Monitoring by Journalists

Monitoring by Journalists#

User Story#

As a journalist, I want to search and monitor certain political issues and bills at all federal levels continuously, comprehensively and efficiently, in order to inform my readers about current political events.

Problem and Status Quo#

In the Swiss political system, important political decisions are made at the subnational (cantonal or municipal) level (cf. subsidiarity). However, the effort for journalists to obtain information and be up to date on subnational political events is disproportionately large (i.e. time-consuming and/or costly). Data is mostly not machine-readable, not harmonized and dispersed across 26 cantonal and 461 municipal parliaments.

Use Case#

        flowchart TB
    Parl1["Most Parliaments
        (Data Providers)"] -- Web Crawling --> OPD["OpenParlData.ch
        (Data Intermediary)"]
    Parl2["Some Parliaments
        (Data Providers)"] -- API --> OPD
    Parties["3rd Party Data Providers"] -. API .-> OPD & Tool["Tool Providers 
        (Data Users)"]
    OPD -- API --> Tool
    Tool -- GUI --> User1["Journalist 1 (End User)"] & User2["Journalist 2 (End User)"]
    User1 <-. share/collaborate .-> User2
    Tool -. API (enriched data) .-> OPD

    style OPD stroke:#BBDEFB,fill:transparent
    style Parties stroke-width:2px,stroke-dasharray: 2

OpenParlData.ch imports, cleans, harmonizes and openly publishes data from Swiss parliaments. It currently offers public data on political actors, parliamentary proceedings, decrees, consultations, votes and more from 78 parliaments. Via a tool using our API continuously supplying harmonized legislative data, journalists can more efficiently and comprehensively…

  • search for current political events relating to a specific topic across cantons,

  • monitor political issues and trends at different federal levels,

  • monitor specific bills, and thereby…

  • efficiently inform and/or entertain their readers and contribute to an informed public.

Furthermore, journalists can share enriched data and insights within news organizations. Tool providers can share enriched data with our data infrastructure.

Current scale#

Cf. Journalistic Data Analysis

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