I recently received an NGO request for the House of Commons members’ contact information in Comma Separated Value (CSV) format. I quickly found the helpful Represent website by Open North. This small group who has scraped government websites and created machine-readable versions of MP contact information, plus a minimal maps interface layered on top.
However, the Represent effort leans a little too “techno-elite.” The results are provided in the JSON format, a hyper-current, versatile and Web-buzzword-compliant format. But most NGOs I know are still struggling to figure out Excel, never mind anything more recent; and Excel can’t handle much more than CSV files (if even that – modern web-friendly text encodings like UTF8 don’t even work properly).
So, I put together a quick bit of Javascript to convert the Represent JSON format to CSV format, ready for Excel to use. This should be “live” – pulling the latest version from Represent each time. Here are links to a few of the Represent datasets:
Federal
- Members of the House of Commons, CSV format
Provincial
- Members of Legislative Assembly of Alberta, CSV format
- Members of Legislative Assembly of British Columbia, CSV format
- Members of Legislative Assembly of Manitoba, CSV format
- Members of Legislative Assembly of New Brunswick, CSV format
- Members of Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly, CSV format
- Members of Nova Scotia House of Assembly, CSV format
- Members of Legislative Assembly of Ontario, CSV format
- Members of Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, CSV format
- Members of Assemblée nationale du Québec, CSV format
- Members of Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan, CSV format
Hi David,
You’ll be happy to know that we now offer CSV downloads: http://represent.opennorth.ca/data/
They are in the Windows-1252 encoding, which Excel should open without a problem.
We have also redesigned the Represent website: http://represent.opennorth.ca
We hope you will be able to refer more nonprofits to the much more friendly website.
James McKinney
Open North