mutsumiya / parlmnt

A more debatable version of Parliament.uk

PARLMT.com

Parlmt imports data from www.parliament.uk, specifically Bills & Legislation, Members of Parliament and Members of House of Lords.

This data serves two purposes:

• Interactive Presentation: Visitors can up/down vote and leave comments against Legislation Bills
• JSON Api: Bills, MPs and Lords data is presented in a JSON API

Application Structure

Server

Ruby on Rails 3.x is used as a mostly viewers API layer which presents relevant data in both JSON and XML formats.

Client

All presentation is created by a AngularJS based client.

Motivation

Moar Interactivity

Although the Parliament website is functional, it is somewhat lacking in interactivity; visitors are not able to voice opinions on Bills nor use them as topics for discussion or discourse.

Better API

Parliament.uk presents all its data as HTML. Specific data such as a Bill's details, stages, documents, and most crucially votes and so on can only be extracted by scraping the relevant pages.

This application aims to provide a JSON and XML API for accessing both Bills and Parliamentarian's details.

My Nephew

My nephew (and parlmnt.com co-founder) is a bright kid and I am trying to nudge him to showing at least a passing interest in computing and software development. Several aspects of this application were designed with his feedback.

Installation

1. Setup Database

  bundle install --path vendor/bundle
  bundle exec rake db:migrate

2. Install Dependencies

3. Parlmt Configuration

Start parlmnt:

  bundle exec rails s

4. Data Import

The newly created database will be empty. To populate parlmnt from parliament.uk run:

  bundle exec rake import:all

The above should take about an hour to import but the end of the process all Bills, MPs and Lords should have been imported.

Contributors

• Nazar Aziz. Initial design and developer
• Sunil Taper. Contributing designer