Mapping the projects
As I said on Sunday, keeping track of all the projects and tools out there is a little overwhelming sometimes.
It’s because of this that I started on the ideas list over Christmas, but I’d like to expand on this in a way that allows everyone to see a map of who is doing what.
So, let’s start with the easy stuff: what Democracy Club (and friends) did over the last General Election:
Candidates database
This underpins almost every other project. We need to know who’s standing for election and where before we can build anything that lets anyone interact with them.
We think Democracy Club made the most comprehensive list last time around, and we have an even better chance this time.
So far we know of a few different projects that are starting to build such a list and we hope they’ll all publish them as open data.
I’d like to see this data accessible in the Popolo format using mySociety’s amazing PoPit project.
Because of the importance of this, I feel like Democracy Club should help with these projects as much as it can.
Candidates survey
In brief, this project emailed all the candidates to ask them to fill out a survey, answering local and national question.
Election Leaflets
Before throwing them away (or reading them…), take a photo of all the election leaflets that get shoved through your letter box. Upload it to this site to contribute towards a permanent archive.
So we can think of this as a baseline for Democracy Club in 2015, but there were (and are) so many other projects. We didn’t do anything around vote matching to party policies (there are a few popular sites that do this), we didn’t really do anything offline or for people who aren’t in the 7% of people who strongly agree that getting involved in politics can make a difference.
There will be so many more things that were done that we didn’t know about, from academic projects to NGO campaigns, to news organizations, to hackers with a cool github project.
We’d like to know about them all, and the more we know the better we can help everyone talk to each other.
If you have ideas, have a project of any sort or are interested in using something we might make, please get in touch – we’d love to know what everyone is up to.
If you’re free, come along on Saturday to talk to us in person