Emails (Legislator Data)

[thomasdavis]

Continue discussion here

[jasminengan]

Collation of postal addresses, telephone, fax and e-mail addresses is now complete. Just adding any personal websites, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube links to the list now (will update when these are done too).

[thomasdavis]

Hey @henare and @davekinkead,

I'm too political naive to understand how given a postcode, an individual can find his/her most direct legislators. Seems quite easy for the house members but how do you narrow down the 12 senators?

[henare]

It's not even particularly easy given the postcode (our postcodes are very blurry - you can often get 3 electorates for a postcode), and for your state you get all the Senators.

Use the openaustralia.org API. If it doesn't work - make it better.

[thomasdavis]

Yep, we will be using the OA postcode look up.

Will brainstorm how to target senators in the mean time.

[davekinkead]

Very quickly....

Local councils are subsets of state electorates (in most states) There is no fidelity between state electorates and federal electorates There is no fidelity between any electorates and postcodes The geographic area that senators represent is the entire state - all 12 senators are 'your' senator

The other thing you might want to consider is that certain people - Turnbull, the PM, the AG, should always come up in this kind of search + their federal member and senators. Maybe choose rand(4) from those 16.

[thomasdavis]

Thanks guys, everything helps. We are setting up a temporary google doc, to try see if we can fill in missing information. Will try merge it more formally into your sources.

[thomasdavis]

Hey @henare,

What would be the best way to merge https://morph.io/openaustralia/aus_mp_contact_details with OA API results? Not finding any UID's that can match at the moment.

@rolandnsharp

[thomasdavis]

@rolandnsharp just string matched the two data sets and it worked! So it's all good now.

[rolandnsharp]

@thomasdavis @henare They are very close to being matched. We still have a few null values for the member_Id. Just working on some fuzzy string matching. Some names like 'Christopher Back' to 'Chris Back' for example.

This is what we have so far.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14eqN3ScMHW-fG_zsMtyoI-sSBHMJKKhfv3QGxB9EhpY/edit?usp=sharing

[henare]

@rolandnsharp @thomasdavis we already load this into the OpenAustralia.org database.

It first gets parsed into an XML format that the TheyWorkForYou/OpenAustralia.org code understands before being loaded: https://github.com/openaustralia/openaustralia-parser/blob/master/parse-member-links.rb#L23-L40

We provide that that XML here: http://data.openaustralia.org/members/websites.xml

I think the best idea would be expanding the OpenAustralia.org API to expose this information that's already sitting there in the database: https://github.com/openaustralia/twfy/tree/master/www/docs/api

[rolandnsharp]

@henare Hi again Henare, I've manually filled out some of those null member_id's but I'm still having trouble finding these 12 missing senators using your API

Am I doing something wrong? I've had a look and these Senators still seem to be active. Mark BIshop for example: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=2L6

If there's anything I can do to help complete the data set just let me know.

http://www.openaustralia.org/api/docs/getSenators

Senator Mark Bishop Senator the Hon Ronald Boswell Senator Sue Boyce Senator Alan Eggleston Senator the Hon Don Farrell Senator Mark Furner Senator the Hon John Hogg Senator Helen Kroger Senator Louise Pratt Senator the Hon Ursula Stephens Senator the Hon Lin Thorp Senator Mehmet Tillem

My list so far.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RVeaLdcOQOUs7WzwMgem3LmNhNDCSgbjlUrIUCitbj4/edit?usp=sharing

[henare]

Am I doing something wrong? I've had a look and these Senators still seem to be active. Mark BIshop for example: http://www.aph.gov.au/Senators_and_Members/Parliamentarian?MPID=2L6

I haven't checked your whole list but I think they're all inactive, e.g. from that page, "Retired 30.6.2014."

[pospi]

We're currently sending our email actions over to the APH site to the contact pages there. Principally this was for quick launch and to avoid the legalities surrounding automated emailing; but may actually be a better way to go in production since the structure of those contact forms ensures that any comment submitted must be taken seriously (instead of being ignored as "too informal" as MP's are wont to do). Thoughts?

[henare]

Not a bad idea. AFAIK every MP has one of these forms unlike email address where some aren't published.

[henare]

Oh and all you need is their APH ID to generate the URL of the form (they're all in here too: https://morph.io/openaustralia/aus_mp_contact_details)

[henare]

On the other hand the usability of those forms is pretty awful.

[benkloester]

Hey, the MP contact forms are actually opt-in - I followed the link to contact mine but got the following: "The contact form is currently disabled for the selected senator or member."

I followed up with site admin and got this explanation:

Good afternoon Mr Kloester, As set out on the Contacting Senators and Members page of the APH website, Senators and Members individually decide their preferred web based contact method. To contact your Senator or Member first find their home page using the below search tool. Their home page will contain their contact details and best method of contacting them.

The contact forms provided on the APH website are only available for Parliamentarians who have opted in to this service. I have confirmed that contact forms for these Parliamentarians are currently available and not disabled. Nathan Sutton Incident Manager IT Services | Information, Communication and Technology Division Department of Parliamentary Services Phone: (02) 6277 2020 | Fax: (02) 6277 5700

It would be better for the "contact directly" links to be mailto: links I think. Maybe keep the link to the contact forms but under a different (additional) category?

How many reps does OpenAustralia not have an email address for? We should work on completing that database. Edit: It appears that Clive Palmer is the only rep for which jasmine's linked spreadhseet does not have a contact email.

[henare]

How many reps does OpenAustralia not have an email address for? We should work on completing that database.

We only have those that are scraped here: https://morph.io/openaustralia/aus_mp_contact_details

This has a lot more: https://github.com/experimentsindemocracy/barton

We should get it into a PopIt instance so we can collaboratively maintain it.