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Free Our Bills Mar 25

Frustrated with the lack of progress from gentle dialogue with the parliamentary authorities, those marvellous chaps at mySociety have launched their Free Our Bills campaign, which I’ve just signed up to support.

They want to see Parliament publishing bills in an improved electronic form that will allow more automated processing by services like TheyWorkForYou (which helps power the LibDems’ new Iraq site, Hold Them to Account), making the issues being debated by MPs and peers more accessible to normal people like you and me.

mySociety estimate the programming work required would cost around £10,000, so it only needs one MP to sacrifice a new kitchen to pay for it.

You can register your support for the campaign on the Free Our Bills website.

One Response

  1. I don’t quite follow what they want to do that can’t already be done based on existing publications on the Parliament website, but my understanding of this kind of automatic processing is limited. Can it not be done by converting Parliament’s PDF files to Word (which takes a matter of minutes) and then processing based on the header codes etc that will be inserted in the conversion process?