in place to hopefully accelerate this process.
- The first prompts are entering testing and are now running on Wikimedia infrastructure. See the following examples as proof of concept:
Up next:
- Development: We're investigating the options for reconciliation - as that's a big task which many editors are going to need to take on.
- Community: Our first event! Wikifying Westminster is coming up on August 19th.
September 2017 edit
Status at 15th September
Main metric (country count):
- Countries for which we have rich current data: 3 (Scottish Parliament, UK, Northern Ireland).
- Bonus (not grant metric), for both of the above, we also have several historic terms.
Other main status updates:
- Slightly quieter month due to team holidays
- First event down! Read the writeup.
- New visiting PhD student Alessandro Piscopo.
- Prompts undergoing heavier testing to generate plenty of examples for documentation purposes.
Up next:
- Development: We're (still) investigating the options for reconciliation - as that's a big task which many editors are going to need to take on.
- Status at 27th September
- See Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician/Midpoint
October 2017 edit
November 2017 edit
Status at 15th November
Main metric (country count):
- Countries for which we have rich current data: 9 (UK, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Pakistan, Germany, Estonia, France, Netherlands).
- Bonus (not grant metric), number of countries in which community actively collecting data: 12 [as above plus Argentina, Austria, Japan]
Other main status updates:
- Planning series of events to support GLOW. 9 events confirmed.
Up next:
- Events Tony is attending GLOW events in six countries.
December 2017 edit
Status at 15th December
Main metric (country count):
- Countries for which we have rich current data: 14 (UK, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Pakistan, Germany, Estonia, France, Netherlands, Australia, Croatia, Ireland, Slovenia, Spain).
- Bonus (not grant metric), number of countries in which community actively collecting data: 17 [as above plus Argentina, Austria, Japan]
Other main status updates: Supported (and attended) Wikidata edit-a-thons in seven countries:
- Slovenia
- Spain
- Greece
- Bulgaria
- Italy
- Croatia
- Wales
Supported a further two events:
- Sweden
- Nepal
Blogpost capturing the events coming soon.
January 2018 edit
Status at 31st January 2018
- Through January whilst we haven't held any new country events, we have been involved in lots of planning and preparation activity to help expand the number of countries we are able to support and to look at ways to best increase the depth and quality of data available.
- In particular we're aligning this Wikimedia funded part of our work with the wider work we've been carrying out as part of our Democratic Commons plans.
Main metric (country count):
- Countries for which we have rich current data are listed on our Wikidata project page https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:WikiProject_every_politician and we now have 30 countries with at least all current legislators identified.
Other main status updates:
- Significant new additions in quality provided by Wikidata contributors include Ireland moving from ★★ to ★★★★, Japan moving from ★ to ★★ and lots of new historic activity in Finland.
- We are also directly contributing data in countries where mySociety has been particularly active; notably in Kenya which moved from no stars at all to ★ and Argentina which moved to ★ as well. We've also been building tools to help validate Kenya, Argentina and Germany against official sources.
- And finally we also created the awesome Wikidata EveryPolitician logo on the right for the project as well!
Up next:
- Through February and in to March, we're going to be working with various local partners to introduce new data in India, Lebanon, South Korea, Taiwan, along with more comprehensive data in Italy driven by the forthcoming elections on March 4th.
- We'll also be supporting new data entry efforts in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Paraguay with new events currently in planning.
Note: Whilst we've already extended our deadline to the end of February some of the activity we are planning now may run on until March or April to actually complete. We'll advise in mid-month if this will require a further extension or whether we feel enough progress has been made before the end of February.
February 2018 edit
March 2018 edit
We’ve extended the project out until the end of May to give individual contributors enough time to make meaningful additions to the data and have spread out our support over the period accordingly.
Status at 21st March
Main metric (country count):
We now have 36 Countries in progress total along with three nations of the UK as well. These breakdown as ;
- Four ☆ - with basic structures in place
- Ten ★ - with current legislators but not position held yet
- Eleven ★★ - can produce a complete and accurate list of all current legislators
- Six ★★★ - can produce gender/age statistics of all current legislators by political party/group or region
- Five ★★★★ - can compare such statistics for members of the cabinet vs members of the legislature
Notable Additions:
- South Africa and Taiwan have increased to ★★ and Sweden ★. France (contributions from Tubezlob, Hungary (contributions from Tdombos) and Latvia are all new countries since February and already at ★★★ each.
