Govdirectory.org - directory of governmental online accounts and services

[abbe98]

Govdirectory is a new project which aims to make it possible to find the social media accounts for any public organization.

Give me all the Twitter accounts for all government agencies around the world involved in environmental protection?

Give me all YouTube accounts for Swedish municipalities?

Those are two examples of queries we want govdirectory.org to be able to answer.

Govdirectory aims to become a global directory of government agencies and their online presence by utilizing Wikidata.

Wikidata’s community, sourceability, versioning, and the govdirectory.org platform that we create will ensure that not only should the information be correct but when it isn’t, because of vandalism or something else, users will be able, and suggested, to validate the information. The goal is for this directory to be useful to journalists, web-archivists, activists, and many others, certainly including regular citizens.

Who is behind Govdirectory?

@Ainali(Jan Ainali) and @abbe98(Albin Larsson), kindly supported by Wikimedia Deutschland’s Unlock accelerator.

We need your help

To make sure we are building a platform beyond our own needs and ideas, we are currently looking for data journalists, web-archivists, activists, researchers, and others who would find a platform like govdirectory.org valuable and who would consider participating in an interview. If that is you, give Jan or me a ping!

Learn more

• govdirectory.org · GitHub
• https://twitter.com/govdirectory
• Wikidata:Gov Directory - Wikidata

[Ainali]

@salgo60

That means if we start track the subject of videos produced by governments then we could maybe get all videos e.g. produced about Covid Delta variant as this video WHO’s Science in 5 on COVID-19: Delta variant - YouTube

Aren’t this “automatically” tracked since you add the video to a Q-item, which should be the topic of the video (just like how you could do the query for outdoor gyms)?

[Ainali]

@salgo60

Yes the challenge I guess is to have the main subjects for every video produced by Goverments

That’s the opposite direction. Not sure that every video is notable on Wikidata. on Government level, probably they are, but not on municipal as it seem more haphazard what gets uploaded.

But this is really off topic. Can someone move the last three messages to a separate thread?

[Pierre]

Great project! Not saying it should be the main focus but I wonder if there isn’t also a need from social media platforms themselves. Twitter now identifies election candidates in some countries, they would probably be interested in fetching information about official gov agencies and local institutions as long as it’s a vetted source.

Maybe they already fetch from Wikidata? Do you have any info about it?