Can we build a tool to allow people to find MPs with relevant training/expertise/affiliations to help support campaigns/initiatives?
For example, this tool could find all the MPs that studied RSE-adjacent degrees, to identify potential political support for future SSI initiatives.
This is a project to:
- Create a dataset of which universities MPs have attended, and what subjects they have studied.
- Explore that dataset
There are 650 MPs elected to the UK Houses of Parliament. Although there is lots of open data available about MPs (eg https://www.theyworkforyou.com/) the majority of it is focused on what they DO within parliament, rather than their backgrounds/skills/experience.
The UK university sector is in crisis with 50+ institutions currently going through redundancies. Pushing back against cuts requires coalitions of academics/university staff, politicians, funders and policymakers to make the case for the power/value of research.
(N.B - Not every politician should be university educated and this project is not about arguing that every MP needs a degree, but more to study the cohort of those that do)
Concrete examples of what the data can be used for and how it can be consulted once everything is running.
Using venv or poetry or whatever else people may need to make that thing work - package everything up in library format? Is that feasible?
What to do more specifically in order to be able to consult the data.
How will problems/concerns/comments/feedback addressed?
What's the project's governance re contribution from folks?
How is this project documented?
How shall it be cited?
Software is licensed under an MIT license. Text data is taken from Wikipedia and is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 4.0