Inspiration

Too few people know who their local MP is, let alone knowing how they have represented them in Westminster. Existing sites such as TheyWorkForYou makes political affiliations and voting records more accessible, but the public lacks a forum to discuss specific topics. ParlaDrama allows people to discuss with their fellow constituents on issues their MP have voted in the Parliament

How we built it

We leaned heavily on Data.Parliament API provided by the UK Parliament. It allows us to fetch constituency, member, and voting record data. Additionally we obtained MPs' financial interests by scraping Register of Members' Financial Interests. The backend is a Flask RESTful API server which the React frontend talks to.

Challenges we ran into

Working within a hackathon timeframe is very intense

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We maintained relatively good coding style throughout and didn't encounter any hard-to-debug issues

What we learned

Data is messy

What's next for ParlaDrama

Show MP's party affiliation, voting records, and comments moderation and better curation of topics

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