During the last two months, Team POPONG has experienced something very fascinating. We’ve beta launched our main service Pokr, and people are getting more and more interested in it. We’re getting lots of feedback, and a whole bunch of ‘first-time’ experiences.

Pokr

  1. Renamed main service!
    • We’ve renamed our main service from ‘Korean Politician Dictionary(polidic)’ to ‘Pokr’ – which shares the pronounciation with the card game ‘Poker’. Pokr represents ‘Politics in Korea’.
  2. Linked more attributes
    • Schools, region names, bill statuses are now aggregated by their values.
    • Ex: Seoul
  3. Added some functions for better navigation
    • Added permalinks to all headers
    • Pagination (rather than showing whole lists)
    • ‘Show more’ buttons (rather than showing whole lists)
    • Breadcrumbs
    • Mobile compatibility
    • Added 404, 500 page
  4. Temporarily removed favorites function (will be back in the future!)
  5. Moved Korean feedback machine from Barometer to Uservoice (The English page still uses Barometer)
  6. Launched Pokrbot!
    • Which Tweets new bills in realtime
  7. Improved search
    • Search people (by both English, Korean names), bills, regions, and schools.
  8. Added Tweet, Facebook like buttons for all pages
  9. Created a Korean map widget

Design

  1. Major redesign in main page & submain pages
  2. Changed to one-column structure
  3. Displayed most data fields in tables
  4. Changed logo

Page upgrades

  1. Person pages
    • Added election pledges for the 19th National Assembly Election.
    • Added more profile images from ROKPS
    • Displayed party affiliation history for each person
  2. Bill pages
    • Added tooltips to bill status descriptions
      • Because Team POPONG believes in easier politics.
      • This feature is currently only served in Korean, however, we’re planning to extend tooltips to English.
      • POPONG glossary is being built for such purposes.
    • Linked original PDF documents
    • Displayed party distribution of cosponsors
    • Ex: Amendment on the Anti-discrimination Law
  3. Party pages
    • Added party logos

Data

  • Implemented a bill online crawler
    • Parsed bill PDFs to raw text using PDFminer
    • Extracted keywords using KoNLP’s noun extractor
  • Separated the parties w/ same name
    • Hannara party (1, 2)
  • Started logging queries
  • Inserted the most recent by-election data
  • Updated party and people codebooks

Others