Parliament Wow!

MPs, civil servants, nobody knows what's happening in parliament. There are bills, amendments and speeches. PW live-transcribes speeches and simplifies language. It is democracy made clear.

Comment

Inspiration

I was invited to parliament. It terrified me. Nobody has a clue. There are speeches, bills and amendments every minute. Nobody knows what is happening, least of all our members of parliaments.

It's actually mad. MPs do so many votes a day. It's super hard to keep track. They're in and out of meetings. Stuff gets proposed in speeches in real-time. They vote with the party whip 99% of the time.

They get transcriptions the day afterwards. Only then do they really know what they voted on.

The speeches are live-streamed and all the bills are public record. But the language is hard to pick through. It's basically impossible to understand the implications of a vote.

This scared me. We can do better.

What it does

Parliament Wow is a website that:

  1. Live transcribes parliamentary speeches
  2. Scrapes and collates relevant information in real-time
  3. Uses AI to cut through the legalese and displays what MPs are actually voting on
  4. Breaks down the potential implications of each vote

All in a clean, usable UI.

How we built it

We leveraged freely available data:

  • Bills
  • Meeting notes
  • Videos
  • Some existing transcriptions

Our process:

  1. Scrape data from various sources
  2. Clean and process PDFs and audio files
  3. Store processed information
  4. Create a user-friendly interface

Challenges we ran into

We had so many problems. So much data.

  • 35,000 bills to process
  • Data stored behind Cloudflare CDN, blocking our scraping
  • Mostly PDFs, hard to parse
  • Audio files up to 12 hours long

What we learned

  1. The importance of good data cleaning and processing (we used vision LLMs to extract tables and other hard to parse info from PDF files)
  2. Methods to bypass CDN restrictions (ethically)
  3. The complexity of parliamentary procedures

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  1. We did the unsexy hard work of cleaning and parsing lots of data
  2. We made a real, usable tool which will scale in production.
  3. We shipped it.

In the end, we created a tool that brings unprecedented transparency to the parliamentary voting process. Parliament Wow makes it easier for citizens and members of parliament to understand and engage with their democracy.

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