Comment by foxandmouse
17 hours ago
I’m working on a real-time tracker for the Canadian Parliament.
While the official data is technically public, it's practically inaccessible (buried in XML feeds and legacy sites).
Phase 1 was building a modern ingestion engine and freeing the information to make it more accessible. The goal is to make legislative data as accessible as sports stats.
I'm almost ready to launch the MVP; I'm just doing some bugfixes and testing the database now! (If you want an early look at the MVP, my email is in my profile.)
The next phase is what I'm most excited about: visualizing this data and using LLMs to provide insights.
Interesting! I’ve been working on a tracker for the Belgian parliament [0]. Similar story: very old site + data mostly gets published as a weekly pdf report (including votes and discussions).
I have
1. A scraper/parser that ingests the data daily and transforms it into .parquet files.
2. A LLM summarizer to summarize larger discussions.
3. A static site that gets automatically generated (based on the .parquet files) to provide insight.
What makes your tracker ‘real-time’? Does it ingest the livestream of a parliamentary session while it is happening?
[0]: https://zijwerkenvooru.be/
This is a really cool idea! I remember once looking at all of the actual concrete actions taken and being surprised at what was actually done (not very much at the time!). Maybe it is better now.
I've been thinking about something similar for my city council. Would be interested to compare notes! Your email seems to be missing in your profile, but you can find my email in mine if you want to chat.
Interested Canadian here! Don't see your email on your profile, mind sharing a link as a reply here? Thanks!