Barton

No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.

-- Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia 12 Aug 2013

Barton is a ~~suppository~~ repository of political wisdom. More specifically though, it's a structured collection of crowd sourced contact details for all elected officials in Australia, designed for consumption by APIs and apps.

Despite the interwebs being around for over 20 years, a complete database of Australian politician contact details still doesn't exist. Many government websites already provide data as mail-merge.docx or contact-details.pdf for download. Unfortunately, none of them use a consistent structure or format suitable for automated consumption.

Barton seeks to rectify this problem.

Usage

To access the most up-to-date politician contact details, simply clone, curl, or scrape the repo. Parse the YAML into your preferred data format and use it to find a politician, write to your representative, or start a revolution - implementation is up to you.

File Structure

The repo is a simple collection of YAML files. Each YAML file in the data/ directory represents the jurisdiction of a single political authority.

The following data conventions will serve as the public API.

Files MUST start with 3 dashes ---.
Files MUST only contain a single jurisdiction of political authority.
Files SHOULD be named descriptively so that jurisdictions will group appropriately by the file system i.e. au-qld-local-brisbane-city-council.yaml
Files MUST contain a name field. Files MAY contain tags and people collections.
Tags MUST contain a collection of strings which SHOULD apply to the current element and all of its children.

---
name: People's Democratic Banana Republic
tags: [tags are strings, they apply to this, and all children]
people: 
  - name: Barry Crocker

People MUST be a collection.
People elements MUST contain a name field, as well as roles and contact collections.
People elements MAY contain any other fields as required, including title, tags, salutation, suffix, party.
Name fields are strings with the format First [Middle] ['Preferred'] Lastnames
Contact collections MUST contain at least one office elements.

- name: Barry 'Bazza' Crocker
  roles:
   - Minister for Political Entitlements
   - Member for Woolloomooloo
  contact:
    electorate:
     address: Corner Cowper Wharf Roadway & Brougham Road, Woolloomooloo, NSW 2011
     postal: PO Box 122, Sydney NSW 2001
     email: bazza@parliament.nsw.gov.au
     phone: 02 9357 3074
     fax: (02) 9357 3020
     web: http://www.barrycrocker.com.au
     facebook: http://facebook.com/barrycrocker69
  party: LNP
  title: The Right Honourable
  salutation: Dear Minister
  suffix: MP
  tags: [Pies & Mash, Gravy, Schooners]

Putting it all together yields something like:

---
name: Queensland Government
tags: [Queensland, state]
people:
  - name: Verity Mary BARTON
    salutation: Dear Miss
    suffix: MP
    roles:
      - Member for Broadwater
    party: LNP
    contact:
      electorate:
        address: 102 Imperial Parade, (Cnr Government Rd and Imperial Pde), Labrador Qld  4215
        postal: PO Box 644, Labrador Qld 4215
        email: broadwater@parliament.qld.gov.au
        phone: 07 5563 9010
        fax: 07 5500 5364       
  - name: Campbell Kevin 'Can Do' NEWMAN
    title: The Honourable
    salutation: Dear Premier
    suffix: MP
    roles:
      - Premier
      - Member for Ashgrove
    party: LNP
    contact:
      ministerial:
        address: Level 15, Executive Building, 100 George Street, Brisbane Qld 4000
        postal: PO Box 15185, City East Qld 4002
        email: thepremier@premiers.qld.gov.au Shop 2, 230 Waterworks Road, Ashgrove Qld 4060
        phone: 07 3719 7000
        fax: 07 3220 6222
      electorate:
        postal: PO Box 3010, Ashgrove East Qld 4060
        email: ashgrove@parliament.qld.gov.au
        phone: 07 3366 6000
        fax: 07 3366 6202

Conventions

Barton employs a number of data conventions that users need to be aware about.

The party field will map to abbreviations outlined by the AEC.

ABBR	Party Name
ACP	Australian Conservative Party
ALP	Australian Labor Party
AMEP	Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party
ASP	Australian Shooters Party
CLP	Northern Territory Country Liberal Party
CP	Australian Country Party
DEM	Australian Democrats
DFD	Dignity for Disability
GRN	Australian Greens
IND	Independent
KAP	Katter's Australian Party
LCL	Liberal Country League
LCP	Liberal Country Party
LNP	Liberal National Party of Queensland
LP	Liberal Party of Australia (formed in 1946)
NAT	Nationalist Party
NCP	National Country Party
NP	National Party of Australia
PUP	Palmer United Party
SFP	The Australian Shooters Party/Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party

Contributing

Barton is a collective endeavour that needs your assistance. You can help out anytime by adding or updating the contact details for officials in your local electorate or further afield. Please see the contributing file for how to help out.

Internationalisation

Want to create a similar database for your own country? Sweet - just copy this readme into a repo named after your first Head of Government and you are away!

License

Barton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License. You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, even commercially so long as you give appropriate credit in your source code, website, or publication.

experimentsindemocracy / barton

readme