From the same people who brought you openpolis, openparlamento.it went live today.

I’m tremendously pleased that sites like this are starting to happen in Italy. The Camera actually has quite well-formated XML files for each of the plenary sessions, and all it needed was for someone to put that to good use.

So wonderful is the site that I feel churlish to pick on them. But just note that their graph of parliamentarians’ positions is based on multidimensional scaling, and as such is going to fall prey to the same problems as optimal classification analysis — extreme deputies in the governing coalition who rebel are going to be depicted as centrists, when they’re not.

Still, nice visualization.