They Work For You

Ruby library to interface with the TheyWorkForYou API.

From their website:

TheyWorkForYou.com is a non-partisan, volunteer-run website which aims to make it easy for people to keep tabs on their elected and unelected representatives in Parliament.

• Bruce Williams
• Martin Owen

The Ruby API closely mirrors that of TWFY, with the exception that the client
methods are in lowercase and don’t include the get prefix.

Some examples:

• getComments → comments
• getMPs → mps
• getMPInfo → mp_info

Please submit bug reports to the RubyForge tracker via the project’s homepage at http://rubyforge.org/projects/twfy or send a message via GitHub.

Usage is simple.

  require 'twfy'
  client = Twfy::Client.new()

Note that the Twfy::Client constructor in version 1.0.1 of the binding requires an API Key string. If you don’t have one they are available at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/key

  puts client.constituency(:postcode => 'IP6 9PN').name
  # => Central Suffolk & North Ipswich

  mp = client.mp(:postcode => 'IP6 9PN')
  puts mp.full_name
  # => Michael Lord

  # Get a *lot* of info about this MP
  info = client.mp_info(:id => mp.person_id)

  # Get a sorted list of all the parties in the House of Lords
  client.lords.map { |l| l.party }.uniq.sort
	#=> ["Bishop", "Conservative", "Crossbench", "DUP", "Green", "Labour", "Liberal Democrat", "Other"]

  # Get number of debates in the House of Commons mentioning 'Iraq'
  number = client.debates(:type=>'commons',:search=>'Iraq').info['total_results']

A few methods on the client return non-OpenStruct instances that support daisy chaining. Using these to access related data more naturally (with caching).

Here are some examples

  # Get the MP for the last constituency (if you sort them alphabetically) 
  mp = client.constituencies.sort_by{ |c| c.name }.last.mp
  # get the geometry information for that constituency (coming from the MP)
  geometry = mp.constituency.geometry

  # An overkill example showing caching (no services are called here, since
  # the results have already been cached from above)
  mp = mp.constituency.mp.constituency.geometry.constituency.mp

  # These return equivalent results (Note how much easier the first is)
  info1 = mp.info # this is cached for subsequent calls
  info2 = client.mp_info(:id => mp.person_id)

  # Get pages of debates mentioning 'medicine'
  debates1 = mp.debates(:search => 'medicine')
  debates2 = mp.debates(:search => 'medicine', :page=>2)

See http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/docs for API documentation.

Please note that data pulled from the API is licensed separately;
see the LICENSE portion of this README for further details.

• The JSON gem

This library uses the MIT License
Copyright © 2006-2008 Bruce Williams, Martin Owen

Data is licensed separately:

The TheyWorkForYou license statement, from their website (http://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/), is:

To use parliamentary material yourself (that’s data returned from getDebates, getWrans, and getWMS), you will need to get a Parliamentary Licence from the Office of Public Sector Information. Our own data – lists of MPs, Lords, constituencies and so on – is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license version 2.5.

Non-commercial use is free, please contact us for commercial use.