- We also added flags to each of the countries, which was nice.
Up next:
- As per our update in January we’re supporting groups in a variety of countries in Asia and Latin America and the hope is that they will begin to add their updates to additional new and existing countries.
April 2018 edit
Now that Georgie Burr has joined mySociety as a Community Manager, we'd like to extend the project the end of July so that we can benefit from all of her expertise.
Main metric (country count): We now have 41 Countries in progress total along with three nations of the UK as well. These breakdown as ;
- Seven ☆ - with basic structures in place
- Twelve ★ - with current legislators but not position held yet
- Eleven ★★ - can produce a complete and accurate list of all current legislators
- Five ★★★ - can produce gender/age statistics of all current legislators by political party/group or region
- Six ★★★★ - can compare such statistics for members of the cabinet vs members of the legislature
Notable Additions:
- Added Paraguay ☆, Colombia ☆, South Korea ★
- Updated South Korea to ★, Hungary to ★★★★
- We have begun scoping the work to adapt a tool that will enable Wikidata users to individually review and verify proposed, updated or additional entries into Wikidata that are available from various sources - we’ve taken using Wikipedia lists as our starting point for this tool
Up next:
- Based on the results and experience of the work up to this point, we propose a slight change in direction to ensure we bring the benefits of the tools investment to the widest audience possible, which includes:
- Continuing to research and contact existing communities currently inactive within Wikidata and beginning engagement with the goal of encouraging them to become active members of the Wikidata community with an emphasis on the addition and updating of political information.
- Development of a tool that enables Wikidata contributors to easily import datasets about political representatives for other sources whilst verifying each individual entry against an authoritative source before adding into Wikidata
- Working with partner organisations, we’ve been collaborating with groups in Latin America and Southeast Asia to both develop a Wikidata community and improve the political data available in Wikidata for several countries
More detail edit
More detailed weekly reports can be found here.
Extension request edit
New end date edit
Wednesday 28th February 2018
Rationale edit
Whilst our programme of work and local events has been progressing extremely well and ahead of our expectations we would like to extend the final deadline for our report to the end of February 2018.
This will allow us to complete more local events within the available budget and enhance our work with additional contributions to Wikidata that we are receiving from similar projects that we are undertaking in parallel.
We blogged about some of the events recently at https://www.mysociety.org/2017/12/18/glowing-the-extra-mile/
Extension request approved edit
Approving extension request for new project end date of February 28, 2018. --Marti (WMF) (talk) 18:41, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
- Noting here that the new final report due date is 30 March 2018. -- Best, JTud (WMF), Grants Administrator (talk) 20:04, 12 January 2018 (UTC)
Extension request edit
New end date edit
31st May 2018
Rationale edit
We have a number of additional events and partner contributions that we would like to run on for a few more weeks and as such are requesting an extension until the end of May.
Request approved edit
Approving extension request for new project end date of May 31, 2018, with new report due date of June 30, 2018. --Marti (WMF) (talk) 17:53, 19 February 2018 (UTC)
Extension request edit
New end date edit
31st July 2018
Rationale edit
Over the course of this project we have learned a significant amount about how best to work with other contributors in order to support their work to increase the depth of detail and quality of data available in dozens of countries. We now have over 40 countries in some stage of progress but it has taken us longer than expected to help get most of these countries to a more complete state.
Now that Georgie Burr has joined mySociety as a Community Manager, we'd like to extend the project until at least the end of July 2018 so that we can benefit from all of her expertise. During this extended period we will help run online missions for contributors to complete more detail on more countries. We will also extend the development of our verification tools to make it easier for anyone to verify externally available datasets with what is contained on Wikidata.
Request approved edit
Per my post on your finances tab, I am approving a new project end date of 31 July 2018.
Kind regards,
Marti
Extension request button edit
Is your final report due but you need more time?