It's worth to look back what happened so far in the campaign, since a lot of things happened by now and there's only 9 days left of the campaign to fund the next year of development for Parltrack.

The two main events since the beginning were the lobbyplag.eu launch and the La Quadrature donation.

The launch of the lobbyplag.eu initiative is related to the data protection regulation and is widely covered all over in the media. They used the amendments from Parltrack to do their analysis. The guys generously promised to donate 20% of their own fund-raising campaign to the Parltrack campaign and are calling for support on their site. We also have plans to work together on automatic lobbyplag processing.

The other major event was that the french organization La Quadrature du Net donated 1000 euros and secured not only their right to influence Parltrack more directly (that's the perk they choose). They also helped breaking the 2500 euro limit, guaranteeing the basic maintenance of Parltrack for the coming year.

In the mean time I was tweeting like never before and showcasing the current and possible future features of Parltrack.

My friends Amelia - working in the European Parliament - and Smari - working in Iceland -, produced awesome videos explaining why they believe Parltrack needs your support (btw check out Amelias show #exile6e). These videos are supported by written testimonials by members of major European digital rights organizations:

• Jérémie Zimmermann, La Quadrature du Net (co-founder), FR
• Javier Ruiz, Campaigns Director, Open Rights Group, UK
• Rejo Zenger, Bits of Freedom, NL
• Bram, Memopol main developer, La Quadrature du Net volunteer and Nurpa co-founder, BE
• Ante Wessels and Walter van Holst, Vrijschrift, NL
• Regards Citoyens, FR

The online the campaign was also covered in some publications:

• Media coverage started of in Germany with a call for support on netzpolitik.org - a major German blog focusing on digital rights. EPSIplatform - a European open data/government initiative - quickly joined in and also called for donations.
• The lobbyplag campaign also covered Parltrack and our fund-raising campaign, getting some kind mentions in articles like from Euronews.
• The making of the article with Joinup was amazing. We met very briefly at FOSDEM with Gijs (the author), and later we had a kind of interview on IRC. I don't interface very often with journalists who do PGP and IRC. Kudos.
• I was honored when I was invited to contribute an article to Orgzine a publication of the Open Rights Group. The first draft I wrote became later the slideshow on parltrack/about.

A third important but much less pleasant event was when Paypal blocked Indiegogo donations because of incoming donations hitting another 2500 euro limit mandated by European regulation. After the generous donation by LQDN and coverage in the Orgzine and Joinup, this put a considerable dent into the campaign. Even though the limit was lifted quickly by kind Paypal support, the fact the campaign was blocked, stopped all donations for a few days. Luckily Indiegogo support was kind enough to extend the campaign by 6 more days.

As of this writing the campaign is around 2700 euros, with about 55-60 founders, there's 9 days remaining. Like with many other campaigns where everything is decided in the last few days, I hope there will be a rush of a few more concerned citizens in Europe and the world that will support the further development of a free software tool that has been so widely praised and useful as Parltrack. Every euro counts, every repost/retweet to your peers as well. Your support is much appreciated. Thanks.

Please donate for more Parltrack.

The paris-based citizen advocacy group supports Parltrack² with a generous donation of 1000 Euro, not only securing their right to influence the priorities of the upcoming development, but also a half day of dedicated work on Parltrack for their benefit. This donation furthermore ensures the maintenance of the basic Parltrack features for the coming year.

La Quadrature du Net³ is one of Parltracks principal users. In fact campaigning with La Quadrature inspired the the development of Parltrack. LQDN however takes the next step and not only uses Parltrack, but they also take the liberated data and build their own awesome tools based on this, their tool Political Memory⁴ is an essential resource for anyone interested how our elected representatives relate to the fundamental rights and freedoms in the digital context.

The advanced usage of technology and the internet by LQDN is something that hints at the future of citizen-based advocacy for more traditional NGOs. Parltrack is proud to have contributed to the success of LQDN in defending freedoms.

