Democracy Club Blog

The rest of the state

We’ve added a feature to WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk that tells you about all the roles and responsibilities of the various people and organisations that represent you and your area.

Testing the Representatives Project

There’s a whole world of council sub-committees to discover. Isn’t it exciting?

Representatives, Referendums, and Redesigns

Or, the Democracy Club summer show-and-tell.

Wrapping up our research on Representatives (for now)

We started this week asking “What would it take to make a list of all representatives in the UK?”.

To answer this question, or at least create more questions we gave ourselves a week’s “spike”. The idea was to get to the end of the week more informed and able to make some decisions about whether we wanted to do anything else on the project to create a list of all elected representatives in the UK.

What might scrapers for councillors look like?

Are there are enough people who can write a little code and care enough to maintain one or more councillor scrapers?

Finding links to lists of representatives

As noted yesterday, one of the first problems with creating a single list of all UK representatives is finding the links to each local list spread across local government websites.

In this technical blog post, I’ll talk about that process, as well some initial thoughts as how easy it is to scrape the data from those local lists once they’ve been found.

What would it take to make a list of all representatives in the UK

We’re doing our bit for European Local Democracy Week by thinking about how we might get more information on representatives in the UK. We think that access to good information is vital to a well functioning democracy, and providing accessible information on representatives is a good step in the right direction.