Current and past positions held for all members of parliament
Parliament should create a data pipeline that results in an accurate and official record of all positions held for current and past members of parliament.
User stories
As a citizen, I would like to be able to see a timeline of all positions held by an MP currently responsible for my constituency, in order to be better informed about their experience and background.
As an MP, I would like to be able to review the historical contributions made by previous members of a committee, in order to better contribute to and understand that committee.
As a journalist, I would like to assess, compare and present the parliamentary careers of members of various parties, in order to create more compelling stories.
Why this is important
When undertaking research and oversight, it is important to be able to align the contributions of specific members with the party, committee or constituency they were representing for the period in question. Without an official, well structured dataset, this work because extremely manual, tedious and time consuming.
How things currently stand
There is currently no official, publicly accessible database containing official parliamentary positions data. If you visit parliaments member pages, you will see that there are records of the committees (and party) a member is currently a part of, but no indication of historical memberships or party affiliations. This snapshot approach is fine for understanding the current state of parliament, but does not allow us to easily conduct oversight on historical data relating to that member (eg. "What committee's was this member a part of in 2018) without a huge amount of manual research. PMG maintains it's own records of members positions which can be found on People's Assembly, but this data has to be manually sourced and added from parliamentary documents. This is exceptionally time consuming and could mean that data is incorrect or missing.
What this recommendation will enable
- Huge improvements to public and internal oversight of MP contributions and other data.
- The ability to more easily assess changes to parliament throughout history.
- Improved MP compliance with parliamentary rules around attendance in order to maintain an upstanding public record.
- The ability to link official member positions data with other information to provide richer insights and oversight.
- Increased innovation in the parliamentary technology space.
Progress made so far
ParliMeter has reached out to the Secretary to Parliament (Mr. Xolile George) and the division manager of parliaments Knowledge and Information Services (Dr. Leon Gabriel), to push for collaboration on this work. No progress has been made on establishing whether this data is collected or stored by parliament.
Have your say
If you have any questions about this recommendation or if you have information you feel could contribute towards its progress, please submit your comment here.
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This list is always evolving to reflect the expressed needs of ParliMeter's users. If you have a question or an idea that you think requires intervention to implement, please tell us about it!
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