zarino
commented
8 years ago Notes from conversation with Tony:
- This is about displaying a politician’s membership of the executive branch of the country (rather than—or in addition to—the legislative branch)
- We don't have this info for many countries yet, but will get more soon.
- The UK is a bit weird in that you can be both an MP for a constituency (a legislative branch position) and a member of the Cabinet (an executive branch position).
- In most countries, you can’t be a member of the executive and a member of the legislature at the same time. (This is why Barrack Obama doesn't appear in any current terms on EveryPolitician USA).
- It’s likely we’ll handle this similarly to how we currently show multiple houses of the legislature, with its own set of historic term_table pages (so, in the USA, there would be three sections on this page: The House of Representatives, the Senate, and the Executive).
- Seems to me a complete no-brainer that we should display a politician’s membership of the executive just as we currently display legislative memberships.
- Since most countries don't let you hold both at the same time, this will be totally natural on the Executive term_table pages for those countries, where Barrack Obama might look like:
- Whereas, in countries like the UK, where you can hold both positions at once, the existing styling would just expand to accommodate:
- Since the politician cards already handle start/end dates for legislative positions, the same styling can be applied for start/end dates on executive positions.
- Since most countries don't let you hold both at the same time, this will be totally natural on the Executive term_table pages for those countries, where Barrack Obama might look like:
Questions left to be answered:
- On the pages for houses like the UK House of Commons, that allow members to also hold positions in the executive branch (ie. UK Cabinet), do we differentiate the executive members somehow? Maybe "hoisting" them up to the top of the Membership list?
- I was initially sceptical of how special these people should be made to appear. The page is about the legislative members, after all – the fact that a politician might also be Cabinet Minister for Silly Walks doesn't seem relevant enough to separate them out from the others.
- Tony points out that it could be useful when you're navigating historical terms – showing the Prime Minister, for instance, would help you fairly quickly grasp the historical location of the presented term – even if it’s a position (Prime Minister) that isn’t technically part of the chosen house (The House of Commons).
- How do we make it clear to people visiting a term_table page for a legislative house (eg: 114th Congress of USA House of Representatives) that there’s another page they might be interested in, which shows the US Executive / Cabinet, including famous faces like Barrack Obama and Joe Biden?
tmtmtmtm
chrismytton
Problem
In many countries we now have in the source data information about who holds key positions: so for the UK we know who is Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary etc. We don't currently show that information anywhere. We should.
Proposal
We have a few possible options.
My suspicion that that although we want to evolve towards #3 over time there's a quick win from a combination of #1 and #2 whilst we get there (which probably requires page-per-person first)
Acceptance Criteria
This ticket is currently only for working out what adding these could/should look like. Implementation can be another ticket. So we're really just looking for a design that will enable people to see at a glance all the people listed on http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/government-and-opposition1/her-majestys-government/ when looking at http://everypolitician.org/uk/commons/term-table/56.html
Not Required
In an ideal world, this will also make it obvious that, say, David Cameron was the Prime Minister during the same term (etc), but that isn't necessarily necessary for a first version. (We'll want to find a way of displaying things like that fairly quickly though, so it would be good if this version wasn't a dead end that made it much harder to get to there).
This will only need to work for countries where the Cabinet members are also part of the legislature. Handling countries where there's a separation of powers that precludes that can come later.
Prerequisites
n/a
Related Issues
Due Date
n/a
Design?
Yes — this is entirely about design at this stage.
Text?
Ideally what's going on will be so self-evident that we don't need any explanatory copy, but let's see :)
Bloggable?
Once implemented across multiple countries this is probably worth shouting about.