Guess who’s back?
A brief escape to Erfurt, Germany, later in the blog
Parliament returns! Does it make a GE2019 any more likely? Who knows. All we know is that we have some details of PPCs here, and we’re always collecting more. Unless we’ve reached the point where have captured all the known knowns. In which case…
🌱 Spring comes early 🌱
If you’re bored of general election chatter and you’d much prefer to go look up some candidates for elections we know are definitely happening, then happy days: we now have some of the May 2020 elections up. This is the furthest in advance we’ve ever managed to do this, hurrah!
We’re taking it slowly, because we have to be confident that there are no boundary changes and no changes to the number of elected officials in an area, etc.
For the following areas, we’re confident of no changes, so we’ve generated the elections in the database and we can now crowdsource prospective candidate details for them:
Enjoy!
📻 More BBC wrangling… 📻
We’ve been in more meetings with the BBC recently and were asked for a breakdown of the data we produce by coverage and accuracy. We made this table and thought it worth sharing. Does it seem right? Comments welcome!
🇩🇪 Nachrichten aus Deutschland 🇩🇪
Germany’s official voter advice app — die Wahl-o-Mat — is celebrating its 50th edition, for the upcoming state elections in Thuringia (east-central Germany, 2m people, thanks Wikipedia).
The people who run it, the BpB or Federal Agency for Civic Education, claim that it’s had 82m uses since 2002. While they keep no personal data, making evidence of effectiveness pretttty tricky, research from the University of Dusseldorf reckons that:
- 62% of users better understand differences between parties more clearly as a result of using the Wahl-o-Mat
- 60%-70% of users talk to their friends and family about their result
- 50% of users are motivated by using Wahl-o-Mat to keep themselves informed politically
- 4-6% are motivated to go vote when they did not plan to before, as a result of using Wahl-o-Mat.
Pretty impressive. If your German’s better than Joe’s, here’s a nice-looking infographic with some of those numbers on it.
📅 What’s next? 📅
We’re working our way through the backlog of issues/broken things about Candidates, we’re looking into the possibility of self-serve uploads for council’s polling location data, and we have a board away day on Weds.
And a new sprint plan on Tuesday, so shout if you think anything should go into the Inbox for consideration!
Forward!
🍂
Photo credit: Magnus Hagdorn