If “hanging chads” and faulty computer chips are causes for concern in today's elections, just imagine the likely fraud that took place in Classical Athens when residents often used small pebbles to cast (literally) their votes. The study of those pebbles, or the votes they represent, developed into an entire academic discipline, Psephology. (Psephos, or ψῆφος, is literally “pebble” in Greek). But then, Classical Athens in the 5th Century BC was made up of only around 30,000 eligible voters. (The vast majority of Athenian society was comprised of slaves without civil rights; women also could not vote or own property.) With just 30,000 participants, Athens could be governed by direct democracy. Adult Athenian men did not elect representatives to vote on their behalf, but voted on legislation and executive bills in their own right. Today's average national democracy, in comparison, attempts to govern over 30 million individuals. The federal government of India, the world's most populous democracy, governs over one billion citizens. It is simply neither practical nor possible for each of those billion voters to take part in every legislative decision. As a result, we almost all live in representative democracies where we elect public officials to create and vote on legislation on our behalf. This layer of representation, while necessary, takes citizens away from the decision making process. For decades broadcast media provided just about the only link between citizens and their elected representatives, but coverage tended to focus more on the lives of the politicians and less on the issues they vote on. Over the past five years a new generation of websites have sprouted up which combine information from parliamentary websites with social media tools in order to give citizens more information and clarity about the profile and activities of their representatives, and to become more active in the legislative process. You can see all of the parliamentary informatics projects we reviewed at the Technology for Transparency Network by clicking on the “parliament” filter underneath the map interface. The first such website we reviewed is Vota Inteligente, a project of the Smart Citizen Foundation in Santiago, Chile. Like most of the parliamentary informatics websites we documented, Vota Inteligente “scrapes data” from the websites of Chile's Senate and House of Deputies in order to more effectively gather and present information about representatives, political parties, and legislative bills. Using the information gathered by the Vota Inteligente team, you are able to compare congressional terms by party, gender, age, and incumbency. There is also a section called “Informed Citizen” which provides contextualization and analysis of the large flow of information that is added to the website every week. The website's archive presents access to all collected data and documents. It includes a glossary, source list, document library, multimedia library, and collection of legal and legislative documents. Vota Inteligente depends on Facebook and Twitter to sustain interaction with its users. The team has also started a “webinar” series where invited guests use streaming video to present a particular topic to anyone who shows interest. All of this information and interaction comes at the cost of a serious time investment. I had the opportunity to visit the Vota Inteligente headquarters, a comfortable two-story house in residential Santiago, which was buzzing with eager volunteers who were adding information to the database and discussing how to improve the functionality of the website. While their enthusiasm and hard work was infectious, one must wonder if it is sustainable. Unlike the dozens of volunteers that Vota Inteligente has managed to attract, KohoVolit.eu relies on the dedicated work of just two individuals who have managed to create a directory of profiles about every representative in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia. It even includes fairly extensive information about the activities of representatives (MEP's) of the European Union. In our interview, project founder Michal Skop emphasized that the sustainability of parliamentary informatics websites depends on their level of automation. Any such website that depends heavily on human labor to input and organize information, Skop says, is likely to run out of steam. By taking government data and automating its presentation and distribution in new ways, the participants of such projects can spend more time on adding much-needed contextualization and analysis to the stream of information. Automation, however, depends on the availability of properly structured, open government data that programmers can easily import and manipulate.