HowTheyVote / howtheyvote

HowTheyVote.eu allows anyone to easily find out how Members of the European Parliament vote in plenary.
https://howtheyvote.eu
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
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Adding short textual summaries for each motion #964

Open joelostblom opened 1 week ago

joelostblom commented 1 week ago

For many of the voting motions, it is difficult to understand what the motion is actually proposing from the title alone. If possible, it would be helpful to have a short summary describing what it is that the members are actually voting on. I can see that the full motions are provided, which is helpful, but they are still quite technical and sometimes lengthy which is an obstacle in understanding the motion.

I understand it is not feasible to manually write these summaries, so I'm wondering if they are already summarized somewhere in the original motion and that text could be fetched and inserted under the title? Alternatively, something like genAI could be used to create automatic summaries, but then there would need to be a clear warning label that they are automatically created and might be incorrect.

tillprochaska commented 1 week ago

Hi @joelostblom, thanks for your feedback! You are right, providing easy summaries is a big challenge when trying to make vote results accessible to everyone.

At the moment, we’re displaying short summaries extracted from press releases for some votes (example). However, these aren’t always helpful, and they aren’t available for every vote.

We’re also considering incorporating summaries from the Legal Observatory (example). Sometimes, these summaries are quite easy to understand, but in other cases they can be quite technical.

If you have ideas for other sources that we could use, please let us know! :)

linusha commented 1 week ago

Just to add to what @tillprochaska already said - we have a strong focus on correct data that goes so far that we prefer taking stuff down over showing incorrect data. GenAI is therefore, at least in its current state, not something that we would seriously consider.