ThePublic Whip is aparliamentary informatics project that analyses and publishes the voting history of MPs in theParliament of the United Kingdom.
It was developed byFrancis Irving andJulian Todd following the18 March 2003 Parliamentary Approval for the invasion of Iraq as a tool to record which MPs had defied their party'swhip long after the information had become effectively inaccessible for reference.
On 1 August 2011 Irving and Todd handed control of the site to a new team.[1]
The project is loosely affiliated tomySociety'sTheyWorkForYou with which it shares a large part of the same parliamentary parsing code-base.
In 2014 theOpenAustralia Foundation launched a fork of the project for Australia's federal parliament called They Vote For You .
In 2004 the Public Whip won theNew Statesman New Media Award for "civic renewal".[2]
The site has never received a grant from any funding body and remains entirely paid for by its creators, including server costs and bandwidth.[3]
Originally the software was written inPerl, and then later rewritten inPython. The main process downloads the daily transcripts from the onlineHansard, matches and assigns IDs to the names of MPs, and saves them into XML files. These are later uploaded into amySQL table and viewed throughPHP webpages.
At the end of 2003 the project was extended to read the archive ofParliamentary Written Answers. Following a request frommySociety, the Parliamentary Parser[4] was expanded to include House of Commons and Westminster Hall debates, and finally the House of Lords, which are all more or less in the same format. It is now maintained by them to provide the data to theirTheyWorkForYou website.
The website has occasionally been cited in newspaper articles, and is sometimes referred to in election material.[5] It has also been used to provide voting analysis to citizens during elections.
An election quiz which advised voters of which party or incumbent candidate most closely matched their political opinions (according to the Parliamentary vote) was on the site for the 2005 General election and received over 10,000 hits.
In anticipation of preparing a version of it again for the next general election, Julian has distributed leaflets and tried out variations of the site at the2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election[6][7] and the2008 Glenrothes by-election.[8]
Francis Irving currently does programming work formySociety, most recentlyWhatDoTheyKnow, a site that provides an on-line interface to theFreedom of Information Act 2000.
Julian Todd has extended the concept of parsing transcripts for speeches and votes to theGeneral Assembly andSecurity Council of theUnited Nations with a website called undemocracy.com established in 2007.[9] The work was motivated by the discovery of the transcripts on-line during research into the application ofUnited Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 in his home town of Liverpool.[10]
On the first of August 2011, after 8 years of hard graft and dedication, Francis Irving and Julian Todd handed us the reins of The Public Whip.