contribute.html

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layout: docs
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<h1>We need your help</h1>

<p class="section-intro">
  We’re always looking for new sources of data. If you know where
  to get data we’re missing for politicians in your country, please
  help!
</p>

<p>
  Right now, we’re concentrating on making sure we have current data on the
  national legislatures for every country in the world. If you know of a good
  source of data that we seem to be missing, please
  <a href="mailto:team@everypolitician.org">let us know</a>. 
</p>
<h2>How to contribute</h2>
<p>
  In summary, if you:
</p>
<ul>
  <li>
    know where there’s a source of data we’re currently lacking
  </li>
  <li>
    or have some or all of the data we’re looking for, or can put us in
    touch with a group who has it, or even just know where we can find
    it in a reasonably well-structured form
  </li>
</ul>
<p>
  ...then please send an email to
  <a
  href="mailto:team@everypolitician.org">team@everypolitician.org</a>
  and tell us!
</p>
<p>
  Here’s more about what we’re looking for, and how you can help.
</p>

<h3> What’s the problem? </h3>
<p>
  EveryPolitician’s data is built by collating data from multiple online
  sources into a single collection. Those sources can be hard to find,
  especially in countries where enthusiasm for open data is low or politicians
  don’t expect to be held accountable. We know that we can’t find all these
  sources ourselves. We benefit from local people pointing out good sources
  where they exist.
</p>
<p>
  We want <em>sources</em> rather than raw data, because once we have a source
  we continue to monitor it, picking up changes and corrections. The
  EveryPolitician data is not static: it’s constantly being updated.
</p>
<p>
  We’ve managed to collect <em>some</em> data on politicians in the national
  legislatures of almost every country in the world. But this will never be
  complete. More countries, more kinds of data, more historic data.
</p>  


<a name="process"></a>
<h3>
    A summary of the process
</h3>
<div class="process-boxes">
  <div class="step-0">
    1. There’s a data source somewhere on the web
    <p>
      We find out about it because someone like you
      <a href="mailto:team@everypolitician.org">tells us about it</a>.
    </p>
  </div>
  <div class="step-1">
    2. We turn that into a format we can import
    <p>
      We write a program that extracts the data into our preferred format.
    </p>
  </div>
  <div class="step-2">
    3.We pull it into EveryPolitician
    <p>
      We add it by telling EveryPolitician where the importable
      data is, and how to merge it with data from the other sources we already
      have.
    </p>
  </div>
</div>

<h3>What is a source?</h3>
<p>
  We combine multiple sources for each legislature. For example, we might be
  getting a legislature’s members' names and dates of birth  from one source
  and their twitter handles from another. This is why we’re always interested
  in sources which contain data we haven’t got yet.
</p>
<ul>
  <li>
    <h4>It does <em>not</em> need to be <strong>complete</strong>.</h4>
    We combine with other sources, and inevitably we often have richer data on
    some politicians in a legislature than others. So even if we can only get
    email addresses or social media details for half of the members, that’s
    better than none to start with.
  </li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>
    <h4>It does <em>not</em> need to be <strong>official</strong>.</h4>
    <em>Of course</em> we love getting data from official parliament websites
    and APIs. But as a single source such a service will never contain
    everything we want. Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations’ websites are
    amongst our favourites, but useful sources can turn up all over the place.
    Journalists’ work, political parties, local special interest groups;
    really, there’s no limit.
  </li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>
    <h4>It does <em>not</em> need to be <strong>current</strong>.</h4>
    We collate and share historical data in exactly the same way as data about
    today’s politicians. One of the goals of the EveryPolitician project is to
    make it possible for people to use our data for analyses of data changes
    over time.
  </li>
</ul>
<ul>
  <li>
    <h4>It’s best if it is <strong>online</strong>.</h4>
    Sometimes it won’t be (perhaps if you’ve found an archive of historic
    data). But if that’s the case, we’d probably look for a way to put it
    online, and then set about using it.
  </li>
</ul>
<p>
  <em>
    The simplest way you can help is to tell us about an online source that
    contains politicians’ data which we appear to be missing.
  </em>
</p>

<h2>If you see an error</h2>

<p>
  Found something incorrect in the data we’re currently displaying on the site?
</p>
<p>
  If you see an error, email us at <a
  href="mailto:team@everypolitician.org">team@everypolitician.org</a>.
</p>
<p>
  Please include evidence for your proposed change such as a link to an
  official or credible source.
</p>

<h2>If there are gaps in the data</h2>

<p>At this early stage, we’re focusing on making sure we have basic
information about the current legislators in every country: names,
contact details, political parties, and the areas they represent.
Please help us gather that if you can.</p>

<p>Having current data for every legislature is our primary goal right now,
but it’s always great when we can obtain past information too. See,
for example, <a href="http://everypolitician.org/greenland/">the data for Greenland</a>, which
contains data on every Member since the formation of its current
Parliament in 1979.</p>

<h2>Looking for different data?</h2>

<p>In this initial phase, we’re only collecting information about <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legislatures_by_country">country-level
Parliaments and Congresses</a>. Eventually we hope that much more than
this will be available, but having every national legislature would be a
great first step.</p>