thomasdavis / barton

A repository of political wisdom. Structured contact details for every elected official in Australia.

Barton

No one, however smart, however well educated, however experienced, is the suppository of all wisdom.

-- Tony Abbott, Prime Minister of Australia 12 Aug 2013

Barton is a suppository repository of political wisdom. More specifically though, it's a structured collection of crowd sourced contact details for all elected officials in Australia, designed for consumption by APIs and apps.

Despite the interwebs being around for over 20 years, a complete database of Australian politician contact details still doesn't exist. Many government websites already provide data as mail-merge.docx or contact-details.pdf for download. Unfortunately, none of them use a consistent structure or format suitable for automated consumption.

Barton seeks to rectify this problem.

File Structure

The repo is a simple collection of YAML files. Each YAML file in the data/ directory represents the jurisdiction of a single political authority.

The following data conventions will serve as the public API.

• Files MUST start with 3 dashes ---.
• Files MUST only contain a single jurisdiction of political authority.
• Files SHOULD be named descriptively so that jurisdictions will group appropriately by the file system i.e. au-qld-local-brisbane-city-council.yaml
• Files MUST contain a name field. Files MAY contain tags and people collections.
• Tags MUST contain a collection of strings which SHOULD apply to the current element and all of its children.

    ---
    name: People's Democratic Banana Republic
    tags: [tags are strings, they apply to this, and all children]
    people: 
      - name: Barry Crocker

• People MUST be a collection.
• People elements MUST contain a name field, as well as roles and contact collections.
• People elements MAY contain any other fields as required, including title, tags, salutation, suffix, party.
• Name fields are strings with the format First [Middle] ['Preferred'] Lastnames
• Contact collections MUST contain at least one office elements.

      - name: Barry 'Bazza' Crocker
        roles:
         - Minister for Political Entitlements
         - Member for Woolloomooloo
        contact:
         - office: Electorate
           address: Corner Cowper Wharf Roadway & Brougham Road, Woolloomooloo, NSW 2011
           postal: PO Box 122, Sydney NSW 2001
           email: [email protected]
           phone: [phone]
           fax: [phone]
           web: http://www.barrycrocker.com.au
           facebook: http://facebook.com/barrycrocker69
        party: LNP
        title: The Right Honourable
        salutation: Dear Minister
        suffix: MP
        tags: [Pies & Mash, Gravy, Schooners]

Putting it all together yields something like:

---
name: Queensland Government
tags: [Queensland, state]
people: 
  - name: Verity Mary Barton
    salutation: Dear Miss
    suffix: MP
    roles:
     - Member for Broadwater
    party: LNP
    contact:
     - office: Electorate
       address: 102 Imperial Parade, (Cnr Government Rd and Imperial Pde), Labrador Qld  4215
       postal: PO Box 644, Labrador Qld 4215
       email: [email protected]
       phone: [phone]
       fax: [phone]
  - name: Campbell Kevin 'Can Do' Newman
    title: The Honourable
    salutation: Dear Premier    
    suffix: MP
    roles:
      - Premier of Queensland
      - Member for Ashgrove
    party: LNP
    contact:
      - office: Ministerial
        address: Level 15, Executive Building, 100 George Street, Brisbane Qld 4000
        postal: PO Box 15185, City East Qld 4002
        email: [email protected] Shop 2, 230 Waterworks Road, Ashgrove Qld 4060
        phone: [phone]
        fax: [phone]        
      - office: Electorate
        postal: PO Box 3010, Ashgrove East Qld 4060
        email: [email protected]
        phone: [phone]
        fax: [phone]

Usage

To access the most up-to-date politician contact details, simply clone, curl, or scrape the repo. Parse the YAML into your preferred data format and use it to find a politician, write to your representative, or start a revolution - implementation is up to you.

Contributing

Barton is a collective endeavour that needs your assistance. You can help out anytime by adding or updating the contact details for officials in your local electorate or further afield. Please see the contributing file for how to help out.

Internationalisation

Want to create a similar database for your own country? Sweet - just copy this readme into a repo named after your first Head of Government and you are away!

License

Barton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia License. You are free to share and adapt the material for any purpose, even commercially so long as you give appropriate credit in your source code, website, or publication.