Earlier in the year, I was invited to work on a project to archive and parse legislative data from the website of Selangor Assembly. It was the technical side of the project, where we demonstrate some of the benefits that may be achieved if the data was published in structured form. In the past weekend, I attended a workshop, where one of the talks mentioned the said project.

In the talk, Khairil from Sinarproject explained how does the assembly operates, and how they maintain accountability. Through the session, we also knew what information can we find in the published documents. Ideally, there are few classes of documents that we as the rakyat should expect, namely:

• Calendar
• Information about the representatives
• Hansards (a transcript of proceedings)
• Written replies (to both oral and written inquiries)
• Other documents (bills, committee / meeting reports, financial reports etc.)

In order to raise questions to be presented in the hall, one of the ways is relaying it through the elected representative. Once a question is presented, the civil servants would need to answer them. All the responses to the questions are also made public through the publishing of the documents mentioned above.

Therefore, researchers or the rakyat can look into the published documents to stay in the know. However, due to the sheer amount of information contained within them, most people, including the press, do not necessarily have the time to go through each of them. Hence, in some countries, there are civil society organization designing web applications, like TheyWorkForYou to allow easy access to the data through carefully crafted user experience and data presentation.

The project I worked on, proposes if the data is published into structured format (or even better, following an open standard like AkomaNtoso), may empower everyone to create better applications. Therefore, we started by parsing and archiving existing published documents from PDF file into structured formats, then we built a sample application based on the parsed information.

Then I stayed to learn about other aspects of open government through other talks in the day, presented by Sinarproject and C4 (Center to Combat Corruption & Cronyism). It was an eye-opening experience, as we were taught how to study and analyze published public information to uncover problems and issues. We also learned about Political Exposed Person (PEP) and Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) and how the knowledge can be applied to help with the analytic work.

If you are interested in the workshop, the presentation slides can be found at the Google Docs archive.