Opening up 17 years of Parliamentary monitoring
Opening up 17 years of Parliamentary monitoring
The Parliamentary Monitoring Group (PMG) have been providing South Africans with insight into the day-to-day details of Parliament since 1995. Being the data geeks that we are, we’re incredibly excited that you can now access over 17 years of Parliamentary data through PMG’s API at api.pmg.org.za.
PMG created their first website in 1998 and have had a few iterations since then. When they approached Code for South Africa last year to build the next iteration it was about more than just a facelift. It was an opportunity to open up more than a decade-and-a-half of their data available for others to analyse and build upon.
PMG makes their content available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 South Africa (CC-BY 3.0 ZA) license which means that you’re free to do almost anything with the content provided you give attribution to PMG.
So what’s there to play with?
PMG have amassed a vast amount of information on Parliament, including:
- Minutes and summaries of more than 18,000 Committee Meetings of 116 Committees
- Progress, debates and versions of more than 500 Bills
- Hansards, minutes and summaries of over 600 meetings of the National Assembly, National Council of Provinces and Joint Sittings
- Thousands of hours of Committee Meeting audio recordings (we’d love to count them – want to help us out?)
- Over 300GB of supplementary PDFs, documents and audio
The bulk of the content is freely available. To sustain their activities (they’re a registered NGO) they charge a subscription fee for the meeting reports of a handful of committees. To get that content you’ll need a subscription and must authenticate your API calls.
PMG also run People’s Assembly, which provides detailed information on past and current Members of Parliament. The PMG website and API build on this data (and will do so increasingly in future) when providing details on MPs and Committee memberships.
Contributions welcome
The PMG website is entirely open source and we welcome contributions and bug fixes through the GitHub repo at github.com/Code4SA/pmg-cms-2/.
Photograph of the National Assembly by GovenmentZA on Flickr and licensed under a CC-BY-ND-2.0 license.