Using parliamentary open data to improve participation

For a lay-citizen, it is difficult to keep up to date with all the bills that are being discussed and will be voted at each level of the law making bodies of the government (e.g. a parliament, the congress, the senate). Currently, some citizens are very politically active and are taking part in the legislative process, starting petitions and protests to stop or support particular bills. However, the majority of the population is lost and does not care much for the details of the legislative process. They get politically active when journalists and news outlets raise an issue, but this is intrinsically biased towards the media's agenda and not always close to the citizen's personal interests. We are researching ways to automatically summarize and simplify the legislative process in a personalized manner for each citizen. In the way that Netflix or Amazon can learn a customer's preferences for movies, books and other products, we have been researching methods to build a system that can learn political preferences and topic of interest and can use these to automatically notify citizens when such topics are being discussed in parliament or when a bill is being voted that the citizen would strongly support or oppose. In this paper we present the state of the open data that is currently made available by legislative bodies to bootstrap such a system and we then discuss a particular use case, Cidadão Automatico that we are developing for monitoring the Brazilian legislative bodies.