IPP - Parliamentary Data Rebuilding for Transparency

About the client

The Institute for Public Policies (IPP) is one of Romania’s most respected NGOs in the field of governance and transparency. Among its missions: improving access to public information and making political processes more accountable to citizens.

The challenge

Although both Chambers of the Romanian Parliament were legally required to publish data about legislative projects and votes, the information was scattered across thousands of static pages, with no central index and no usable database. Technically public, the data was practically inaccessible — impossible to search, cross-reference, or analyze.

The solution

I engineered a system that reconstructed the Parliament’s legislative database from the outside:

• Scraped and consolidated MP profiles (including mandates, party affiliation, contact details).
• Indexed legislative projects and their stages through committees and plenary sessions.
• Collected and cross-linked both plenary votes and individual votes.
• Integrated committee structures and assignments, ensuring every step of the legislative process could be followed.

The system worked like a parallel database — automatically updated and organized — which mirrored, cleaned, and reconnected the fragments the Parliament itself had intentionally left unstructured.

The results

• Transparency leap: for the first time, analyses like absenteeism rankings, party discipline vs. deviation, or cross-party coalitions became possible.
• Real-time monitoring of legislative progress, with clear timelines and links between MPs, committees, and votes.
• Evidence-based advocacy: IPP gained a powerful tool for policy papers, media outreach, and public campaigns.

In short, I turned dispersed raw data into a full transparency platform, enabling citizens and researchers to see what Parliament really does, beyond the scattered façade.