"I would (and did) pay for supporting LQDN, their work is essential. I'm extremely honoured by this contribution, which enables Parltrack to explore further innovation in the citizen advocacy realm. I hope this mutual support between LQDN and Parltrack inspires other organisations to support the efforts of Parltrack to empower them as well."

reflects Stefan Marsiske developer of Parltrack.

Links

1. Fundraiser http://igg.me/p/316104/x/2150548

2. Parltrack http://parltrack.euwiki.org

3. La Quadrature du Net http://www.laquadrature.net

4. Political Memory: http://memopol.lqdn.fr

About Parltrack

Parltrack is a European initiative to improve the transparency of legislative processes. It combines information on dossiers, representatives, vote results and committee agendas into a unique database and allows the tracking of dossiers using email and RSS. Most of the data presented is also available for further processing in JSON format. Using Parltrack it's easy to see at a glance which dossiers are being handled by committees and MEPs.

Contact: stefan.marsiske@gmail.com

Monitor by subjects

Parltrack already provides listings by subjects (e.g. Protection of privacy and data protection) but there's neither a possibility to subscribe to any changes or new dossiers to these listings. Also missing is currently a user interface where users can browse and select all existing subjects. This feature would allow for broad tracking of policy areas instead of the currently supported dossier-by-dossier tracking.

Monitor by search phrase

Simply enter a search phrase and your email and get notified, if any dossier appears or changes that contains this phrase in its title.

Subscription management

A user-interface to better manage your subscriptions to things you're monitoring.

Visitor Trends

Display any trending dossiers or MEPs based on the visitor access statistics. This way you can identify what or who is currently hot in the EP.

Amendments from the 6th term

Adding also the amendments from the 6th parliamentary term between 2004 and 2009, different formats require the tuning of the scrapers to handle also these earlier documents.

Historical view

The preservation of historical data allows to present also snapshots from previous points in time. A nice timeline visualization is also imaginable.

Localized Parltrack data

Parltrack currently only scrapes in English, some information is easily scrapable also in the rest of the 22 European languages. Some might be harder, but for NGOs it would definitely make a difference, having this information also in their native language - especially if we're talking about re-users of the liberated datasets.

Commenting on dossiers and MEPs

Last but not least a feature that I have been long contemplating. It would be nice to somehow merge Pippi Longstrings, Herr Nilsson and Parltrack into a useful bundle, creating a possibility to comment on the legislative proposals and their procedural meta-information in one location. The issue with this is, that a public service like this needs a lot of moderation, and I fear that serious NGOs would not want to trust their internal political insights and commentary with an untrusted 3rd party like Parltrack. This feature is also the basis for the 750 EUR perk in the campaign by the way ;)

Conclusion

So this would be an initial list of medium to big features to be added, in addition to the site redesign and various small improvements that come up in the mean time, with possible other yet unplanned features to be added to this list. I expect this to occupy me for about a year especially if we reach funding levels that allow me to add new data sources as well.

There is also continued cooperation with NGOs reusing the Parltrack database, like with La Quadrature Du Nets awesome Political Memory and the just recently started Lobbyplag initiative which wants to expand its operations beyond the Data Protection dossiers.

If you agree with all or some of these goals, please consider supporting the current fundraising campaign by donating and making other people aware of this initiative. If you feel some important thing is missing let's talk about it, information and financial feedback are both important for the future of Parltrack, thank you.

I think Parltrack is a tool with lots of potential. I'd really like to find some more time to just data-mine Parltrack, which was one of my initial motivations when I started this project. As a good friend used to say: most of our work in the commons is financed by pre-accumulated wealth from the traditional system. The peculiar nature of this open data combined with free software makes it somewhat difficult to keep this project sustainable. I've tried Flattr, debated and rejected advertising, offered consulting/custom development jobs, and turns out i'm too small to be eligible for EU funding grants. Depleting resources resulted in a shift of my attention lately to other jobs, however Parltrack seems to be used quite a lot. The lack of maintenance already started showing, so to stop this degradation and to allow me to focus more on Parltrack in the coming year I started an Indiegogo campaign. If you care about freedom, datalove, kittens, puppies, or just me, go here and support this campaign. It will allow me to build more free infrastructure.

