Thinking about using YourNextMP

[Martín Szyszlican]

Hi all, here at Congreso Interactivo in Argentina we know that elections time brings a lot of traffic to our civic sites, and we are thinking how to harness that interest for the benefit of the local community.

I think specially that jorunalists might be interested in having wiki-style access to a public repository of candidate information.

Do you think YourNextMP is ready to be deployed to other countries? If not, what would be the steps required to internationalize it?

We have the skills to do it, but we alone don't have the resources, I think if several spanish speaking organizations get together this could happen and we can all benefit, since this year is going to be elections year in many latinamerican countries.

Thanks as always for your support,

Martín Szyszlican

www.martinszyszlican.com

www.congresointeractivo.org

[Steven Clift]

Hmmm, here are some upcoming elections:

https://www.ndi.org/electionscalendar
http://www.electionguide.org/elections/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_elections_in_2015
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:2015_elections

Steve
Steven Clift - Executive Director, E-Democracy

* Support E-Democracy. Pledge drive to raise $10,000 US:
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[James McKinney]

FYI, Open North created the following service for internal use to track subnational Canadian elections: http://www.comingelections.com/

It scrapes some Canada-specific sources, but also Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_electoral_calendar,_2015

If the Spanish and/or Portuguese Wikipedia have similar pages for LatAm countries, it may be possible to set up a similar service.

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[James McKinney]

Oh, and code is at https://github.com/opennorth/comingelections.com

[Martín Szyszlican]

Hi Steven, thanks for the answer.

Are you proposing that we find partners at more elections to implement the same system?

That we implement a global system that will work for all elections?

Thanks,

Martín.

--

Martín Szyszlican

Desarrollo web usable y accesible

martinszyszlican.com

[Mark Longair]

Hi Martín,

I hope I have a reasonable idea of what would be involved in
internationalizing the YourNextMP codebase and making it generic
enough for reuse, but I think it would be best to write that
down as a fairly detailed plan, and then work out how much
developer time the various interested parties (including us)
could put towards that. (And indeed decide if it would be worth
it given that there are alternatives.)

We have a new sprint beginning on Monday and I'll advocate for
spending some time on that. [1]

Best regards,
Mark

[1] https://github.com/mysociety/yournextmp-popit/issues/145

[Martín Szyszlican]

That's great mark.
Do you think we'll end in for forking like we do in the legislative project to handle all the national particularities?
That's maybe simpler than adding a lot of ifs.

Martin

[Steven Clift]

I shared the election list not to suggest a global project but to highlight where upcoming elections are happening.

If people know civic coders or election participation projects in those countries,  please invite them to join us here. http://bit.ly/poplusgroup

Then, let's see what kind of collaboration emerges.

Way back in 94 and then every two years after that I build the most comprehensive state legislative candidate directories around through about 2002. Example: http://e-democracy.org/2000

The best thing I did was ask our state government elections office to add campaign email and web address to the official filing form. That gives time for general election directory/guide building but not for primaries or our party precinct caucuses process which happens months before filing. But our campaign finance board does have filing deadlines every year a candidate raises money for their campaign committee.  And then they, again based on my and perhaps others request, added e-contact info to the forms.

So one benefit of demonstrating the value of open data on candidates through crowd-sourcing might be getting the official processes to embrace this as well. Imho, we in particular need this data to surface provincial and local candidates.

It is still amazing to me how many candidates leave those fields blank, but most do fill something out. And this is released by our election office and can be used to contact the campaigns in bulk at a far lower effort down ballot.

That said, then they do get lot as more bulk queries so don't forget the power of telephone follow-up if you want candidates to then fill out more information bringing down the cost of developing voters guides.

Steve

[Paul Lenz]

Hi there

Just a quick note to say that in mySociety we have started to think about how YNMP might be used in other national elections over the next 18 months. Only very rough first thoughts but we were thinking that there could be a possible grant pitch for funding to help us continue to develop the platform and localise it and also to support the country groups in the data sourcing and management work.

Very early days, but I will keep the list in the loop and, if we think the idea has potential, be keen to get your feedback on and interest in such a proposal.

Kind regards

Paul

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