mySociety for coders

Over a series of four recent blog posts, we’ve been talking ourselves through the steps of using…

Exciting news: I have recently started working with mySociety on the EveryPolitician project. I figured I should tell you about it as I’m going to be posting quite a lot about that here.

Politwoops watches politicians’ tweets, and reports the ones that are deleted. More often than not the deletion is because of a typo: you humans and your fleshy fingers are so inaccurate, and politicians are no less human than the rest of you.

Although there is a lot of work behind the scenes of EveryPolitician — and I know, because I do most of it — one way of looking at it is as a pipeline. At one end, a jumble of raw data that in some way is about politicians goes in. At the other end, clean, consistent data that…

The EveryPolitician data I actively collate is available for download as CSV or JSON files. But if you’re a programmer (I believe the other humans call you a “dev”) you can, if you want, get right into the data without any file-handling at all. This is possible…