mysociety / csv_to_popolo

Popolo::CSV

Generate Popolo-format JSON from CSV

This is a (deliberately very simple) module/script for generating Popolo-format JSON from CSV.

It does not try to cover every possible scenario — the expected use-case is to quickly convert a simple table of data about legislators (e.g. their name, email, party, and consituency), and then fill in the more complex data by hand, or using a web-based system such as PopIt.

It currently handles data from the following columns:

• id
• name
• family_name
• given_name
• additional_name
• other_name
• honorific_prefix
• honorific_suffix
• patronymic_name
• sort_name
• email
• phone
• fax
• cell
• twitter
• gender
• birth_date
• death_date
• image
• summary
• biography
• national_identity

(none of these are required — it will simply extract data from any suitably-named columns)

Party/Faction Membership

Popolo allows for very complex modelling of roles and posts. Here, however, we optimise for the most-common case: a legislator being associated with a single political party/faction, possibly representing a given region/constituency.

Basic Membership records will therefore be generated from the following optional columns:

• area (or region or constituency)
• group (or party, bloc, or faction)

An optional start_date and/or end_date can also given for the membership.

ID-generation

It is strongly recommended that id and group_id columns be provided. If not, these will be generated from the name (or group) column. If multiple people have the same name, this will do the wrong thing.

Executive Posts

If members of the legislature can also hold executive positions (e.g. Prime Minister; Minister of Education; etc) these can be specified in an executive column.

Terms

Data for multiple Terms (Legislative Periods) can be added by specifiying a term column. If you use this, you must also provide an id column, otherwise we will create a new Person each time (which almost certainly isn't what you want). We don't currently do anything smart here to combine fields: at the minute we just take the Person data from the first line that provides that, and combine the Membership data from later versions. If this doesn't do what you expect, let me know: it's all a little experimental at the moment.

Other Links

Any of the following columns will be turned into suitable "External Links" data:

• website
• blog
• facebook
• flickr
• instagram
• wikipedia
• youtube