Bills Watcher Malaysia

Recently I got involved in a Open Data Movement in Malaysia, and one of my recent project is called Bill Watcher. It is a webapp that broadcast via twitter and rss on bills that is being debated, and being passed recently.

Main Page

Bills Detail

Basically this page scraped from the malaysian parliament website. And load into a sqlite database now, which I don't really care, because I am doing it via sqlalchemy for now, it make it easy to move to other database. Bottle.py just read from the database via sqlalchemy, and render it. Use 960 gs to make the rendered page look nice. 

The feature of this app, is pretty small, the pdf is iframe, there is no login. Fancy sharing feature is via twitter and facebook button and RSS. Commenting will be provided by disqus, if I figure out where to put it. Javascript is only used on twitter and facebook button. 

I consider this as MVP for this, small basic feature to be extended. So feature will be added as requested, but not all will be added. Also not a lot of information is available on the parliment bills page, so feature will be based on effort needed to extract it from other source, which actually not really easy. But otherwise, we will try our best to get feature to be added inside. 

What next, we going to host it live soon. Then we will add disqus, then finalized twitter notification. To get your hand dirty now. Go to the github link 

https://github.com/sweemeng/Malaysian-Bill-Watcher

I will transfer to the sinar repo soon. Need to do a bit update across repo. 

p.s 

Recently a bill being debated intensely, shows that how many stuff we don't know about the decision process in the country, even though it is there on the parliament side. Which does not make it easy for use nor navigater around.