General election?

Hello, 

Thanks for being part of Democracy Club. 

We’ve not emailed you since our summer review, partly because we’ve all been a bit glued to the news.

This newsletter explains what our plans are in the event of an autumn general election: 

• We’re already collecting candidate data;
• We’re preparing as best we can to try to maximise coverage for the polling station finder;
• There will be plenty more crowdsourcing to do;
• We’re thinking about data reuse;
• And we’re celebrating other civic technology projects! 

More soon, depending on events...

Best wishes,

Joe and the team

🕵️ We’re already collecting candidate details.

Over 1,000 people have already announced their intention to stand for the next parliament. We can’t use our crowdsourcing website at the moment, because we don’t have a date for the election. In the meantime, you can help add details to this spreadsheet of ‘prospective parliamentary candidates’. 

📍 We’ll get as much polling location coverage as possible.

Once there is a date for an election, then councils will confirm their polling stations and send us their data. It will be a race to election day to import as much data as we can. We have lined up some support with the project, but are keen to hear from any Python developers who’ve worked with geographic data. 

🙋 There will be plenty of crowdsourcing for everyone!

Once an election is announced, we will also collect details of hustings and manifestos, and we hope to collect election leaflets too. We know voters will have questions about Brexit, so we are looking for objective data sources on this. Other ideas welcome!

📣 We want people to reuse the data we collect…

To help get the information to the voters, we rely on organisations with big audiences to link to our websites or to use our data in their own products. If you know of people or organisations who can reach an audience and could be persuaded to help democracy, let us know! 

💥 ...but we don’t want to break democracy.

There are risks in opening the data to everyone. We are considering whether our data licence or terms of use can help mitigate these risks. Find out more and let us know your thoughts.

📚 Take a look at other election projects in the Election Tech Handbook.

There are plenty of people looking to use technology to improve the next election. Volunteers at Newspeak House have helpfully compiled a long list of related projects, data and communities.