Show HN: Parliament Wow makes sense of UK democracy

Show HN: Parliament Wow makes sense of UK democracy(parliament-wow.threepointone.workers.dev)

9 points by mattzcarey 1 year ago | 5 comments

Over the weekend we built Parliament Wow. It's hacky, buggy and slightly broken but it does the job :)

Parliament Wow makes it easy to find out what is going on in parliament and what it actually means for you and me.

We know that nobody has the time to watch hours of debates, drown in legal paperwork or keep up with the implications of every vote. Not me or you and least of all your MPs. There is just too much data.

So we made a solution. We paired some semantic search with every publicly accessible document, audio recording or transcript we could get our hands on + some generative models to make it all look pretty. And we built a demo of what democracy could become.

Parliament Wow won the a16z London Hackathon in the Build Back Britain category.

Where should we go with this?

jamessb 1 year ago |

For what tasks is this better than the longstanding TheyWorkForYou [1]?

> every publicly accessible document, audio recording or transcript we could get our hands on

It doesn't seem like it. If I search for something e.g. "small boats" without quotes, I get no results for Parliament Wow [2], but 4000 from TheyWorkForYou [3]. If I add quotes, I get 4 matching "past sessions" on Parliament Wow [4], with no indication of which part of them is relevant to my query; TheyWorkForYou gives 2000 results [5].

[1]: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/

[2]: https://parliament-wow.threepointone.workers.dev/?search=sma...

[3]: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q=small+boats

[4]: https://parliament-wow.threepointone.workers.dev/?search=%22...

[5]: https://www.theyworkforyou.com/search/?q=%22small+boats%22

mattzcarey 1 year ago | |

Hey, we scraped bills and news. Better transcriptions will be coming soon and are not on the demo site.

We dont see this as any competition for theyworkforyou. They provide and awesome service to the UK. We are going in the direction of better realtime monitoring as the current products are very limited.

Thanks :)

cfrancoid7 1 year ago |

Have you tried to contact Audrey Tang? Minister in Taiwan. She has experience in this field.

You're solution could be very interesting for journalists as they struggle to fact check what the politics say about a law. It a potentiel to find a ethical business and grow your solution. Have you tried to contact some journal?

For council it could be very interesting to check if a good idea already exists or is linked to something already under the law. It is RAG for law facts but with streaming functionalities.

Because in the public administration or in the written law, the terms are sometimes specifics, ideally, proposed something like a reformulation of the query. Could be done with some agents working in parallel (Langchain ?). It is well known the answer of a RAG improves a lot by reformulation, or proposals or reformulation.

gus_massa 1 year ago |

Perhaps the main page should show an image of the video and a small (unlegible) transcript. Something similar to YouTube.

mattzcarey 1 year ago | |

good shout.

there's a bunch about notifications we want to do. Imagine subscribing to all issues mentioning young drivers for instance.