European Democracy

I’ve got to admit, I’ve never paid much attention to the European Parliament. To be honest, I don’t think many people do; the turnout in European elections here in the UK is very low.

But a couple of things have recently changed that. The first was the fact that the European Parliament (hereafter EP) elections are coming up next month; the second was the controversial Telecoms Packet. We hear very little about what gets discussed in the EP, so I went to their website to find out. I was utterly astonished by what I found.

The EP website is clunky, and it’s a bit hard to find the information you’re after, but that’s not really the problem. Have a look at a debate and you’ll see what’s wrong: every contribution is recorded in the speaker’s original language:

The verbatim report of proceedings of each sitting (often referred to by its French abbreviation, CRE) is published (Rule 173 of the Rules of Procedure) and contains the speeches made in plenary, in the original language.

OK, I can read French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Italian well enough to catch the gist. But I don’t understand Polish, or Latvian, or Bulgarian, or Greek, or Hungarian, or …. In fact, I doubt that there’s a single person alive who can speak all twenty-three working languages of the European Union. In other words, no one can understand what’s going on unless they were actually there.

The odd thing is that, whilst debates are simultaneously translated, these translations never seem to make it into the official record. This is, surely, no way to run a democracy. I thought this was all pretty scandalous.

A little later, I realised that I could actually do something about it. Google’s translation service can handle almost all the EU languages (all except Irish, I think). I know how to make websites, and how to scrape data off other websites. I had signed up for the Yahoo-sponsored 24-hour Open Hack Day last weekend, and decided that opening up the European Parliament should be my project. I roped in Julian Burgess as a collaborator, and we roughly bolted together a website to prove that it was possible.

Inspired by TheyWorkForYou.com and TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, we called it TheyWorkFor.EU

Check out the debates, and see what your EU representatives have been discussing! At present, we’ve only scraped a couple of days of debates, but we’ve proven both that it’s a workable idea and that Google’s translations are pretty good.

We won a Guardian-sponsored prize for Best Government Hack, which was both gratifying and amusing, considering that Julian works for The Times!

My hope is that I can get it into workable shape before the next session opens, so that the next session of the European Parliament takes place in a more open environment than it has done in the past.

2009-05-15 19:35 UTC. Comments: 10.

Comments

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  1. Adam Wilcox

    Wrote at 2009-05-15 21:38 UTC using Safari 528.17 on Mac OS X:

    Paul- might want to take a look at some of the links on the http:/theyworkfor.eu/ site- they seem to be locally hardcoded.

  2. Terence Eden

    Wrote at 2009-05-15 21:43 UTC using Firefox 3.0.10 on Linux:

    Excellent service! Two very minor points.

    1) Your link should point to http://TheyWorkFor.eu – at the moment it points to a subdirectry of po-ru.

    2) Would it be possible to list the MEP’s national party affiliation? Knowing that, say, Malcolm Harbour is in the “Group of the European People’s Party (Christian Democrats) and European Democrats” isn’t as useful as knowing he’s a member of the UK Conservative Party.

    Other than that – a stellar job.

    Thanks

  3. Paul Battley

    Wrote at 2009-05-16 07:47 UTC using Firefox 3.0.9 on Linux:

    Oops, missed a / in the markup. Thanks, Terence.

    I do want to put the actual party names, but that will probably require a bit of work to collect.

  4. Lee

    Wrote at 2009-05-19 11:58 UTC using Unknown browser on Mac OS X:

    Your discovery is nothing short of scandalous. Whilst your tool no doubt does a good job in attempting to recify the situation, I can’t believe they’re being allowed to get away with it in the first place. Where are the press? Too busy keeping the expenses story running. Doubt this will even get a mention when the Euro election campaign gets under way properly.

  5. John Handelaar

    Wrote at 2009-05-21 19:11 UTC using Firefox 3.0.10 on Linux:

    Please keep me posted – we just launched KildareStreet.com in Ireland and we’re already getting questions here about when we’re getting to the MEPs…

  6. Nina Jansen

    Wrote at 2009-05-28 14:24 UTC using Firefox 3.0.10 on Mac OS X:

    Are you on github? I would like to help. Currently you can’t click on a topic without getting a 404.

  7. Nina Jansen

    Wrote at 2009-05-28 14:35 UTC using Firefox 3.0.10 on Mac OS X:

    ... oh and btw do you know about this site: http://www.votewatch.eu/index.php ?

  8. Paul Battley

    Wrote at 2009-05-28 15:07 UTC using Firefox 3.0.10 on Mac OS X:

    Nina, your help would be gratefully received! The repository is on Github at threedaymonk/theyworkforeu. I’m developing in the ‘working’ branch. It’s a regression from the basic functionality we hacked out over the weekend, but it’s a more robust model.

    Oh, and I know the topic links don’t work. They never did. I’m not quite sure why we put them there … to show the potential, I guess.

    Thanks for the link to VoteWatch. I had heard about it, but hadn’t seen it until now.

  9. Glyn

    Wrote at 2009-06-10 18:00 UTC using Firefox 3.0.10 on Linux:

    The Open Rights Group sent a questionnaire to UK MEP candidates, asking them where they stand on digital rights issues.

    http://euelection.openrightsgroup.org/

  10. Peter Brooke

    Wrote at 2009-07-10 10:27 UTC using Mozilla 1.8.1.21 on Windows XP:

    Paul,

    The EU is fundamentally undemocratic:
    1 Its Parliament cannot make law
    2 Its Parliament cannot impose its will on either the Council or the Commission.
    3 The Commission is appointed.
    4 The Council is made up from member states’ governments. Member states’ opposition groups have no voice on the Council.
    5 If the Commission wants something, and a qualified majority of the Council agrees, then it happens; irrespective of what MEPs say.

    It seems to me that member states’ establishments have given up power to the EU so that they can play with a smaller slice of a bigger cake.

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