About Public People

Public People makes news more effective at supporting accountability and democracy.

It does this by showing news about a person of political or civic interest in reverse chronological order. Presenting historical articles in this way helps you find articles that you might not otherwise find easily; it lets you see how the conversation about someone changes over time; and it lets you see how one publication differs from another in angle on the same story.

Roadmap and progress

We currently show news related to a person based on their name occurring in an article. That means news mentioning John Smith will be shown for all John Smiths, which is not always correct. This is an early simplification and we welcome suggestions to improve on this (see Contributing)

We're working towards a Minimal Viable Product right now and just want to get it into peoples' hands.

The longer-term goal is to build an ecosystem of loosely connected tools that each do what they do well, and also provide data exports to support other related tools and more in-depth investigation. We're explicitly trying not to build one big central network analysis hub combining all possible sources of information about someone or trying to visualise someone’s influence network.

Known issues

Privacy

The people featured on Public People are those who choose a role in politics or public administration.

The information featured about those people is limited to information that is

Practically, we use the press and government publications as a benchmark for what may be shown about someone.

Contributing

We welcome public contributions in various forms. Additionally, using the information available on this site in other projects, however big or small, is also very valuable to the project. If you use the data or information on this site, please let us know how.

How can you contribute?

Person data adapted from People's Assembly is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
Person graphic adapted from Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY