Event: February 22, 2017: Dave Whiteland (MySociety), "EveryPolitician.org: How and why we are Gathering Data on Every Politician in the World"

EveryPolitician.org: how and why we are gathering data on every politician in the world

Dave Whiteland, MySociety

In order to hold their representatives to account, citizens need to know who they are what they do. In much of the world this information is hard to get. The EveryPolitician project (http://everypolitician.org/), run by UK-based civic tech pioneers MySociety, is gathering data on every politician in the world and makes it freely available in a consistent, useful format. What are the challenges of such a project? How is it even possible? How can data change the world? Who uses it? MySociety's Dave Whiteland tells the story of civic tech, open data, the technology of webscrapers and data pull requests. Featuring a tiny team of humans, 72,654 politicians (and counting), and one very busy little bot.

DATE: Wednesday, February 22
TIME: 16:00-18:00
PLACE: WINDSOR-0-02
All Welcome!