[cvn-developers] Next steps

[Seb Bacon]

I need to catch up on the rest of my life, but then there's a few
fairly immediate things to consider before we move onto DC3k or
whatever we want to call our blue-skies-what-next project.

- Tom, we need to award someone a duck house!
- I'm going to write a post-mortem report on achievements and lessons learned
- As part of this, I made a simple "did you find this useful" type
survey on the election quiz site for the last day of the campaign. It
also asked for email addresses; I'm going to send a survey to those
people
- We should write a thankyou / congratulations to our volunteers,
including some honourable mentions for people with lots of badges, etc
- How to encourage more analysis and use of the raw data (it'd be
good if Edmund could put in place a tell-us-the-gender game for YNMP)

Some notes here if anyone wants to add to them (including a link to
survey ideas -- thoughts very welcome)

http://code.google.com/p/constituencyvolunteernetwork/wiki/DebriegTasks

Thanks,

Seb



--
skype: seb.bacon
mobile: 07790 939224
land: 020 8123 9473

[Edmund von der Burg]

On 11 May 2010 11:08:13 UTC+1, Seb Bacon <seb....@gmail.com> wrote:
> I need to catch up on the rest of my life, but then there's a few
> fairly immediate things to consider before we move onto DC3k or
> whatever we want to call our blue-skies-what-next project.
>
>  - Tom, we need to award someone a duck house!
>  - I'm going to write a post-mortem report on achievements and lessons learned

Likewise - before I forget it all.

I'll also be writing a list of changes needed to make YNMP reusable
for future elections - at the moment it can only do one election.

>  - As part of this, I made a simple "did you find this useful" type
> survey on the election quiz site for the last day of the campaign.  It
> also asked for email addresses; I'm going to send a survey to those
> people
>  - We should write a thankyou / congratulations to our volunteers,
> including some honourable mentions for people with lots of badges, etc

When you do this get permission to email them regarding future
elections (local, Europe and general). I don't know what the initial
privacy policy was regarding this.

>  - How to encourage more analysis and use of the raw data (it'd be
> good if Edmund could put in place a tell-us-the-gender game for YNMP)

Shall do - but it may not happen for a few days...

Do we want this game to tie in to the duck house points system or
shall I just whack it up without that (doing the points will take
longer - hint hint ). Also I should be able to auto-gender some of the
candidates so it may be quicker than we think.

Cheers,
Edmund.

> Some notes here if anyone wants to add to them (including a link to
> survey ideas -- thoughts very welcome)
>
>  http://code.google.com/p/constituencyvolunteernetwork/wiki/DebriegTasks
>
> Thanks,
>
> Seb
>
>
>
> --
> skype: seb.bacon
> mobile: 07790 939224
> land: 020 8123 9473
>

--
Who will you vote for?
http://www.YourNextMP.com
http://blog.yournextmp.com/

[Seb Bacon]

On 11 May 2010 13:47, Edmund von der Burg <edmund.v...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 May 2010 11:08:13 UTC+1, Seb Bacon <seb....@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I need to catch up on the rest of my life, but then there's a few
>> fairly immediate things to consider before we move onto DC3k or
>> whatever we want to call our blue-skies-what-next project.
>>
>>  - Tom, we need to award someone a duck house!
>>  - I'm going to write a post-mortem report on achievements and lessons learned
>
> Likewise - before I forget it all.
>
> I'll also be writing a list of changes needed to make YNMP reusable
> for future elections - at the moment it can only do one election.

e.g. in Scottish parliament elections, where there are candidates
standing for regions (the PR list) and first past the post
constituencies (which aren't the same as Westminster constituencies!)

>>  - As part of this, I made a simple "did you find this useful" type
>> survey on the election quiz site for the last day of the campaign.  It
>> also asked for email addresses; I'm going to send a survey to those
>> people
>>  - We should write a thankyou / congratulations to our volunteers,
>> including some honourable mentions for people with lots of badges, etc
>
> When you do this get permission to email them regarding future
> elections (local, Europe and general). I don't know what the initial
> privacy policy was regarding this.
>
>>  - How to encourage more analysis and use of the raw data (it'd be
>> good if Edmund could put in place a tell-us-the-gender game for YNMP)
>
> Shall do - but it may not happen for a few days...
>
> Do we want this game to tie in to the duck house points system or
> shall I just whack it up without that (doing the points will take
> longer - hint hint ). Also I should be able to auto-gender some of the
> candidates so it may be quicker than we think.

Agreed, it should be easy as a human will be able to guess 99% of them
based on name, immediately.

