Yle vaalikone data updated

Posted: March 25, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Own projects | Tags: , , , | 17 Comments

I did a new scrape of the Yle vaalikone data yesterday. About 300 new candidates have answered, making it 1801 people all together.

  • The answers of all candidates in Yle vaalikone (Google Docs) (offline for now)

This time I combined it with candidate data from ehdolla.org (thank you Google Fusion Tables). Note that questions 31-33 are specific for each district and not comparable.

//EDIT: I found some errors in the previous dataset (or rather Verkostoanatomia). I did the scrape again, but skipped the fusion part. I hope this is correct now.

If you want to see how the scrape was done I’ll also leave you with the Ruby file. Don’t hesitate to comment on my coding if you have any suggestions about improvements (I am sure there are many).

//UPDATE: The dataset has been taken offline. This is why. Hope to be able to put it back soon.

Growing open data movement in Finland

Posted: March 21, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Links | Tags: , , | Leave a comment

I’ve been psyched to learn about a number of very interesting Finnish data projects last couple of days. Here are a few initiatives that I really want to push (most of them only in Finnish unfortunately):

  • Ehdolla.org. This site opened yesterday after Big Clean Screen Scraping event in Jyväskylä this weekend. The idea is to gather open data about candidates in the parliamentary elections – political promises, campaign financing data, statements and so on.
  • HS Open. The leading Finnish news paper Helsingin Sanomat has taken a progressive role in data journalism by opening up the data from its voting advice application. Last week it arranged a workshop about how this data could be put to use. I couldn’t participate myself, but some very inspiring ideas seem to have emerged from the seminar. One idea is a game where the user has to stabilize the state budget by making her own cuts – a test few politicians seem to be willing to take now before the elections.
  • Helsinki region infoshare. In an attempt to make public data more accessible Helsinki and the neighbouring cities in the metropolitan area has just opened up a portal for public data. I’ve written about this project myself in an article in Finlands kommuntidning (in Swedish). I haven’t had time to examine the site myself yet, but the idea is great.