Sure. They were both very well documented, so I would share my perspective on it. The voting one, which is vote.ly.g0v.tw meaning, the "ly" being the legislative, then being our parliament. It’s one of the g0v long running projects, and it started when the legislative system was not entirely open sourced.
It was IE-only for its video feeds. There’s no structured data, there’s only PDFs, pretty much like any other parliament before the open data gets into fashion. It started as a very coordinated effort, taking whatever other citizen participation efforts abroad, like the Akoma Ntoso format — I think the mySociety folks work with some South African folks on this, it’s the basis of the SayIt system, but it has a lot of other applications. There’s also the Popolo schema, and there’s... You knew all about these things perhaps.
The idea is that there’s already a vibrant community developing these standards. Most of the effort here is to write web scrapers, not so fancy work, that turns all the legislative records into something conforming to these things.
Our main contribution in here is not about the structured data, which is basically the same work in any other country, but a very strategic mergers of not only the parliamentary floor, or proceedings, or records, or what is said, but also their campaign donation records, but also their investment portfolio, and so on...
Usually, it would take three to four different civic tech websites to present this data, because they’re not fundamentally linked in a same government organ kind of way, but because of all the sibling projects in g0v around parliaments legislators are open source, so they could freely transclude each other.
It then became very quickly a handy voter’s guide, for people who want to choose among the candidates where we’re running, versus people who want to look up something for the first time running candidates. We provide our records and the discussion boards for each of these.
By voting season, people would go to here. For larger elections, maybe half a million people or something close to that amount. Then click on it and then choose the counties, cities, regions that they care about, and then it shows a lot of things.
Then it also makes each legislator or running candidates a social object, by having discussions, and Google searches, and real-time updates, subscriptions, whatever about it. This had buy-in from the central election committee late last year, late 2015, partly because the OKFN Global Data Index calls for open election data and valid data at that level.
They found that there’s already people in the civilian sector who already are very versed in this OK, Open Knowledge conforming implementations. They work to publish the platforms, and real-time statistics, and whatever, using conforming APIs. This becomes a news media by itself.
There’s also quite a few media sites building upon this, where they let people chose among controversial issues, like gay marriage or whatever that they care about, and then they show the positions that each legislator backed with the actual words that get spoken by those legislators on the floor about these issues.
Of course, this is collaboratively tagged by the NGOs who care about that particular issue. There’s maybe four or five of those issues around the candidate season. This has worked, both through the city-level election and national-level parliament elections. Does it answer your question?