Don't really care about points, whatever's easiest. With 6500
volunteers we should get it sorted pretty quickly, I think.


Seb

[Tim Green]

On 11/05/10 13:56, Seb Bacon wrote:
> e.g. in Scottish parliament elections, where there are candidates
> standing for regions (the PR list) and first past the post
> constituencies (which aren't the same as Westminster constituencies!)
>
>

It'd be pretty awesome if we could re-use it for local elections.

> Agreed, it should be easy as a human will be able to guess 99% of them
> based on name, immediately.
>
> Don't really care about points, whatever's easiest. With 6500
> volunteers we should get it sorted pretty quickly, I think.
>
>

I wouldn't be surprised if someone had made some sort of bayesian
auto-genderiser based on name. Could just do them for a high enough
confidence, then fill in the rest manually if it's not sure.

-t

[Edmund von der Burg]

On 11 May 2010 13:56:55 UTC+1, Seb Bacon <seb....@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 May 2010 13:47, Edmund von der Burg <edmund.v...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11 May 2010 11:08:13 UTC+1, Seb Bacon <seb....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I need to catch up on the rest of my life, but then there's a few
>>> fairly immediate things to consider before we move onto DC3k or
>>> whatever we want to call our blue-skies-what-next project.
>>>
>>>  - Tom, we need to award someone a duck house!
>>>  - I'm going to write a post-mortem report on achievements and lessons learned
>>
>> Likewise - before I forget it all.
>>
>> I'll also be writing a list of changes needed to make YNMP reusable
>> for future elections - at the moment it can only do one election.
>
> e.g. in Scottish parliament elections, where there are candidates
> standing for regions (the PR list) and first past the post
> constituencies (which aren't the same as Westminster constituencies!)

Exactly - it is a nasty rabbit hole that I'm wary of going down.

Another example: The general election was on May 6th but not all
results are in because one of the candidates died so that poll has
been delayed until May 27th.

http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/8115410.Thirsk_and_Malton_election_postponed_after_candidate_dies/

So this means that there needs to be a table for elections (eg
'General Election 2010' ) which links out to a table for contests (
election: 'GE20101', date: '27 May 2010', place: 'Thirsk and Maldon
Westminter Constituency (2010)' ) which in turn links to the
candidates contesting it (candidate_id, party_id, votes) which finally
gets us to the candidate.

Not forgetting that candidates seem terribly keen on standing under
two parties ( eq lab & co-op ) or better yet making shit up (one
candidate was pissed that he was down as an 'independent' - he wasted
to be an 'individual' ).

And if we switch to STV (or full PR) then how do record how many votes
were cast for a candidate?

My poor head!

All good fun :)

Cheers,
Edmund

[Tim Green]

I think in terms of working out the architecture for YNMP to handle
future elections, things should probably just be factored as we go,
though what you suggest is reasonable - though I think any user
interface is going to have to be heavily denormalised for the user's sake :)

Another one to add to that list is the proposed PR for the House of
Lords. Actually I think it'd be really interesting to think how we'd
handle an elected house of lords - the candidate centric approach we've
done this election would be quite applicable (praying that it won't be
party list, one can hope, right?).

As for STV I've got no idea how other organisations tend to release STV
votes, but in our student union elections they release the
round-by-round vote assignments (and also actually release all the
ballots, anonymized). Visualising this is pretty tricky! I could imagine
how you could show the losing candidates's votes splitting into the
other candidates.

-t

On 12/05/10 12:45, Edmund von der Burg wrote:
> Exactly - it is a nasty rabbit hole that I'm wary of going down.
> Another example: The general election was on May 6th but not all
> results are in because one of the candidates died so that poll has
> been delayed until May 27th.
>
> http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/news/8115410.Thirsk_and_Malton_election_postponed_after_candidate_dies/
>
> So this means that there needs to be a table for elections (eg
> 'General Election 2010' ) which links out to a table for contests (
> election: 'GE20101', date: '27 May 2010', place: 'Thirsk and Maldon
> Westminter Constituency (2010)' ) which in turn links to the
> candidates contesting it (candidate_id, party_id, votes) which finally
> gets us to the candidate.
>
> Not forgetting that candidates seem terribly keen on standing under

> two parties ( eq lab& co-op ) or better yet making shit up (one

[Edmund von der Burg]

On 11 May 2010 13:47:51 UTC+1, Edmund von der Burg

<edmund.v...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11 May 2010 11:08:13 UTC+1, Seb Bacon <seb....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>  - How to encourage more analysis and use of the raw data (it'd be
>> good if Edmund could put in place a tell-us-the-gender game for YNMP)
>
> Shall do - but it may not happen for a few days...

