voOot bot

voOot

Inspiration

Most people are not very interested in what the local government (the city council) is doing. Most attention goes to the national government. This is strange, because what is being decided on local level has a lot of influence on the lives of people. Also, in a lot of cases, the local news agencies are very limited in both time and resources. This makes it also difficult to bring good news reports about local developments and decisions.

In current day and age of API's, Open Data and Open Government it should be possible to have state of the art information services about the core of our democracy: the decisions being made by our elected officials. This project, which we called voOot, is being developed in The Hague, The Netherlands. The nation's governmental capital. We found out that it is virtually impossible to be able to find out information about developments in the local city council. It is even impossible to add the meeting schedule to your own agenda! These are basic necessities that can be easily implemented.

We found out that we can't wait for the government/council to do this. Simply because they do not have the capacity. We are doing it ourselves! By providing access to the council information in the form of a public API, and by providing services to make use of all this information.

The voOot Bot is a chatbot service to get the latest information about developments in the local city council.

What it does

The voOot Bot is a chatbot service to get the latest information about developments in the local city council. It is bridging the gap between government and the people. The chatbot gives you access to the latest information about the Council, Persons, Events and Topics.

Using a chat interface (at this point we use Slack), people can ask questions about the local city council:

Council: Information about the council: the number of seats, the council members, the different parties etc.
Person: Information about a specific person in the city council. Providing background information, latest activities and social media links.
Event: Information about events in the city council. These are council meetings. Information about the date, time and place and the agenda.
Topic: People can ask information about a certain topic. The response will provide access to documents, votings and other types of information that is related to this topic.

How I built it

We use AWS Lex for the Chat interface and AWS Lambda to handle the request. We use our own voOot API backend service (based on NodeJS) to fetch the required data.

Challenges I ran into

It is a challenge to get all the data that is needed to provide this service. Even in this time of open data it is virtually impossible to receive the required data in a meaningful format. This is something we have to do ourselves unfortunately.. AWS Lex is a giant leap forward, but still a steep learning curve to really understand the lingo, and the way to structure the intents and slots.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

The first version of the Bot is there! It is really nice to have the first service based on the voOot API that we are developing. Even though it is the first version, and only a fraction of all the stuff that should be done, I am already proud that we got this far!