Call for Volunteers: Open Knesset – oknesset.org

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been lightly involved in work on open knesset.
Mostly I’ve been helping two of the main developers, Benny and Ofri, and joining the discussions on the discussion group.

(For the non-Israelis: the Knesset is Israel’s congress, where laws are passed.)

The website’s mission is to improve Israeli citizens’ involvement in our democracy, and the first step in doing so is giving people more information. Ever wanted to know who keeps his promises? Who voted how? Who never votes? Which Member of Knesset is never present in discussions and votes?

Open Knesset is the place to put this information. If you know a bit of Python & Django, you can join development either on the content harvesting front, or on the front-end front (pun not intended :).

“What about algorithms?” you may ask, or “what does this project has to do with algorithm.co.il?”. Well, there’s also plenty of room for innovation and interesting features. For example, finding the correlation between Members of Knesset that always vote together. Knowing which vote is for which law. Understanding if the vote is for or against that law. Plotting the party graph, and working with it. These are all things that still need to be done. See these graphical examples to see what I’m talking about.

The website is still in its infancy, but it already has lots of content and lots of features. Nevertheless, it still needs more work.
If you’re looking for an open-source project where your work will have great impact, this might just be it.