D26 Project Politics-at-us Wesseling

The challenge

In order to help shape politics, it helps a lot if you are well informed. All the information on political decisions in a municipality lies in so-called Council information systems (or in short: RIS) and a large part of this data has always been public.

The only problem is that the Council Information Systems are working tools for Council members and administration. The public part for citizens is therefore not the focus. And that’s exactly what we want to change.

The approach

People in a city don't think so much in committees and application types, but in geographical places and keywords. For example, one has the approximate address and the name of a playground in mind, not so much the competent office and the legislative period in which the playground was built.

In order to optimise the presentation of political decisions in a municipality for citizens, data is needed in a structured form. To this end, we have developed the OParl industry standard, which is now also offered by the majority of Council Information System manufacturers.

With the data in OParl format you can now build completely new representations. Modern web technologies such as search servers and the intersection of data with geodata from OpenStreetMap help.

Project website: https://politik-bei-uns.de