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GE2019 Election Tech Handbook

✏️ Edit this document to make it better ✏️

A crowdsourced resource for technologists building things for the general election

blame this on The London College of Political Technologists at Newspeak House

Projects

Political Data

Events & Community

WhatsApp Group ↗️

How to use this handbook

  1. Join WhatsApp group for updates: ElectionTechHandbookChat
  1. also there’s a facebook group electiontechhandbook.uk/fb
  2. you can also hassle @nwspk

  1. If you’re (thinking of) building something to do with politics or the upcoming election, add it to the list below. These can be partisan or non-partisan, free or paid, almost finished or just ideas looking for contributors - stick them down anyway.
  1. there is a comprehensive library of political data here that might be helpful: electiontechhandbook.uk/data
  2. if you’ve never done any political campaigning before, read this: how to make a difference in an election
  3. check what you’re doing is legal: Campaigning Legal Guide: Politics, Elections and Lobbying
  4. if you’re collecting user data, please do so responsibly: responsibledata.io/resources/handbook
  1. If you’re not sure what to do but you want to get involved:
  1. check out the community page for online groups, meetups, etc: electiontechhandbook.uk/community
  2. have a read through the projects listed below - they probably need your help
  3. peruse the datasets page for inspiration: electiontechhandbook.uk/data

  1. If you’re organising meetups, hackathons, groups or doing any kind of online or offline organising of technologists, add the details here: electiontechhandbook.uk/community
  2. Share this handbook far and wide ❤️
    e.g. retweet this:     https://twitter.com/nwspk/status/1169150244833103872

Election Results

Non-partisan data infrastructure

Voter Registration & Turnout

Targeted Political Advertising

Voter Education

Disinformation & Misinformation

Tactical Voting/Campaigning

Filterbubble Breakers

Campaigns

Campaigning & Organising Tools

Security

Messaging

Monetisation

Visualisation

Prediction

Project Ideas - looking for people

Domain Names

Misc

Non UK projects - Worth taking ideas from

Projects (add missing ones!)

Election Results & Analysis

Live map of election results in London

www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/who-runs-london/general-election/2019 - also available as an embeddable map, contact oliver.hannan@londoncouncils.gov.uk

ERS Election Results Hub

http://ge2019.electoral-reform.org.uk/ Election results UK wide, regions and nations and constituency level

Triangle plot of election results

https://drive.google.com/file/d/127SY1at9oEc-wD-fJqHqtg6HXrO-Tidm/view?usp=sharing - plot of Con v Lab v LD (England only) - sjorford@gmail.com or @sjorford on Democracy Club Slack

Free live-updating embeddable visualisations of election results

https://flourish.studio/2019/11/26/charts-for-the-uk-elections-2019/ from Flourish - these are based on the live results collection done by Democracy Club volunteers. (You can also see a visualisation of when results were recorded by the top contributing volunteers over election night.)

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Democracy Club

democracyclub.org.uk - we are a community that produces useful datasets for UK elections; candidates, polling station locations, hustings, manifestos, and more! If you want to help out, join us on slack.democracyclub.org.uk and check out democracyclub.org.uk/quests

mySociety

mysociety.org - we are a not-for-profit social enterprise that provides technology, research and data to help people to be active citizens, including:

  • theyworkforyou.com A tool to check any MP’s recent voting records[a] as well as their historical voting archive. registered interests, appearances and full profile information. API at https://www.theyworkforyou.com/api/.
  • writetothem.com helps you identify your representative and contact them — and offers a ‘write to your MP’ interface that can be added to any website.
  • mapit.mysociety.org is an API service which matches geographic points to constituencies - ideal for showing your users who their MP is.

Policy Tracker

policytracker.org.uk - tracks progress on all of the government’s manifesto promises, includes explainers and ways to get more involved. @ukpolicytracker.

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/blog/2019-wrap-up-good-result-for-vfp-bad-result-for-democracy

TwittElection

twittelection.co.uk - we’re creating 650 Twitter lists, each of which will contain the candidates for a constituency (using Democracy Club data to build these lists). Allowing people to easily follow the candidates.

Tweet your Candidate

tweetyourCandidate.com - postcode lookup to find list of candidates social media accounts - includes option for pre-filled tweet campaigns and lists previous MP and their majority.

PoliMonitor

https://www.polimonitor.com/ - PoliMonitor tracks all 10,000+ Parliamentarians in Europe - and hopefully soon all the 5,000+ in North America - as well as 15,000+ UK Journalists. fWe also added lists of around 2,000+ candidates for the 2017 GE and also the European Parliament election this year to our system (that was 4 months of research!) This means anyone can search what candidates have said over the past few and get a free alert each day if they talk about areas of interest. A useful campaign tool during an election, if you’re trying to get GE candidates to make a pledge on a certain issue. Visit the site to create a free account, a free alert, and also start a free trial of our premium tools. Or email info@polimonitor.com if you have a question, idea or would like to work with us. We hope to have completed our GE Candidate research by 12th November. Please get in touch if you’d like access to it to create other tools and services or conduct research. UPDATE - We have 1133 Candidate Handles so far.

