WEBVTT 00:00.000 --> 00:09.000 Hey, thanks for having us, thanks for being here. 00:09.000 --> 00:14.160 We are going to talk about how they vote today, which is an open source online platform 00:14.160 --> 00:19.760 which we've been maintaining since around 2020 and which we make roll call votes in the European 00:19.760 --> 00:22.240 Parliament more accessible. 00:22.240 --> 00:26.960 My name is Venus and original software developer and now do some stuff related to policy 00:26.960 --> 00:33.840 and data science and the other half of the project is still who's also a software developer. 00:33.840 --> 00:39.840 So the general idea about this project is that we take a bunch of data related to roll call 00:39.840 --> 00:46.320 votes or things happening in Parliament and combine them into a single data set that you 00:46.320 --> 00:53.760 can then search on our website and we also do that quite fast. 00:53.760 --> 01:00.240 So once a vote has happened in the plenary approximately one hour later you will find it on 01:00.240 --> 01:07.040 our site where you can then search for it for example by using keywords whatever is of interest 01:07.040 --> 01:12.880 to you but we also provide a bunch of more advanced filtering options for example you can 01:12.880 --> 01:17.840 look for votes based on the responsible commission of the whole procedure in Parliament 01:17.920 --> 01:23.920 or you can also look for votes regarding specific topics for example climate change or taxation. 01:25.120 --> 01:30.160 Once you found the vote that is of interest to you you can of course see how each individual 01:30.160 --> 01:38.080 MEP voted this is to all of whom roll call votes is a meaningless term that exactly the deal 01:38.080 --> 01:47.120 of the votes that we scrape votes where it's open like where it has been recorded how each individual 01:47.200 --> 01:54.000 MEP voted so you can take a look at that but you can also take a look at like aggregates of that 01:54.000 --> 02:02.160 so see how individual parties have voted or MEPs from specific countries and we also have a 02:02.160 --> 02:08.880 page for each individual MEP where you can then see how for example the conservative leader 02:08.880 --> 02:15.920 voted on climate change or your local MEP and the whole data we we collect for that we also 02:15.920 --> 02:23.440 republish in and say in our format and the original data and under an open license for using 02:26.080 --> 02:33.600 and we do that because like the European Union is very important in all of our lives 02:34.800 --> 02:39.360 some examples we have already talked about today right you have the chat control thing 02:39.360 --> 02:43.840 that will eventually come back to the Parliament you will have the digital omnibos that will 02:43.920 --> 02:50.880 come back to the Parliament we had the Macrosure vote last week and the special thing about 02:50.880 --> 02:57.360 the European Parliament as opposed to the other large institution of the union like the commission 02:57.360 --> 03:04.320 and the council is that these are people that have been directly elected by all of us or most of us 03:05.840 --> 03:12.640 and we think this is why it's especially important for people to be easily look up 03:12.640 --> 03:21.520 what MEPs voted on and how they vote but republishing this data we also make it available for others 03:21.520 --> 03:27.840 to do interesting stuff with that and which is something that luckily a lot of journalists do 03:27.840 --> 03:35.440 and for example we brought one analysis by the Europe server that I really deep into who votes 03:35.440 --> 03:40.400 in favor of Russian interest in the European Parliament you can also do a lot of other interesting 03:40.400 --> 03:46.720 things with the data this is a voting device application built by a German NGO focused on 03:46.720 --> 03:54.480 the politics for the last European elections and by using the actual roll call vote data from the past 03:54.480 --> 03:59.200 term this is super cool because the result in the end will not depend on what parties right 03:59.200 --> 04:04.560 in their manifesto they will do but it's actually based on what they did in the last term 04:05.440 --> 04:11.280 yeah that's what the project is about basically and now to tell us a bit about how it works 04:13.840 --> 04:20.640 well yeah thank you so as you know said like roll call voting resides are recorded and they are 04:20.640 --> 04:26.240 published on the Parliament website so this is an example of one of these voting lists for a single vote 04:26.240 --> 04:33.520 and the top left there is a small reference number and for the text that this vote is about 04:33.680 --> 04:38.800 and then in the gray header you see a big plus sign which means all the names that are listed 04:38.800 --> 04:44.960 below that you can probably not read them but it's names of MEPs these are the names of MEPs 04:44.960 --> 04:50.480 that voted in favor for example of this votes and then it's actually grouped by the