=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=How to study lobbying with crowdsourced OpenData ?
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-739/paper_31.pdf
|volume=Vol-739
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/okcon/Ooghe-Tabanou11a
}}
==How to study lobbying with crowdsourced OpenData ?==
<pdf width="1500px">https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-739/paper_31.pdf</pdf>
<pre>
     How to study lobbying with crowdsourced
                   OpenData ?

                            Benjamin Ooghe-Tabanou

                                 Regards Citoyens
                          contact@regardscitoyens.org,
                         http://www.RegardsCitoyens.org



1   Content

Lobbying is a very controversial subject in France: largely discussed, but not
well known. So for about a year, Regards Citoyens and the French section of
Transparency International worked together in order to bring more transparency
in the processes of influence and lobbying within the French parliament, by
bringing out some new data to the public debate. Indeed the Parliament has,
like the European one, a register of lobbyists, but it turns out this register does
not contain more than a hundred names, a figure far from the reality as we
discovered.
    So we extracted from all parliamentary reports the lists of the people who
were auditionned by MP’s, bringing out 15.000 names. This already revealed a
first lack in transparency since only 38% of the reports have such a list. To qualify
and validate this data, we used some crowdsourcing power, by making an easy-to-
use web-application to let people process what couldn’t be done automatically.
In only 10 days, more than 3.000 people participated and successfully helped us
transform this into real data.
    It finally took us some time to requalify the data, especially to categorize
the 9.000 different organisations revealed by the mashup. Public sector, private
companies, unions, civil society, think-tanks... Which ones are the most listened
to during this visible part of the iceberg that is lobbying? Is this done in a
plural and equal way? These are the questions we tried to answer within the
study which was published last March, revealing interesting figures like the major
representation of the public sector with 48% of the auditions. To complete the
study we finally developed an interactive web visualisation in order to allow
anyone to browse, access and download the data that was finally published under
the ODbL, an open data license.


2   About the Author

Regards Citoyens is a citizen organization created in 2009 which promotes public
open data in France. In addition to try to popularize Open Data principles in
France, the members of this association create web projects using Open Data
with Free and Open Source Software in order to provide tools for a better di-
alogue between citizens and representatives and a better understanding of the
french democratic institutions. Their most known initiative is a parliamentary
monitoring website : NosDeputes.fr.

</pre>