The Long Black Friday
Who votes in a place like this? Find out below!
It’s a quiet fridayblog today as we’re heads-down, Getting On With Things.
We’re building a new API, we’re remaking the candidates crowdsourcing platform, and writing up what we’ve learnt about underrepresented communities in the elections process.
In the meantime…
🖥 Every little helps 🖥
At Democracy Club, we love helping you with future pub quiz questions. So, on Thursday 6 December, there’s a by-election taking place in the largest ward in Britain.
We don’t envy the person in charge of polling stations for this particular 480,000 hectares of the Highlands Council. And we eagerly await Andrew Teale’s election preview for it.
Anyway, we have currently have this much information on the nine candidates for Wester Ross, Strathpeffer and Lochalsh. 🎉 There must be more info out there — can you find it?
And there are ten more by-elections in the next fortnight. Help voters learn about their candidates!
Or, if you’re bored of candidates, which is impossible, help us track down contact details for local political party branches. Volunteers have made some incredible progress so far — and it will make a big difference come the local elections next May.
🙋🏽 Ask her to stand! 🙋🏽
This week marked 100 years since women could stand for parliament. Cue lots of celebrations in parliament (check out the #AskHerToStand hashtag).
We’ve been chatting with 50:50 Parliament — and hope to chat with Fawcett Society soon — about how Democracy Club’s candidates data can help organisations to understand how many women are standing for election in local and national elections.
💳 Would you donate for democracy in the event of a general election? 💳
We’ll be keeping you up-to-date with our funding applications over the next few months. One down, a few more to go — hoping for some good news from Rowntree next.
In the meantime, we’ve also been pondering a crowdfunder (or conditional-pledge-based funding thing) where we put up a Blue Peter-esque totaliser that says:
‘In the event of a GE2019, we’re going to need £100,000 — pledge your support here’
We’d only charge your card in the event of an election. There might be stickers, badges, lapel pins etc available for contributors! What do you think? Would you chip in? Answers in the comments!
📅 What’s next? 📅
We’ll be at the Cardiff Open Data Jelly next week, thinking about the government’s Innovations in Democracy Programme (funding citizens juries for local government) and we’re continuing to interview exciting people to come work with us on democracy!
Forward!