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The Public Whip is a Parliamentary informatics project loosely affiliated to mySociety's TheyWorkForYou website which shares a large part of the same parliamentary parsing code-base.
It was initially developed in the summer of 2003 by Francis Irving and Julian Todd after witnessing the 18 March 2003 Parliamentary Approval for the invasion of Iraq, and learning that members of parliament (MPs) usually vote the way they are instructed to do because their party's Chief Whip maintain a record of all acts of disobedience for future reference. They realized that without equal access to this information, members of the public were put at a severe disadvantage when it came to holding their representatives accountable on any particular vote or issue. The Parliamentary approval for the invasion of Iraq was given by the elected members of the British House of Commons to the Tony Blairs government on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq in a series of two votes on 18 March 2003. ...
A Member of Parliament, or MP, is a representative elected by the voters of an electoral district to a parliament; in the Westminster system, specifically to the lower house. ...
The Chief Whip is a political office in some legislatures assigned to an elected member whose task is to administer the whipping system that ensures that members of the party attend and vote as the party leadership desires. ...
Initially, the software was written in Perl (later rewritten in Python) which downloaded pages of from the online Hansard, extracted the MPs votes, uploaded them into a mySQL table, and allowed them to be viewed through PHP webpages. Perl, also Practical Extraction and Report Language (a backronym, see below) is a dynamic procedural programming language designed by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. ...
Python is an interpreted programming language created by Guido van Rossum in 1990. ...
Hansard is the traditional name for the printed transcripts of parliamentary debates in the Westminster system of government. ...
MySQL is a multithreaded, multi-user, SQL Database Management System (DBMS) with more than six million installations. ...
PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a reflective programming language originally designed for producing dynamic Web pages. ...
Later that year the project was expanded to handle Parliamentary Written Answers, and eventually everything except for the webpage grew into the Parliamentary Parser, which provides the raw material for mySociety's TheyWorkForYou website. One of the important lessons that was learnt during the building of these projects was never to ask for permission to use government copyrighted information such as this, because you risk not being granted it, or being tied up with conditions that could threaten the viability of the project.[citation needed]
It is widely understood that the decisive wielding Parliamentary power occurs at the moment of division or vote among the MPs. Therefore a chronology of these votes provides a good way to account for the goings on in the House. Unfortunately, the format of the record is so poor that, while it is possible for a computer to automatically determine who voted in any particular division, it is very difficult to extract a comprehensible description of what was decided. As a consequence, the description of each division has its own wiki page for readers to correct and clean up.
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