The Hill Times is reporting this morning on a very promising development: MPs' voting records are going to become accessible via a new database at the Parliamentary website:

[T]he database will kick off with the voting records for the 308 MPs during the 40^th Parliament and will subsequently start reaching back to previous Parliaments .... [T]he software is being developed by House of Commons information services staff right now so "it's a matter of weeks" for this feature to be up.

OK, as a software developer, I can vouch for the fact that optimistic expectations for software projects to be finished in a matter of weeks can sometimes disappoint, but it certainly looks as though things are moving in the right direction.

I'd also like to second the view of Cory Horner from HowdTheyVote.ca who told the Hill Times that:

I would be pleased to see the Parliamentary website include voting data in their offerings, but I would urge them to also provide the data in some sort of machine-readable format so other websites may consume it (if they aren't going to do it, then I will). In addition, I'd love to see Hansard published in XML, as my previous attempts to get easier access to it have not borne fruit.

On the other hand, I will have to respectfully disagree with Messieurs Connacher and Rubin, who argued that the resulting data will be uninteresting if M.P.s were not found to vote differently than their parties. I suppose that is a news gatherer's perspective, since conflict makes news. But I would argue that people join political parties precisely because they share many common views, and since many voters cast their ballot based on party rather than individual (particularly in larger urban ridings), that is as democratic an outcome as any other. I'm not sure Connacher and Rubin realize how much MPs' budgets would have to be increased in order to allow them to develop well-formed individual opinions on each item of legislative business, if that's truly their objective.

But this also serves to make Mr. Horner's point, because the value added is in the Hansard debates ... seeing why the M.P.s came to the decision that they did. Add in the Proceedings of Committees, and you have a wonderful repository of historical context for decisions made on Parliament Hill.

All too often, government data has been presented for public use on the web in a manner that attempts to replicate the original printed documents, rather than in a form that is better cross-referenced and indexed for public access than those original documents ever could be. The Parliamentary documents such as Hansard, the daily Projected Order of Business, the Order Paper, and the Journals particularly fell victim to this approach. A well-organized Hansard Index 2.0, that spanned multiple Parliaments, would be a powerful research tool, and not just for gotcha journalism or "opposition research", but for legal researchers and historical scholars.

I hope that is the approach being taken by the Commons' Board of Internal Economy, and would encourage them to continue moving forward in that direction.

Labels: Open Government Data