La rentrée - back to democracy school
If a week is a long time in politics, what’s a summer?
With a backdrop of continuing political drama, it’s back to the dirty work of building democratic infrastructure. (Well, Sym was here most of time, it was Joe that was skiving off around Europe meeting great civic tech folks).
But we’re now throwing ourselves back into the thick of it, readying for May 2017 and beyond.
Over the summer we’ve…
- made some funding applications (100% failure rate so far, more on this in another blog soon),
- met some election software companies (and one well-known purveyor of ice cream),
- presented on our plans for the next four years at the LSE,
- continued the Open Government Partnership work (on election results) and
- submitted our views to the consultation on the future of the Electoral Commission (again, we’ll blog this shortly).
And our priorities for the next few months?
- Raise some money! We need to hire talented folks to help us do more and do it better.
- Start preparing for May 2017! The earlier the better: what elections are taking place, where are the polling stations, who are the candidates and what do they stand for? And on the first question of elections, what’s a sustainable solution to collecting and publishing data on every election taking place in the UK henceforth? More to come.
- Tell everyone we’re building stuff! And that there will be delicious open data available on candidates, polling stations, perhaps even results.
Normal blogging service to be resumed soon — and get in touch if you have ideas, questions, requests or complaints about the noise.
It’s good to be back. Onwards!
Photo credit: University of Salford