French Senate Election: transparency and Open data

French Senate Election: transparency and Open data

Summary

1. A dedicated mini-Website

2. An automated procedure for the posting of candidates and results

3. A first experiment of Open data

1. A dedicated website…

With explicative maps…

… a lot of Interactive animations

… and videos.

1. An automated procedure for the posting of candidates and results

• 2011 Senatorial Elections were characterized by a technological gap: the automatisation of the posting of candidates and results

• An application conceived to import datas from Excel and export XML datas

Posting of candidates

• 1st step: import of Excel lists of candidates from the ministry of Interior in our « Senators Database »

• 2nd step: these datas were automatically « exported » on the Senate website and easily available for consultation through an interactive map

• For this, we used « iframe elements »

Posting of results• On Election Day, we used the same

application to post the results, constituency by constituency, in real time

• We had previously implemented iframes on each page (44 pages in total : half of the French « départements »)

• As long as the database was empty, nothing appeared on the web pages except the lists of candidates that we had previously posted

Imports of Excel files in our database

When receiving the results from the ministry of Interior via Excel files, we imported them in our database

And just had to check wether the names in the excel files were the same as the one we had previously imported through the lists of candidates

Export of datas on the websiteThese datas were automatically posted on the Senate website and easily available for consultation through an interactive map

To improve the graphic rendering, we used « avatars » for new senators –whom we didn’t have the pictures- and photos of re-elected senators.

Exemple : results of the constituency of Loire-Atlantique

1. A first experiment of Open data

• For the first time, both the lists of candidates and the results were available in « open data » for those who wanted to re-use these datas instantly.

• The re-users had to approve a licence in order to access the app.

• More than 1.600 requests.

A traffic explosion

• 5,7 millions pages viewed in 2 days

• 4,2 millions on 25 september

• Six times the traffic of the previous election (2008)

0

1000000

2000000

3000000

4000000

5000000

6000000

26 et 27 sept. 2004 21 et 22 sept. 2008 25 et 26 sept. 2011

5,7 millions de pages vues en 2011 (+ 513 %)

Thank youAnne Esambert, Web Manager

a.esambert@senat.fr