Represent Data

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

Provincial

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