This document introduces the Political Memory, which aims to track the voting records and positions of elected representatives on certain issues. It does this to help citizens understand how well their representatives actually represent their views. The tool tracks votes in the European Parliament and French Parliament on issues like internet freedom and net neutrality. It provides listings and data visualizations of representatives' scores that are meant to inform citizens and help advocacy groups like La Quadrature du Net apply political pressure. The goal is to build this tool for various citizen groups and provide aggregated data to help citizens engage more with politics and hold representatives accountable.

1. Hack the democracy with the Political Memory
of la Quadrature du Net
Laurent Peuch
September 25, 2012

2. I think I’m supposed to present myself
Me in a nutshell:
Freesoftware dev
La Quadrature du Net
NURPA
UrLab
Neutrinet
Chocolate
and too many other things

3. Introduction
The Political Memory has 2 sides:
Citizen
Hacktivist

4. Citizen side or why is it interesting for us?

5. Citizen
The Political Memory tries, for every elected representatives, to:
be a political memory of their actions (on a certain subject)
make it easier for citizens to understand how they are
behaving
increase the political cost of their decisions

6. Citizen
It does that by:
tracking the vote of those representatives
recording official positions taken by those representatives

7. Citizen
The vote part is the interesting one:
voting recommendation to representatives (eg: by lqdn: vote
against ACTA)
+
list of representatives with their actual votes
=
score on how well those recommendations have been followed
If your opinion on defending Internet == LQDN’s opinion − > you
can see who is representing you the best on defending Internet

8. Citizen
World Domination plan:
get every citizen groups to use a political memory
build an aggregator that allow everyone to see who is
representing him the best
build feeds of informations with this aggregator so everyone
will be aware of what is happening
also allowing everyone to get back into politics by
decomplexifying it
...
PROFIT

9. Citizen
Can you tell how well your representatives are actually
representing you on subject X?
Can you tell how they have voted?
Can you tell if their public positions are coherent with their
behavior?
Do you have any way of being informed about that?
This has to change.

10. Citizen
We are trying to do this:
on the European Parliament
a bit on the French Parliament
on Fundamental Freedoms on the Internet
on Net Neutrality

11. Hacktivist

12. The Political Memory is our main campaign tool.
We act a lot at the European Parliament level with direct
contact with eurodeputies
We need informations about them to be able to act: their
committees, office floors, phone # etc...
Vote tracking && public opinions are also very valuable
informations

13. Hacktivist
The Political Memory is build around that idea:
A lot of listings: by committees, by floors, by total score,
Filtering options of listings
CSV export of listings
Advanced search (WIP)
Datavisualizations, especially on votes results

14. Don’t forget our world domination plan!

15. Details
(Memopol is the nickname of the Political Memory)
https://memopol.lqdn.fr
Code: https://gitorious.org/memopol2-0
Licence: aGPLv3+
We are looking for devs! It’s in python/django
IRC: irc.freenode.net#lqdn-memopol
Me: brain@worlddomination
Twitter: @brabram
Thanks!
Questions?