political 04:50.480 --> 04:56.160 groups so that's a little helpful but it's still difficult to for example find out which MEPs 04:56.160 --> 05:03.120 from a specific country voted in a particular way thankfully this data is also 05:03.120 --> 05:08.320 published in the machine read of the format as X magnifiers right but the contents are still pretty 05:08.320 --> 05:13.280 much the same so we use these X magnifiers and we combine it with a bunch of other data sources 05:14.640 --> 05:21.040 so for example we use information about MEPs nationality or their political group and party 05:21.040 --> 05:28.000 affiliation from profile pages which the European Parliament publishes on its website and also 05:28.000 --> 05:34.800 Parliament publishes short press releases about at least interesting or somewhat relevant 05:34.800 --> 05:39.680 votes and we try to match these press releases to the actual voting results so we can show 05:39.680 --> 05:44.560 short summary of what vote was actually about and then there are a bunch of other data sources 05:44.560 --> 05:50.000 I won't go into detail about all of them but here's we use data from all of these different 05:50.000 --> 05:54.640 data sources and aggregate integrate that together into a single data set that is searching 05:54.640 --> 06:00.080 but on our website but as Linus already said we also published that so others can build upon 06:00.080 --> 06:05.360 this work and don't have to go through all of this data cleaning and integration process again 06:06.720 --> 06:11.600 and so taking just a bunch of data sources that are already available and combining them 06:11.600 --> 06:18.000 might sound relatively easy but actually you can be quite challenging for example not all of 06:18.000 --> 06:23.040 these data sources use consistent identifiers cross source so it's difficult to combine data from 06:23.040 --> 06:29.600 one source and match it data from another source and just in general not all of the data that 06:29.600 --> 06:35.680 might be relevant is published in machine readable formats we've only talked about planetary role 06:35.680 --> 06:41.200 quote votes but vote results from the committees in the European Parliament for example 06:41.200 --> 06:46.320 as the only published in PDF format I think and then more recently we've also run into a 06:46.320 --> 06:51.120 problem with the Parliament's websites or so was blocking us because they started using some sort 06:51.120 --> 06:58.720 of bot detection or NTI tools we are our software we are actually quite responsible in how 06:58.720 --> 07:06.480 we scrape and download data but apparently we're just some sort of collateral damage in this AI 07:06.480 --> 07:16.560 arms race here so these are just a few of the challenges we've encountered and if you're 07:16.560 --> 07:21.120 in the same boat as us if you're also working with planetary data or if you're working in the 07:21.120 --> 07:28.240 administration on planetary data then we'd really like or left talk to you and exchange knowledge 07:28.240 --> 07:34.320 and talk about these challenges also if you have a very good and deep understanding of for 07:34.320 --> 07:39.040 some of the rules of procedure of the European Parliament that would be really useful to us 07:39.040 --> 07:44.720 because sometimes as an outsider it can be quite difficult to understand all the details of the process 07:45.360 --> 07:50.880 and then if you are a journalist if you are a researcher if you're an activist working in an NGO 07:50.880 --> 07:55.680 and you think that data could be useful for you or the true could be useful for you please talk to us 07:55.680 --> 08:00.480 we'd love to hear about your use case especially if you're working in NGOs to make it more useful 08:00.480 --> 08:06.800 for your work and finally if you know of any funding options or grant programs there could be 08:06.800 --> 08:12.000 good fit for us please also let us know most of the work on this project is on a voluntary base 08:12.000 --> 08:17.520 although we've been lucky enough to receive some funding as program programs in the past 08:19.840 --> 08:25.200 we will be here for the rest of the day or at least for a couple more hours so if you want to talk 08:25.200 --> 08:31.840 to us please approach us or just reach out via one of these contact channels and we can meet up 08:31.840 --> 08:37.520 of course you can also reach us after the conference as I said we'd love to hear from you 08:38.400 --> 08:42.800 you can also follow us on blue sky or mustard on where we post short updates about the project 08:42.800 --> 08:48.480 when we add new data on new features but we've also started posting short summaries of 08:48.480 --> 08:53.680 planetary sessions and highlighting interesting votes there so if you're interested in that 08:54.400 --> 09:00.080 you might want to consider following us and that's already the end of our presentation thank you very 09:00.080 --> 09:03.360 much for coming 09:07.520 --> 09:09.520 you