Programmieren

(die folgenden Informationen wurden in Englisch verfasst, da wir eine möglichst große Zahl von Leuten erreichen wollen)

We want to cover many more practical opportunities for citizens to get involved in politics and have their say. The data available is dispersed and in multiple formats and we would very much appreciate your help in getting it in a standardised form to make it searchable and accessible via meine-demokratie.de. If you already know what meine-demokratie is and how it works, you might want to jump straight to our regularly updated list of data sources we would like (you) to scrape.

What we do

The major part of the data at meine-demokratie.de are pointers to the websites of other projects. We collect this information with the help of so-called scrapers. These are little pieces of code that regularly check websites for new information on participation projects, and that provide this information in a standardised format. In principle, this can be done in any programming language on any platform. However, if you plan on using Python, PHP or Ruby, we strongly recommend the brilliant ScraperWiki which you can use to write and share your code online. It runs completely online and takes care of all data storage and exporting. Here is an example:

1. We write a a bit of code on ScraperWiki that scrapes some information about projects relating to political participation. For each project, we are interested in the following pieces of information:
   • a telling title
   • a description of what it is about – but not too much, as meine-demokratie.de is only meant to refer to the original sites for detailed information, therefore we also need
   • a URL to the original content
   • the name of the data source
   • a place - this can be anything from an address, a zip code, a city or even a election constituency
   • a category - classifying what type of project we are looking at, e.g. a demonstration or else
   • optionally, you can add a start and and end date as well as tags
   • for a real world example, have a look at our ScraperWiki code with which we get information about surgeries of some local representatives from the official calendar of berlin.de
2. When the data is collected, we output it in an XML format that we can feed to our platform. The basic format is defined here. In ScraperWiki, we achieve this by using a customised view – here is again the example of berlin.de.
3. Once it is collected, we import it to our platform and its visualised there immediately.
4. In the process, we also add lots of useful additional information to the data, including post codes, council, election district and so. This can then be exported again in an extended RSS format – here again shown with the data for berlin.de that was originally collected with ScraperWiki.

How you can help – here is our list of data sources

Below is a list of stuff we are interested in. It will be regularly updated. If you are up for taking one one of them, just drop us a little note here or on Twitter. The same goes for any of your ideas about other data that meine-demokratie.de should cover! Thank You!

At the moment, we are all excited about public consultations on planning permissions (“öffentliche Anhörung / frühzeitige Beteiligung der Öffentlichkeit bei Bauplanung”). As this data is highly dispersed, we thought we start with some cities and take it from there. We are interested in current as well as past consultations. The information can be found at various places including:

1. for Cologne: current official consultations as well as pre-consultations
2. for Stuttgart: current consultations
3. for Munich: current consultations
4. for Duisburg: current consultations
5. any other cities you know of?

consultations on development plans for Berlin are at various places

1. consultations on development plans (“Bebauungspläne”) . The basic information would be the some location (second column) and the dates of the consultations (third column). If you manage to get some geo reference – even better
2. Steglitz-Zehlendorf: list of current consultations
3. Treptow-Köpenick: current consultations and past ones
4. Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf: list of past consultations (the consultations could link back to the original plans here)
5. Mitte: list of current consultations
6. Tempelhof-Schöneberg: current consultations and past ones
7. Marzahn-Hellersdorf: current consultations as well as list of plans currently in process (from pdfs…)
8. Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg: only if you feel really in need for a challenge …
9. Neukölln: list of current consultations (none at the moment)
10. nothing suitable in Lichtenberg, Reinickendorf, Spandau and Pankow

While planning permissions are all a bit messy, here are some other ideas

1. participation projects from bürger-beteiligung.org
2. list of members of parliament of Berlin
3. petitions in the federal state of Saxony
4. your ideas here …