Help the FSFE to connect with representatives
Developed by the Free Software Foundation Europe, MP Explore is a Free Software tool to help us reaching out to representatives in Parliaments across Europe. We need your help! Contribute by adding your local, regional, and national parliament!
MP Explore is a tool designed to retrieve official and publicly available up-to-date contact information about Members of Parliament (MPs). This information, alongside other capabilities, such as filtering, is important for the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) policy activities to effectively reach representatives from several parliaments. MP Explore allows to obtain this data from any number of sources, therefore becoming an effective tool to obtain such information of political representatives.
Contributing to MP Explore
MP Explore relies on well-maintained data sources that collect up-to-date, official, and accurate information of MPs across Europe. Such data sources are based on official and publicly accessible sources from parliaments. Currently, we have developed data sources for the European Parliament, the German Parliament (Bundestag), and the North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament (Germany).
When data is not readily accessible in well-established data formats from official sources, it can be difficult to explore all of the different representative bodies while trying to get the nuance of the different local, regional, or national political systems right. In order to build a resilient and modular system, your help is needed! Contribute by creating data sources for MP Explore!
Helping us connect with representatives by building sources for local, regional, and national parliaments is the best way to get involved. This is a documented process and the FSFE team can guide you throughout it. Before taking up on the challenge of creating your own MP Explore data source, we encourage you to contact us by sending an e-mail to contact@fsfe.org. This allows us to better coordinate efforts and ensure a well-maintained, reliable, and vibrant ecosystem of data sources.
Aside from taking up the challenge of creating your own data sources for local, regional, and national parliaments, you can also contribute to our work towards Software Freedom by becoming a supporter or donating.
Using MP Explore
In order to use MP Explore, you need to create a workflow. Workflows define from where are you getting which data, what to do with that data, and how to store it. For example, a workflow allows you to store the information of members of a given committee in a CSV file. Workflows are one of the building blocks of the MP Explore ecosystem.
We have developed two end-user tools, MP Explore CLI and MP Explore UI, to simplify the execution of such workflows. You may find CC0 1.0 licensed workflows to build upon in the Library of Workflows.
A key aspect of tailored and strategic communication is collaboration and coordination, which ensures that our efforts best contribute to the advancement of Software Freedom. Therefore, we encourage you to send an e-mail to contact@fsfe.org if you are planning to contact representatives on topics related to Free Software. We have a lot of experience in this area and would be happy to support you in your efforts.
You can also contribute by supporting our work with a donation.