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Draft Legislation 45% open

France


What data is expected?

Data about the bills discussed within national parliament as well as votings on bills (not to mix with passed national law). Data on bills must be available for the current legislation period. Open data on the law-making process is crucial for parliamentary transparency: What does a bill text say and how does it change over time? Who introduces a bill? Who votes for and against it? Where is a bill discussed next, so the public can participate in debates? This data category draws on work by the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the Declaration of Parliamentary Openness.

  • Content of bill
  • Author of bill
  • Votes on bill per member of parliament
  • Transcripts of debates on bill
  • Status of bill

How open is the data?

The submitter described how the French draft legislation dataset is composed. The bottom line: Senate and National Assembly publish data to very different degrees. The different key data characteristics are spread across different data files, and are hard to put together. 1) Content of bills is never published as machine-readable data, only as HTML and PDF files on the official websites. 2) Authors of bills are missing from Senate's data but sufficiently enough present at least for all discussed bills in National Assembly's data. Yet, author names are not part of the bill texts. The National Assembly requires author names to be collected through ids in another dataset. This means users need to put these datasets together. 3) Only the National Assembly publishes data on voting records [but not for all votes]. The Senate does not publish any voting record as data. Votes on bills per member are partially published as OpenData for the National Assembly when a public scrutiny happened (which is the case for most important bills but not all), and associating a vote to a bill is very complex. Votes at the Senate are only published in html pages on the official website. 4) Transcripts of discussions around a bill are published as separate datasets that are not trivial to bind with bills data. 5) Final status of bills can easily be found in Senate's data. Ongoing status is available in National Assembly's data although it needs to be interpreted from analysing information on all parliamentary steps. Data is released with the national French Open License, but with an explicit warning that it remains subject to the 2002-1064 decree https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000413818 which authorizes the data owner to refuse to grant the license to a reuser, hence making it not really openly licensed. See https://rip.journal-officiel.gouv.fr/index.php/pages/juridiques Further discussion here https://discuss.okfn.org/t/entry-for-national-laws-france/5461/6

This entry was changed after a discussion on the Open Knowledge Forum, see here: https://discuss.okfn.org/t/entry-for-draftlegislation-fr/5581 Some data is available in machine-readable, open formats, including JSON, XML, CSV or Postgre SQL 8.4 format. See as stated the relevant sites: https://data.assemblee-nationale.fr & https://data.senat.fr. However, the bill content is required to be machine-readable, so that the entire dataset can count as machine-readable. Since the bill content (i.e. bill text) is not machine-readable, the dataset is not considered to be machine-readable.

Data location   https://data.assemblee-nationale.fr/travaux-parlementair - Bills data from National Assembly
   https://data.assemblee-nationale.fr/travaux-parlementair - Debates data from National Assembly
   https://data.assemblee-nationale.fr/travaux-parlementair - Votes data from National Assembly
   https://data.senat.fr/dosleg/ - Bills data from Senate
Data licence   Unknown
Data format   Unknown
Reviewer   Danny Lämmerhirt
Submitters   anonymous
Last modified   Mon Aug 07 2017 08:22:54 GMT+0000 (UTC)

Contributors

Reviewers

  • Danny Lämmerhirt

Submitters

  • anonymous
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