writethem.bm
LiveFind your MP. Read the Hansard. Write to them directly. Parliamentary transparency for Bermuda in one place.
Status
Live
Django Models
0
Data Scraping
Daily
Inspired By
mySociety
01
The Problem
Most Bermudians could not tell you who their MP is without looking it up. And if they did want to write to them, there is no obvious way to do it.
No public directory with contact details. No simple form. No connection between where you live and who represents you. The Hansard transcripts exist on parliament.bm, but they are buried in PDFs that nobody browses.
02
The Approach
Inspired by two mySociety projects from the UK: WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou. Bermuda's Parliament is small enough that both functions fit in a single platform.
The scraper pulls MP profiles, party membership, constituency data, and sitting records automatically from parliament.bm. It runs on a daily schedule so the directory stays current when members change or new sittings are published.
Technical stack: Django 5, Python, BeautifulSoup4 scraper, SQLite, Bootstrap 5, Pillow for image processing. Seven Django models handle the full parish-to-member hierarchy, Hansard sittings, messages, and scrape logs.
03
How It Works
Find your representative. Start with your parish. The platform maps Bermuda's geographic hierarchy from parish to constituency to member, so finding your representative takes seconds. Every MP has a profile page showing their name, photo, party affiliation, and constituency.
Parliamentary transparency. writethem.bm scrapes parliament.bm daily for Hansard sitting records and links to the official PDF transcripts. Residents can browse what has been discussed in the House without navigating the parliament website.
Direct contact. If an MP has a public email address on record, you can write to them directly through the site. No account required.
04
The Result
writethem.bm puts the records in one accessible place alongside the people who created them. It combines a representative directory, parliamentary record, and direct contact tool into a single platform.
For the first time, a Bermudian can go from "who represents me?" to "here is what they discussed last week" to "I am writing to them about it" without leaving one site.
Alongside fix.bm, it forms a civic tech pair: one for reporting problems in your neighbourhood, one for engaging with the people who set policy. Both built on open source. Both designed for an island of 60,000.