Popolo International open government data specifications

People and organizations

• Person
• Organization
• Membership
• Post
• Contact detail

Motions and voting

• Motion
• Vote event
• Count
• Vote

Other classes

• Area
• Event
• Speech

Specification

1. Scope
2. Conformance
3. Use cases & requirements
4. Standard reuse
5. Classes and properties
6. Serialization
7. Change history

Appendices

• Example Popolo JSON
• Multilingualization
• Inventory of terms from prior work
• Survey of existing specifications

Goal

Define data interchange formats and data models so that organizations can spend less time transforming and modeling data and more time applying it to the problems they face.

Popolo supports the development of reusable open source components that implement the specifications, making it easier for civic developers to create civic software.

Process

1. Identify use cases and requirements for an activity system
2. Research prior work relating to the use cases and requirements
3. Draft a specification and improve it through rough consensus

We otherwise roughly follow the W3C process.

Contribute

• Discuss open issues on GitHub
• Join the W3C Open Government mailing list
• Join the Poplus mailing list

Principles

• Reuse prior work unless it sacrifices consistency or clarity
• Keep the specification small by making the models flexible
• Plan for imprecise and uncertain data