Projects/Memopol

= What is Political Memory? =

Political Memory is a toolbox designed to help citizens follow the activity and voting records of their Members of European Parliament (MEPs), and to help them influence decision and policy-making by making it as easy as possible to contact their MEPs.

The idea is simple: many decisions made in the European Parliament (and in national parliaments) are made knowing most citizens will not know about them. By increasing scrutiny of MEPs’ decisions, we can raise the political cost of these decisions and put citizens back at the heart of policy-making.

Political Memory aims to make this as simple as possible by giving citizens an easy-to-use interface to visualize their representatives’ votes, written questions, and general decisions, follow their representatives over time, and by giving them a way of quickly getting in touch with MEPs by listing all useful contact information in one place.

More specifically, Political Memory is a piece of software that can be used by anybody to create a website to track their Members of Parliament on any topic they wish, and remember what they said and what they did, as well as score MPs according to chosen criteria.

It is web application, written using the Django Python Framework, designed to be easily deployed on your website.

This project, nicknamed Memopol 2, is the 2.0 version of the 1.0 Political Memory tool written by La Quadrature du Net in Perl in the early days of net activism.

Political Memory is free software (licensed under the GNU Affero GPL v3+ license) that anybody can use, share, study, contribute to, debug, translate etc.

= Versions =


 * Version 1 of Political Memory is deprecated.
 * Version 2 of Political Memory is actually online. Do not hesitate to add your representative's public positions or to report some bug.
 * Version 3 of Political Memory is in dev mode... Contribute !

= How to use Memopol =

Memopol has listed every European and French deputies to enable citizens to see the vote and decision of each deputy on internet laws, regulations or directives (ACTA, IPRED, telecom).

The vote scoring is based on a traffic lights system:
 * if the vote matches with the ideas of La Quadrature: the deputy get a green point.
 * if the vote does not match with the ideas of La Quadrature, the deputy get a red point.
 * if the deputy abstains or is absent, he gets an orange point.

These points are added all together to get a final score which ranges from a flashy green point (‘really cool’) to a dark red point (‘not cool’).

Let’s illustrate this system with an example:

If you want to know what European deputies from France vote, click on France on the map: it will open a page with an alphabetic list of these deputies. You can change this order to put the list by vote or political group.

Thus you can see that Ms. the deputy Flautre often votes in favour of the ideas of La Quadrature as opposed to Ms. Grossetête. If you want to know how a particular deputy vote, just click on « by name » in the tool on the right. An alphabetic list with all deputies’ name will appear.

On the profile of each deputy you will find: his email, his office’s postal address, his possible website, the comities and delegations he belongs to, his CV, his public declarations and most importantly: his vote on each single law, regulation or directive.

= How to contribute =

Documentation
You can modify/upgrade the Documentation

Code

 * Clone the project : Core + LQDN Instance
 * Install it
 * Code something (See the Roadmap page)
 * Send a pull request either on gitorious or github

Tests
Projects tests are centralized in the "tests" dir.

To run tests, you just need to run "nosetests" in the project root directory.

The nose configuration is in the "setup.cfg" file.

Translations
There are 28 countries in Europe, and we have, at that time, only 2,5 translations available.

Feel free to translate it in your mother-tongue.

List bugs / questions / new features
The Roadmap page can easily be modified. Do not hesitate to add ideas/bugs/anything in the relevant sections.

Discuss
You can reach us on IRC (Freenode / #lqdn-memopol) or on the mailing-list (mempol2@laquadrature.net)