Developers, we need your help.
We have just over 50 days to go until the election, and we have a chance to make a real difference to the way people interact with it, but we can’t do it alone.
The projects we have that need the most help right now are:
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YourNextMP.com. We want to convert the site from a data gathering project in to a nicely presented site where the public to learn about their candidates. This site will import data from other Democracy Club projects in a way that will help the public, by putting it all in one place. At the moment we’re thinking this can be a Jekyll site with importer scripts from other sites.
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ElectionLeaflets.org. We have rebuild the site from the ground up to make mobile uploads work well, however there is a long way to go. We need some basic image editing functions (rotation, cropping) for admin users, and the ability to mark up leaflets with who sent them and what party they are from. The site is written in django 1.7.
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Polling station data. We are undertaking a very ambitious project to gather information on every polling station in the country. We need someone who can help import data and make the site work well on polling day. Again, this is a django project.
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Monitoring. We’re supporting Full Fact in their aims to fact check the election. There are loads of small projects here, basically finding sources where people are talking about political issues or making claims about the campaign, scraping them and converting them to the XML format that Full Fact can use. Read more about it in their blog post on the project.
Everything we’re doing is open source, non-partisan and non-policy based. We have no money or time, but we have a chance to make the election better rather than resenting the fact we can’t do anything to improve things. Even a small amount of work on any of the projects would be a huge help.
If you can’t help directly, please pass this on to others who might be able to.