Done: http://www.yournextmp.com/tools/set_gender

Not linked to on the site as it looks like they'll get done pretty
quickly if a few volunteers hammer away at it. Not sure if it is worth
a DC task. (I did a hundred and now need to tend the baby :) ).

I got most of them using a name to gender script:
http://github.com/evdb/YourNextMP.com/blob/master/script/one-off/guess_gender_from_name.pl
if you're interested.


Cheers,
Edmund.

[Seb Bacon]

Great, thanks!

Seb

[Matt Robinson]

On 12 May 2010, at 17:17, Edmund von der Burg wrote:

> On 11 May 2010 13:47:51 UTC+1, Edmund von der Burg
> <edmund.v...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11 May 2010 11:08:13 UTC+1, Seb Bacon <seb....@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> - How to encourage more analysis and use of the raw data (it'd be
>>> good if Edmund could put in place a tell-us-the-gender game for YNMP)
>>
>> Shall do - but it may not happen for a few days...
>
> Done: http://www.yournextmp.com/tools/set_gender
>
> Not linked to on the site as it looks like they'll get done pretty
> quickly if a few volunteers hammer away at it. Not sure if it is worth
> a DC task. (I did a hundred and now need to tend the baby :) ).

Twatted about a hundred, too, by my guess. When I saw mclovin come around for the 8th time, I decided to call it a day. :)

[Tim Green]

Seems that the ones that were removed as spam/incorrect are showing up
(I had candidate called 'fart on cake', which I guess is the price of
posting it on some forums).

-t

[Matt Robinson]

Hard to tell with the monster raving loonies and all. :) Speaking of which, Jaz Delorean came up a few times (great name!) but their page notes that they stood down from the election. D'you still want gender info for people who didn't run?

On 12 May 2010, at 17:34, Tim Green wrote:

> Seems that the ones that were removed as spam/incorrect are showing up (I had candidate called 'fart on cake', which I guess is the price of posting it on some forums).
>

['Dragon' Dave McKee]

>> And if we switch to STV (or full PR) then how do record how many votes
>> were cast for a candidate?

>As for STV I've got no idea how other organisations tend to release STV votes, but in our student union >elections they release the round-by-round vote assignments (and also actually release all the ballots, >anonymized). Visualising this is pretty tricky! I could imagine how you could show the losing candidates's >votes splitting into the other candidates.

================

http://vote.dsu.org.uk/index.cgi/results/47 and
http://vote.dsu.org.uk/index.cgi/stats/26 may be of interest (I
believe these refer to the same election)

(http://vote.dsu.org.uk/index.cgi/ may be of interest generally to this list)

[Tim Green]

Similarly, the system we're moving to here gives that information (names removed to protect the innocent)

Round	xxx	yyy	bbb	zzz	aaa	Re-Open Nominations (RON)	Exhausted	Surplus	Threshold
1	53.00	5.00	60.00	15.00	33.00	2.00	0.00	0.00	84.00
	Count of first choices. The initial quota is 84.00. No candidates have surplus votes so candidates will be eliminated and their votes transferred for the next round.
2	60.00	0.00	65.00	0.00	39.00	0.00	4.00	0.00	82.00
	All losing candidates are eliminated. Count after substage 1 of 1 of eliminating yyy; zzz; and Re-Open Nominations (RON). Transferred votes with value 1.00. Since no candidate has been elected, the quota is reduced to 82.00. No candidates have surplus votes so candidates will be eliminated and their votes transferred for the next round.
3	75.00	0.00	80.00	0.00	0.00	0.00	13.00	2.50	77.50
	All losing candidates are eliminated. Count after substage 1 of 1 of eliminating aaa. Transferred votes with value 1.00. Since no candidate has been elected, the quota is reduced to 77.50. Candidate bbb has reached the threshold and is elected.

Along with voting data like:

	token, v1p1, v1p2, v1p3, v1p4, v1p5, v1p6
    ABED SEWN NEE NAIL,    3,    2,    4,    5,    0,    0
     ACE YAW NINA WISE,    3,    5,    0,    0,    0,    0
    ACRE RED CADY GUNK,    3,    1,    0,    0,    0,    0
      AIDS DISK WAY OK,    3,    5,    1,    2,    6,    0

Where the token is emailed to people when they vote online, and the data is also given in "BLT" format for re-processing in OpenSTV.

-t

[Edmund von der Burg]

I've just changed the code so that it only looks at the live
candidates. Sorry about that.

Seems that they've pretty much all been done now.

Cheers,
Edmund.

[Seb Bacon]

Yup - done.

Thanks!

Seb