Help us make an ID per election in the UK

Tim Green (co-founder of Democracy Club) is asking for help with a very important problem we have:

This is something that’s been bumping around my head for a bit, and has come up quite a bit in chats around Democracy Club and civic tech generally. It’s a very simple but, I’d say, necessary bit of infrastructure for UK elections online: standardised codes for elections.

Read the full blog post for much more.

Here’s the conversation to far:

j4 tweeted:

.@tfgg2 @democlub Looking for elections taxonomies, I found the BBC have ontologies! Who knew?! https://t.co/Xxio1PiFzq

— Janet McKnight (@j4) November 12, 2015

And sussexrick added:

@tfgg2 @democlub What about https://t.co/TD2GG5cfLo? (I was looking for https://t.co/uu06qqz6ce but that seems to have died)

— Rick Mason (@sussexrick) November 12, 2015

On the mailing list, floppy pointed out that he has a way of storing elections already

Update 2015-12-14

Tim and Iain got in to a debate about linked data, IDs, URIs and issuing authorities. Is there anyone who wants to use this ID system who has an opinion either way? We’d like to build systems that work best for users of them!

@iaincollins @andylolz @r4isstatic GUIDs would require a central authority :/ Does the BBC have a thing for every election? council, by, etc

— Tim Green (@tfgg2) November 13, 2015

Update 2015-12-19

RichardOfSussex suggested using numeric IDs:

@tfgg2 I would be less democratic, invent a system with numeric IDs for elections, and provide a simple web service so folk can access it.

— Richard Light (@RichardOfSussex) November 14, 2015

Plus, Tim will be talking about this at the next Citizen Beta. If you’re in London, come along to have this conversation in person!

Can you help us? Tweet Tim or @democlub, or email the Google group with your thoughts!