Re: Popolo draft comments

Thanks for your comments James.  I'll skip the ones you answered and only
respond to ones where you asked questions, inline below:



On Wed, May 8, 2013 at 4:37 PM, James McKinney <james@opennorth.ca> wrote:

> *2.1/5.1 Person*
>   * Email - From the sample, I can't quite tell if this will support
> multiple email addresses for each person, but I think it's important
>
> We will be restructuring contact details in such a way as to allow for
> multiple email addresses (see below). Out of curiosity, in what situations
> have you had multiple addresses? Was each address tied to a distinct
> context?
>

For people, we see legislators that publish email addresses for a district
office as well as a legislature office.  At the local level, there may be
an address that is for the district id (district7@citycouncil.gov) as well
as the individual's email (JohnSmith@gmail.com).  It's not super-common but
it's definitely something we see.  The more common situation today is the
contact form (a URL) as well as an email address.  By putting a contact
form URL in Links, that situation would be reduced in number.


>
>  * Some concept of Political Party is probably important
>
>
> Couldn't you use Organization for that?
>
>
I hadn't thought about using Organization = Democratic Party and then
making the person a member of the party.  However, there will still be
situations in which the person is independent (without being a member of
the Independent Party) and the consumer would probably want to know that.



>  * Is there a way to support judicial and executive offices?
>
>
> Yes, through the Post class.
>

I'm not sure I understand how this would work, but since Post and
Membership are being re-worked, perhaps it will be clearer.


>  * There is a lot of other structured information that could potentially
> be captured about legislative bodies..  For example, the number of seats,
> the electoral system (constituencies vs. proportional representation),
> number of years between elections, election rules, inauguration rules, etc.
>
>
> The number of seats is communicated by using the Post class to define each
> seat.
>

Can a Post be vacant?  It seems like it might be possible based on your
comments below.


>
> If you can point to a controlled vocabulary for electoral systems, I would
> be happy to recommend it. As for the other properties, I am not familiar
> with systems with such properties. If you can point to some examples (or
> preferably some existing standards), that will help us choose a property
> that fits with the most existing implementations. Otherwise, for now, those
> properties are left to each implementation to define. Our priority is to
> cover the highest demand, most common properties.
>
>
Unfortunately, I don't know of a controlled vocabulary apart from the
election types and parliament types that Wikipedia uses for voting systems (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system) but I suspect that some bright
political science person has developed a controlled vocabulary.


Best,

Robert