TGIGF

It’s always a good Friday at Democracy Club. Here’s a shorter bank holiday blog. (Didn’t want to break the habit.)

This photo of Joe pointing at things can only mean one thing.

Either he’s standing for election as a councillor and is posing for an election leaflet, or he was pitching Demo(cracy) Club to the room at Demo(nstration) Day at BGV. It was the latter, where the nine startups in our cohort presented to an audience of fabulously wealthy investors, ready to write cheques. Well…some well-meaning folks who can spread the word.

All the teams poured countless hours into the rehearsals - and happily, it showed. BGV will publish videos of them all soon. Thanks to everyone who helped us hone our message (and design our slides).

There was also some time spent not practising pitches this week.

We properly launched the candidate finder, because it now has local elections in it too! We sent a press release and everything. We featured in the Salford Star! Andrew Sparrow (Guardian politics liveblog) was good enough to retweet us! Now we just have to crowdsource 12,000 candidates. Get involved!

Two good meetings stood out this week.

One with friends from the Local Government Information Unit was about our plans for an election results recorder, that can be used live on the night by folks at the counting centres, or by people following avidly (?) on twitter.

The aim of this project is to get faster elections results to people - maintaining a better feedback loop between the voter voting, and actually hearing the result. Traditionally, the feedback loop in local elections can be pretty bad. We think we can do better, making a better voting experience.

The second meeting, with some folks who help fund and chair organisations in the non-profit world, was a useful chance to review what we’re up to, how much we should be aiming to achieve with a small team, and where we should be looking for sustainable financing. We ended up spending a couple of hours chewing over the state of Democracy Club and civic technology. Good stuff at a time where we’re starting to myopically focus on May.

We’ve a new homepage! Check it out - Tim whipped it up for Demo Day and we think it’s a great improvement, and we’d love to hear your feedback.

In our last week at BGV we’ll be wrapping up the programme with some ‘what next’ chats. And we’ll be reflecting about the programme - we’ll blog on this next week. Then we race on towards 5 May.

Forward!