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The Team

Building and maintaining Democracy Club's services is a long-term commitment, both in the run up to the elections held in May every year, and in keeping the underlying technology running year round.

Throughout the year, we also run an online community of around 1,000 members and a mailing list with 15K subscribers. Our volunteers are non-partisan, either interested in democracy, open source technology, or both.

The club is supported by a small core team and an experienced board of directors.

Peter Keeling

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Peter oversees the election administration and communications at Democracy Club, including polling stations and candidate information. He previously spent far too much time at university, and holds a PhD in nineteenth-century British political history.

Sym Roe

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Sym founded Democracy Club in mid-2014 and has since been co-director and CEO. He now heads up all technical and delivery operations.

Sym has 15 years experience in civic tech, open data, government and technology, for folks like ScraperWiki, Ministry of Justice and FarmSubsidy.org. He has never knowingly set foot in a school, lives in Stroud, and is trying to rebuild a Cotswold stone house.

Will Roper

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Will started helping with data importing for the polling station finder in February 2019. There were enough elections in the subsequent months and years that he stuck around, helping out on various projects - mainly Where Do I Vote and Every Election.

Chris Shaw

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Chris has 20 years of experience in software development, data wrangling, and devops for organisations in the research, education and civic tech sectors. He originally started working on Democracy Club projects as a volunteer. Chris is currently thinking about improving the architecture across Democracy Club's suite of related products.

Will de Montmollin

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Will got involved with Democracy Club during the 2024 local and general elections madness by importing polling station data, and they've carried on since as part of the development team. They previously worked on community farms and market gardens in various roles.

Ella Botting

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Alongside helping out with operational support at Democracy Club, Ella is a freelance user researcher with significant experience in the public sector. She writes a blog, cyberwomen.co.uk, which aims to raise the visibility of women and non-binary people in tech. Other than that, she likes weightlifting, ballet and plants.

ResultsBot

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ResultsBot is a robot that helps us collect election results from reliable sources. Thanks to ResultsBot, we can supplement the work of our volunteers in collecting election results shortly after they are published. It was built by Sym and is maintained by the team. It is a very good robot.

Board

Susan Simmonds

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Susan is strategic communications, capacity building and governance consultant, working internationally to communicate complex law and policy issues within human rights, citizenship, international development and democratisation/elections. She has worked in Iraq with the Electoral Management Commission, UNAMI and is a member of the OSCE-ODIHR Election Experts database and experienced observer. She is Chair of Learning for Life UK and a Trustee of South London Botanical Institute.

Alice Casey

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Alice is a Director at Maudsley Charity - she leads a portfolio of programmes that fund and support innovation in mental illness working closely with Kings College London and the South London and Maudsley NHS Trust. She is responsible for strategy and operations for funding programmes of £48m. She previously was Head of New Operating models at Nesta, primarily eading on a portfolio of work looking at how technology is transforming communities and civic life. This has included ShareLab Fund, exploring how collaborative platforms can help tackle social challenges, as well as co-founding a new open data infrastructure charity, 360Giving, that supports grantmaking bodies to publish and use their data. Before Nesta, Alice worked for Involve on public involvement in policy making. Alice was a trustee of Local Trust which leads Big Local, a £220m place-based fund to support communities to lead change at a local level, and has acted as an advisor to a range of socially minded startups.

James Key

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James is a regulator, strategist and consultant working in telecommunications, infrastructure and innovation - currently as a leader in the Strategy team at Ofcom, the UK communications regulator. At Ofcom he leads across a range of cross-cutting and edge of remit policy questions, including developing a new regulatory regime for the BBC, early proposals for UK online safety protections and the launch of Ofcom's Open Data programme. He also has experience at boutique consultancies DG Cities, MTM London and DotEcon, developing strategies for clients including MHCLG, Google and Arts Council England.

Ashley Hodges

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Ashley was appointed Chief Executive of Young Citizens in 2021. She has previously held Chief Executive and Director roles within education and social mobility charities, including Speakers for Schools as the charity's founding CEO. Her career has focused on working on building strong cross-sector collaboration and solutions to increase support for young people from backgrounds traditionally excluded or systemically disadvantaged in education and careers. A former Obama Campaign staffer and experienced programme designer, Ashley is passionate about building stronger communities and empowering people for a fairer, more just society and ensuring strong democratic participation. Originally from Ohio, she moved to the UK in 2009 to complete an MSc at the London School of Economics. She also serves as Vice-Chair of the Board of Governors at Welbourne Primary School, in Tottenham north London, and a trustee at Elizabeth House Community Centre in Finsbury Park.

Jonathan Flowers

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A long-time admirer of Democracy Club, Jonathan is an experienced non-executive director, currently independent chair of his local council’s audit committee and a member of his police audit committee. He chairs the charity In2scienceUK and is an NED of Care City CIC. He also advises some other organisations who are using data cleverly in local government. His previous non-exec experience includes: trustee at mySociety and chair of their trading company - SocietyWorks; independent chair of the improvement and development board for local councils; non-exec chair of dxw. He was an adviser to FutureGov for 6 years. Previous full-time executive roles included commercial development director on the exec board of a large financial services business and deputy chief executive of a county council. He then spent ten years advising on leadership and business improvement in local government before taking on a portfolio of advisory and non-executive roles. Semi-retired, he enjoys travel, theatre, walking, and the interest and purpose that comes from supporting socially-motivated organisations.

Paul Maltby

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Paul is the Director of Public Services at Faculty, the UK’s leading applied AI company. He was previously Chief Digital Officer at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities where he established the digital function and led reform to the Department’s digital services such in the planning system and across local government. Prior to that he led the government’s new data agenda as Director of Data in the Cabinet Office’s Government Digital Service, with responsibility for open data, data science in government, data infrastructure and data legislation. He has a background in public service innovation and reform in government, setting up Policy Lab the design-led team in Cabinet Office, and negotiated the G8 Open Data Charter during the UK Presidency and UK chair of the Open Government Partnership. He has had spells in Leicestershire County Council, the Home Office and the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit.

With thanks to

Democracy Club has been helped by many people along the way. We are grateful to them all, but some deserve a special mention:

Seb Bacon, Tim Green, Edmund von der Burg and Tom Steinberg for their initial work in 2010, and much help from Michael Collins and Eleesha Taylor-Barrett since.

Mark Longair for all his work on YourNextRepresentative.

Andy Lulham for support, feedback and code contributions and general top wombling.

Former board members Mevan Babakar, Olly Benson, Rebecca Eligon, Sarah Hartley, Rebecca Kemp, Alison Walters, and Ian Watt.

Chris Shaw for "being the person who cared about WhereDoIVote the most". Without him the polling station finder wouldn't exist, and millions of people would still be looking for their polling station to this very day. (The keen eyed will notice that Chris cared enough to return to DC later, but we still thank him for the first time around)

Virginia Dooley for development work across all our projects, as well as mucking in wherever needed with partnerships, governance, hiring, and so much more.

And last but not least, Joe Mitchell who took a leap in to Democracy Club, via a basement, after Sym spammed him once in 2014, and kept us afloat as co-coordinator for the best part of 5 years. He also wrote almost all the early blog posts.