Announcements about the openparliament.ca site
As of today, you'll see colourful word clouds in prominent positions all through this site: on this page, and on the pages for debates , meetings , committees , and politicians . As a data visualisation, word clouds are much maligned , not to mention so five years ago. So why Open Parliament's sudden embrace of cloud computing? Well, because I think they're genuinely useful, and because they're…
This site now has a comprehensive HTTP JSON API . If, to you, that was an gibberish sequence of letters, what it means is that I've made it far easier for other computer programmers to build sites and tools that tell you about Parliament. If you recognized all those acronyms, if you know your REST from your RPC, then by all means poke around, and let me know if you build anything with it! (This is…
Just launched a test version of a new alerts system. Check it out. (Though I should warn you that it's a test, and it may change or disappear.) Email alerts were one of the things I thought were necessary to launch this site—which is now, at 2.5 years, well into its toddler years. Actually, I built the signup page before launching the site, but I wasn't sure people would actually sign up.…
The House of Commons is on summer break, and doesn't meet again until September 17.
Wednesday and Thursday—though, according to Parliamentary convention, it was just an exceptionally long Wednesday—Parliament didn't get much sleep. The opposition parties forced a long series of votes on Bill C-38 , the omnibus budget bill that opponents say forces through hundreds of major changes unrelated to the budget. The full transcripts have just been released, and I've updated…
Two big, long-in-the-making additions to this site today. Whee! The first is the addition of House committees and their transcripts. Committees can be really interesting. Even though this current Parliament certainly doesn't mark their heyday, they're still the most productive part of the House. There's way less theatre and name-calling than in debates—and, unlike in the House chamber,…