thanks, s

Thank you to all my friends who helped me setting up this campaign.

ps: for Parltrack related news you can follow @Parltrack, and RSS updates

http://parltrack.euwiki.org/amendments/2011/0430(COD)

The data is possibly not complete, but gives good additional information. If everything goes well this will be integrated into MEP and dossier views. Until then you can change the dossier id in the url above, or replace it with a name of a mep:

http://parltrack.euwiki.org/amendments/SCHAAKE%20Marietje

Some stats on the data,

• total number of amendments in the 7th term so far: 168917,
• amended dossiers: 976,
• amending MEPs: 775.

top 3 MEPS:

1. Olle SCHMIDT: 2038
2. Philippe LAMBERTS: 1974
3. Silvia-Adriana ŢICĂU: 1610

top3 amended dossiers:

1. 3075: Structural instruments: common provisions for ERDF, ESF, Cohesion Fund, EAFRD and EMFF; general provisions applicable to ERDF, ESF and Cohesion Fund (2011/0276(COD))
2. 2482: Common Fisheries Policy (2011/0195(COD))
3. 2310: Public procurement (2011/0438(COD))

If anyone wants to play with the raw data:

http://parltrack.euwiki.org/dumps/amendments.json.xz

And to see what data might be missing:

http://parltrack.euwiki.org/dumps/amendments.log

This also allows other organizations to run their own internal wiki, which can contain private analysis and commentary. A much requested feature. All you need is a mediawiki and Herr Nilsson is setting up stubs for the dossiers of interest.

On parltrack there's now a Preferences menu in the top blue bar, where you can set the address to your mediawiki, and parltrack will automatically display a Notes link in the top blue bar, which links to the dossiers page on your own hosted wiki.

• aggregates and publishes dispersed information,
• provides email and RSS based notifications,
• links most documents with Pippi Longstrings for analysis and commenting.

Combined information

Parltrack collects the data daily and combines the information on MEPs, progress on dossiers from OEIL, committee agendas, and vote results from the plenary minutes. Using this data it is easy to see for example at a glance:

• which MEP has taken responsibility for which dossiers,
• which committee is responsible or gives opinion on which dossiers,
• forecasts for next steps on dossiers in the EP and committees - including tabling deadlines for amendments,
• online detailed committee agendas,
• online calendar with EP and committee dates,
• who are the influential MEPs related to a dossier. There's much more possibilities in this data than the web-interface and your humble developers can ever present to you. Though we are willing to work for hire to dig deeper into this information-goldmine. ;)

Notifications

Anyone can subscribe to receive email notifications on changes on dossiers. On every dossier page, there's a link "Track this Dossier", by providing your email here you create a new notification group. If you don't specify a name of the notification group, one will be randomly generated for you. If you specify an existing notification group name, the current dossier will be added to that. After you created a notification group, you can share the link to this so other people can join in.

The Texts

Most of the documents created in the law-making process (initial, supplementary and final texts, opinions) are linked whenever available from OEIL. Most of these documents are also available on Eur-Lex (the official EU website publishing the texts) and thus are also automatically available in Pippi Longstrings from the Documents tab for dossiers. Using Pippi Longstrings you can analyse the texts and comment on them. Commenting happens by selecting the text you want to comment on. The results of pippi-analysis are also displayed as comments, from a user named Pippi Longstrings.

The Data

All data in Parltrack is available freely in various forms for anyone to use. Most of the pages have a "Download as JSON" link, all new and changed dossiers are listed in an RSS feed, changes in dossiers are also available as email notifications. Furthermore a complete DB dump as JSON is also available. All this is under the ODBLv1.0 license. Running your own instance of Parltrack is encouraged, the code is free under the AGPLv3+.

Searching

Currently search is possible for text in MEPs names, dossiers titles and IDs of final acts like "directive 2006/24/EC".

Credit

Parltrack is inspired by ehjs Tratten, was conceived during the 2010 FCForum Tools for policy reformers workshop and is influenced by a bunch of good people, thanks!

If you'd like to support similar tools in the future, don't hesitate to show your support: