Politik Bei Uns

The open council information system “Politik Bei Uns” presents information and processes from council and administration in a user-friendly way, so that citizens can understand political decisions and can have a say at an early stage. As a data market place, our project makes council and administrative data available to third-party developers so that they can build further applications without much effort. Apart from politics, civil society and journalists, the scientific community also benefits from structured and therefore analysable data.

If you want to help shape politics, you need to be well-informed. All the information about political decisions in a municipality is stored in so-called council information systems (or RIS for short) 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 the administration. The public part for citizens is therefore not the focus. That is exactly what we want to change.

The people in a city do not think in terms of committees and types of applications, but in terms of geographical locations and keywords. For example, the approximate address and the name of a playground are more likely to be in the mind than the office responsible and the legislative period in which the playground was built. In order to optimise the presentation of political decisions in a municipality for citizens, the data needs to be presented in a structured form. For this purpose we have developed the industry standard OParl, which is now also offered by the majority of council information system manufacturers.

The data in OParl format can now be used to build completely new representations. Modern web technologies such as search servers and the blending of the data with geodata from OpenStreetMap help here.