~stef/blog/

I've been maintaining a list of possible features for Parltrack if the funding campaign hits 10.000 EUR, I'd be interested to hear feedback and other suggestions to this list:

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.