Open Parl Data

We are collaboratively building an open standard and API for harmonized Swiss parliamentary data to promote transparency, innovation and participation in Swiss politics.

As a citizen, journalist, scientist or civil society organization, it is currently only possible to follow a specific political issue at different federal levels or from A to Z at great expense or effort. The reason: the 26 cantonal parliaments, 461 municipal parliaments and the national parliament publish their data in different formats, structures and qualities that are not compatible and linked with each other. There is no free way to search data from several parliaments in a structured way or to obtain the data. This makes civil society initiatives more difficult and creates unnecessary barriers to active citizen participation. Initiatives that use parliamentary data (e.g. Prototype Fund projects: Demokratis, VoteLog, CH+ Games for Democracy) have so far been limited to data at the federal level. The effort to include the cantonal and communal level is disproportionately large due to the inadequacy of the data.

We want to close this gap. We are collaboratively setting up an open infrastructure that brings together parliamentary data from all federal levels. The data will be made freely accessible and searchable via an API and a web interface (minimal GUI).
This lays the foundation for the open reuse of structured data. Existing initiatives can now also include data from cantons and municipalities and new fields of application are opening up for the use and analysis of Swiss parliamentary data (e.g. political monitoring for civil society organizations (Politpulse), transparency of vested interests: Lobbywatch, monitoring of voting behavior: Smartmonitor, techrating.ch, search and summarize council debates using AI: LegisLense).
In addition, the project aims to optimize data provision and structuring by parliaments and to establish a uniform standard.

We are working on this project openly and collaboratively. Follow the progress and contribute on GitLab!

This project is made possible by the Mercator Foundation Switzerland.