What is basic your idea of your initiative and what are you trying to accomplish with it?
Basic idea: just visualize data, which are publicly available at official
site of Czech Parliament (http://www.psp.cz). The raw data are
rather useless once you start to ask how many M.P.'s are attending
meetings regularly. So the very basic goal is make numbers visible.
When was the first thought born about the project?
Well I don't like too much planning, so usually it does not take me too
much time from the first idea to execution. Finishing project/task is
different story. Everything has started at the late spring 2008. The starting
impulse came from frustration with Czech politicians. For a last decade
the powers in Czech Parliament are equal half left/half right. So there
is no chance to set any direction and go does not matter whether left
or right, all country is stuck in the middle. The politicians are just
focusing too much to stay in their posts instead trying to rule our country.
So my idea was to create a page with few charts to provide an overview
and let the other people (voters) to see that those guys in parliament are
not the right choice for job, which needs to be done. I was hoping the
people will see and realize they should come to vote.
How much time did it take to launch the project before it went live?
I was working at my spare time and weekends. The first commit is July 31.
It's actually my first web I've ever created. The web went live few month later
I believe in April 2009.
What were the first reaction of the people?
I've learned I'm not alone. The people, who were already running similar
sites (i.e. www.nasipolitici.cz and kohovolit.eu) have contacted me,
saying 'hey, it's way cool, what you are doing. would you be interested
to join us?' We met few times. The result is our web pages linked
each other. This is the least minimum we can do.
The web itself has like 100 unique visitors per month. So it seems not
so many people here are interested in politics...
But I must admit, that user interface, look and feel is not so ideal. the
pages itself are still too hairy and not attractive enough.
Did and how the idea change since Day1?
No. The idea has not changed. I still want to make data from parliament
human friendly.
What are your users saying and how are you adapting to their needs?
I really don't have a feedback except the few emails sent to paketka@gmail.com
address. few people asked me if they can help, but no real work came from them.
basically anyone who is able to code in python can help. The project is
built on top of Django (http://www.djangoproject.com). I've released sources
under BSD license, anyone can find them
(http://code.google.com/p/parliament-poll-stats)
What are your plans for near and further future?
I've realized I'm not true web-guy. My long term goal is to create a
reasonable javascript API, to allow other people easily develop their
own widgets and put them on their own pages. The web page I'm going
to provide should server as a documentation base, and demo playground.
Also I would like to extend a data model to allow full text search within
parliament speech transcriptions, novellas and published documents.
The short-term goal is to develop unit test cases and clean up
existing code. It's not attractive job to do, but it's needed.
What is/was your main obstacle while developing and running your project?
Of course, the only constraint is time I can invest.
Do you think people are not interested in politics or there was not enough promotion about the project?
These are two distinct questions combined into single one:
If I say people are not interested in politics I'm talking about low
number of election particpation. The amount people who vote constantly
shrinks:
1996 76%
1998 74%
2002 58%
2006 66%
2010 63%
These numbers are for parliament. For senate there were like 40% election
attendance. It's hard to explain it, but it's easy to understand it,
when you have a Czech Passport and live here for a year or two.
Talking about my project: there was no promotion so far. I used a
http://linkuj.cz (which is a sort of digg-it). When I was launching site.
Since that I'm relying on google search. And of course the webs kohovolit.eu
and nasipolitici.cz we are linking each other.
The part of a problem is that there are like 10mil of people. It's same category
like New York. So how many programmers and activists, who tend to look after
mayor's office, live in New York?
It's slightly different when you are creating a page (product in general),
which is taylored to such small audience (market = czech citizens). You can't
rely on chance, it will attract some one in New Zeland, who would join your
effort. Both resources and consumers are living at one place, which is located
in ~200km radius. This is a new experience for me. I can't expect someone in
France sending a patch to improve site.
So as I've said the only think I can do right now is to try to focus on
bugfixing and at least best effort sort of development. I believe I should
do, what I feel I can do best.
How did you promote it?
I've tried some keyword tuning for google. As I've said I used a linkuj.cz.
So this is a very least and loosy promotion.
If you would have more time, do you think your website would have more visitors?
Sure. I think the time invested into site is directly related to page hits. I
can spend like two/three hours weekly working on page right now. It is far
away from time, which is needed to get things done.
I hope I'll get organized soon and find a way to steal at least one day in week
to work on it.