Representa

Representa is a combination of a number of different source datasets about elected representatives for people in the UK. It is a fork based on the fantastic EveryPolitician project from MySociety, but aims only to cover the UK.

Why does this fork exist?

MySociety unfortunately couldn't commit the resources to keeping EveryPolitician up to date forever, and as a consequence have chosen to put the project into a semi-archived state. Keeping the entirety of the world's political information up-to-date election upon election is a massive feat, and a special mention goes out to Tony Bowden, whose stellar work on EveryPolitician for many years created the amazing groundwork to make this dataset.

Why just the UK?

The simple answer is resources. As mentioned above, it's incredibly difficult to maintain such a large number of countries' information, and as a matter of practicality, the current maintainer simply doesn't have the time to keep the project going with every country in the world. Unfortunately, this does inevitably lead to a smaller dataset.

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The below information is from EveryPolitician's original README, and hasn't been modified. Its accuracy or usefulness can't be guaranteed.

Want to use the data?

• general information about how to use the data
• if you want to download it, get it from:
  • human? go via the EveryPolitician website
  • program? use the RawGit CDN, via links in countries.json, which we explain here
• what's in the data?

Want to contribute data?

• high-level information about how to contribute

This repo is where we store the data, but we have a process for adding it — please don't submit Pull Requests with data. Instead, if you know of data or data sources we are not using, please get in touch: here's how to contribute. The bottom line is: we use multiple online sources, and we regularly retrieve data from those sources so we can automatically keep up-to-date if and when they change. If you can help us by providing more sources, great!

This document is for developers actively working on the project, rather than consuming data from it.

Building the data for a legislature

1. From within the directory for the legislature it should usually be enough to run bundle exec rake clean default.

   • To re-refetch the data from a given source first, set the REBUILD_SOURCE environment variable to something matching the filename of the required source: e.g. REBUILD_SOURCE=official bundle exec rake clean default

   • If you want to fetch fresh data from all existing sources, you can use bundle exec rake clobber default instead.

   • Note that if you're fetching any data from Morph, you'll also need to specify your morph.io API key in the environment variable MORPH_API_KEY, e.g. MORPH_API_KEY=my_secret_key bundle exec rake clean default

2. Make sure that the changes look sensible, and then commit the new/refreshed data. Please commit human-edited files separately to data fetched from a remote source or generated as part of the build.