My only concern is that the people who run the tools etc. have their political view. For example "https://tacticalvote.co.uk" is clearly against the Conservative party. So that tool is straight away biased.
Almost nobody gets into politics without a reason. Nobody is going to put effort into something without an objective to achieve. Nobody is unbiased. And trying to treat good and bad ideas the same way, or honest and dishonest people, is doomed to encourage the bad to drive out the good.
Whotargetsme is a good start, but I think this election is one where fighting algorithmically targeted disinformation is going to be absolutely critical.
Our site handled a lot of traffic at the last snap election. 2.6m unique visitors in the 5 weeks before the vote, a crazy number during the last 48 hours.
To accommodate this we have a static site builder, with our data in Google Sheets. We monitor github for changes, Sheets for changes, and auto-generate the site. The site builder translates the Google Sheet into JSON.
This then pushes a Cache Purge instruction to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is configured to cache everything at the edge for hours, but in the browser for minutes... meaning we serve virtually nothing from the origin server, and over 99% of reqs from Cloudflare caches.
Doing this meant we had to design everything to just be static HTML and JS. It works well.
We communicate in Slack, use MailChimp for email mailouts, and have a GSuite account with some alias emails.
# What is the org like?
No-one is working on this full-time, but we have a team of ~5 people who all do just a little. It's no burden for this to exist, and the costs are virtually $0 outside of the election period.
The only cost we have is MailChimp during the election period, so we will be crowdfunding to allow us to keep people informed about changes, etc.
We are very much a small group of individuals from wildly different backgrounds and political beliefs who happen to have a common goal but for different reasons. We aren't trying to convince each other about "why" to do this work, only that the goal makes it worth it even though different individuals have different goals.
# Why am I involved?
It is not as if I necessarily believe that the Tories are vile, Labour is better, etc. (Though some in the team do express this.)
What I personally believe is that we should have proportional representation, and that mass tactical voting is an important step towards progressive candidates and progressive parties before we can reach a full PR system. Mass tactical voting applies pressure and encourages progressive behaviour.
My contribution then, is towards fairer election systems.
I was part of creating the initial version of https://www.swapmyvote.uk/ that ran in the 2015 and 2017 general elections. My experience of it was that it was a slow ramp up, but the final week leading up to the general election got very exciting and busy. There's a fun kind of energy in working on something like this, where people get more and more engaged right up to voting day... and then an anti-climatic finish afterwards, when interest vanishes overnight.
I’ve not but I think a lot of these projects are run by small numbers of people for free. The list is coming from newspeak house (there’s a link at the top) and they try to run events helping people interested in working on various political projects to meet one another (amongst other things). Think a mix of academic political science, people who work in politics/think tanks, and people who have various other skills in eg technology or science and want to get involved in political projects. Apart from events they also put together resources like this one of projects people may be interested in.
The institution is in some sense not partisan but I guess the political makeup of the people there is somewhat like HN (but applied to U.K. rather than us politics), maybe a bit more left leaning and less libertarian leaning.
If you’re interested in getting involved or using your skills but you aren’t really sure what you Gould go to one of their events. They’re in Whitechapel and are pretty friendly.
This looks like an interesting initiative and I wish you the best with it, however I think you should reconsider placing a WhatsApp group link on a publicly crawlable webpage.
I'm only hooked in to the Democratic technology side, but there is https://thedemlabs.org/ that collates (and creates) a bunch of technological solutions for campaigns problems.
I'm also personally affiliated with https://ragtag.org/ which is a bunch of volunteers trying to make said resources and tools.
We (Newspeak House) would love to see one created. If you know people in that space, put up some tech and share it. Feel free to use our template if you credit us.
[+] [-] obayesshelton|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dangerface|6 years ago|reply
Every one has a bias at least they own it. As long as they are not pretending to be unbiased I'm fine with it.
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
Almost nobody gets into politics without a reason. Nobody is going to put effort into something without an objective to achieve. Nobody is unbiased. And trying to treat good and bad ideas the same way, or honest and dishonest people, is doomed to encourage the bad to drive out the good.
[+] [-] specialist|6 years ago|reply
When all the belligerents, err aspirants, certify the results, then it's probably good enough.
[+] [-] nathan_young|6 years ago|reply
(disclosure, I helped initiate the doc)
[+] [-] mhh__|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pjc50|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathan_young|6 years ago|reply
If something interests you, you could offer to help the developers involved.
(disclosure: I am involved in the project)
[+] [-] sefrost|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|6 years ago|reply
# Tech
Our site handled a lot of traffic at the last snap election. 2.6m unique visitors in the 5 weeks before the vote, a crazy number during the last 48 hours.
To accommodate this we have a static site builder, with our data in Google Sheets. We monitor github for changes, Sheets for changes, and auto-generate the site. The site builder translates the Google Sheet into JSON.
This then pushes a Cache Purge instruction to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is configured to cache everything at the edge for hours, but in the browser for minutes... meaning we serve virtually nothing from the origin server, and over 99% of reqs from Cloudflare caches.
Doing this meant we had to design everything to just be static HTML and JS. It works well.
We communicate in Slack, use MailChimp for email mailouts, and have a GSuite account with some alias emails.
# What is the org like?
No-one is working on this full-time, but we have a team of ~5 people who all do just a little. It's no burden for this to exist, and the costs are virtually $0 outside of the election period.
The only cost we have is MailChimp during the election period, so we will be crowdfunding to allow us to keep people informed about changes, etc.
We are very much a small group of individuals from wildly different backgrounds and political beliefs who happen to have a common goal but for different reasons. We aren't trying to convince each other about "why" to do this work, only that the goal makes it worth it even though different individuals have different goals.
# Why am I involved?
It is not as if I necessarily believe that the Tories are vile, Labour is better, etc. (Though some in the team do express this.)
What I personally believe is that we should have proportional representation, and that mass tactical voting is an important step towards progressive candidates and progressive parties before we can reach a full PR system. Mass tactical voting applies pressure and encourages progressive behaviour.
My contribution then, is towards fairer election systems.
[+] [-] jpallen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dan-robertson|6 years ago|reply
The institution is in some sense not partisan but I guess the political makeup of the people there is somewhat like HN (but applied to U.K. rather than us politics), maybe a bit more left leaning and less libertarian leaning.
If you’re interested in getting involved or using your skills but you aren’t really sure what you Gould go to one of their events. They’re in Whitechapel and are pretty friendly.
[+] [-] jlokier|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mellosouls|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rapnie|6 years ago|reply
https://www.talkingeurope.eu/
"Talking Europe connects citizens having an opposing political view - and living in a different country!
Our mission is to create a European public sphere. We want to foster democracy and cohesion in Europe."
[+] [-] nathan_young|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] methehack|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bszupnick|6 years ago|reply
I'm also personally affiliated with https://ragtag.org/ which is a bunch of volunteers trying to make said resources and tools.
[+] [-] nathan_young|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] drcongo|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, sure, hand over all your political planning to Facebook.
[+] [-] edsaperia|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackbrookes|6 years ago|reply