What is the German Bundestag (national parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany) up to? (Was treibt der Bundestag?)

This repo contains all necessary code to set up an autonomous bot that scrapes the Bundestag committee's page for PDFs, analyzes these using gpt-4 and automatically posts their relevant content on Instagram @was_treibt_der_bundestag. For more information about the deployment, see section Usage.

Telegram bot: t.me/was_treibt_der_bundestag_bot [Not properly implemented yet] Website: wastreibtderbundestag.de [Not properly implemented yet]

Main contributors: Lorenz Hufe @lowrenz, Justus Westerhoff @MassEast, Jakob Maleck

Affiliation: BLISS Berlin

Why?

As of March 2024, the German Bundestag's committees regularly publish their work, plans and activities in the form of PDF files. We think that the committe's work isn't transparent and 'shareable' enough and hence thought of a simple solution to make it more accessible. Especially, we wanted to point out which proposals the different parties bring up to clearly see what they are dealing with. Examples:

13.03.2024, Antrag der AfD: "Kinderkopftuch als politisch-weltanschauliches Symbol - Verbot in öffentlichen Kindertageseinrichtungen und Schulen" (in English: AfD motion: "Children's headscarves as a political and ideological symbol - ban in public kindergartens and schools")

Usage

We currently deployed it on Google Cloud in the following way:

flowchart TD;
    S[Cloud Scheduler]-->|trigger|F[Cloud Function: scraper_function.py];
    F ~~~ D[(Firebase on Google Cloud)]
    F-->|save potentially new data|D;
    D-->|get actually new data|F;
    F-->|trigger for each datum in new data|B[Cloud Docker: this repo's Docker]
    B-->|posts|I(Instagram)
    B-->|triggers|T[Cloud Function: telegram_bot.py]
    T-->|broadcasts|TB(Telegram)
    T-->|save chat_id on /start or /sub|D
    D-->|retrieve chat_ids for broadcast|T

.env

Your .env file should contain a backend URL that runs the docker ("BACKEND_URL"), an OpenAI key ("OPENAI_API_KEY"), an Instagram username ("INSTAGRAM_USERNAME") and password ("INSTAGRAM_PASSWORD"). If a Telegram bot wants to be used as well, also provide a Telegram bot token ("TELEGRAM_BOT_TOKEN").

Remarks

Without instragrapi this probably wouldn't have been so easy, since using Meta's actual Instagram API turned out to be very restrictive (need for Business account and much more). [Meaning: We could not figure it out in one night, the night where this project was drafted and implemented.]

At the Berlin Hack & Tell #99, we were made aware of the Bundestagszusammenfasser, which does similar thing, but not as focused as producing specialized social media posts, but rather structuring (and also summarizing) very nicely almost everything that can be found on German state websites. Take a look at Sabrina's website!

Potential improvements