Open Access

https://openaccess.transparency.org.uk/ Who is meeting government, when and for what purpose? Search by Minister, Department, organisation and more. Data from UK Gov website and up-to-date with Q2 2019, downloadable in CSV format.

Who’s Lobbying

http://whoslobbying.com/ - Who's Lobbying is a place to access data about lobbying activity in the UK without having to navigate; dense, difficult-to-navigate websites and hard to find PDF documents.

Members Interests

http://www.membersinterests.org.uk

Vote for Policies

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/ Non partisan website that shows policies and gives information on which parties best match your policy preferences. Party’s policies are presented anonymously.

https://voteforpolicies.org.uk/blog/2019-wrap-up-good-result-for-vfp-bad-result-for-democracy

Many more data projects like this at electiontechhandbook.uk/data

Voter Registration & Turnout

Voter Registration Performance Statistics

https://www.gov.uk/performance/register-to-vote - How many people have registered to vote today? Official stats from gov.uk

Votey McVoteFace

https://mcvoteface.org.uk - Just 2% of boaters are registered to vote. Voter registration tool for boaters suggesting where and how to register to vote, in order to vote most effectively against Conservative candidates in marginals, based on location.

Puppy.Rodeo

https://puppy.rodeo/ - There's no time for a puppy rodeo, but there is time to register to vote!

‪Votebot.uk

https://votebot.uk/- facebook chat bot that helps you register to vote and encourage friends to register and vote

Apply to vote by post

https://www.onlinepostalvote.uk/ - General tool. Currently in beta

https://www.postalvote.labour.org.uk - Tool to walk through registering for a postal vote, run by the Labour Party.

https://www.postalvote.conservatives.com - Tool to walk through registering for a postal vote, run by the Conservative Party.

Vote Tracker

https://votetracker.co.uk/index.html - track how many people have registered to vote across different electoral cycles

VoteReminder

https://votereminder.uk/ - a simple way to add a calendarndex.html - trac invite / reminder to your Apple, Google, Yahoo! or Outlook calendar. Uses Democracy Club data where available to include polling station location based on postcode.

VoteEarly

http://www.voteearly.org.uk - A rebranding of postal voting. Why spend time queuing up on the day when you could vote early? Non partisan - can be used by any organisation. Facebook Ads/ messaging/ assets to promote are here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17BFbhhOwrYy61Qq4CNqke8HqxSd0ylCm8I8ao_oIpGE/edit?usp=sharing

Everyone.Vote

https://www.everyone.vote - a printable poster to help people register to vote.

Teachers for Turnout

https://www.teachersforturnout.org.uk/ Inspired by the US campaign a website with information and resources to help teachers and lecturers help their students to turnout and vote. Non-partisan.

Democracy Club Research: Who’s Missing? (2018)

https://democracyclub.org.uk/reports/whos_missing/ or Google Doc version for comments

An overview of existing research on underrepresentation in voter registration, candidacy, informedness and turnout.

See also 2016 blog posts on voter registration and young people: who? what works? and what could be done differently?

House of Commons Library Research: Political disengagement in the UK: who is disengaged? (2019)

https://researchbriefings.parliament.uk/ResearchBriefing/Summary/CBP-7501

This Commons Library Briefing Paper provides information about which groups in the UK are considered to be politically disengaged, and why. The Commons Library is a great source for lots of election-related desk research!

Webroots Democracy Research: Online Voting

https://webrootsdemocracy.org/online-voting/ - Our research has found that an online voting option for elections in the UK could have a number of significant benefits and that the reform enjoys broad support across the population.

Where Do I Vote?

https://wheredoivote.co.uk/

A tool by Democracy Club enabling people to find their polling station. Twitter featured this on 9th December 2019:

Targeted Political Advertising

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Who Targets Me?

whotargets.me - We’re working out which demographics political campaigns online are targeting with ads, and what messages they’re using in their communication. Our browser extension detects campaign ads on Facebook. We’re aggregating the data to build maps of where specific campaigns are targeting. Opportunity to expand to YT/Twitter/Email campaigns if time allows. Particularly looking for ways to recruit users to the project in 100 key marginals (ideas/opportunities about how to do that v. welcome): https://whotargets.me/en/get-in-touch/

Every Political Ad

https://www.instagram.com/EveryPoliticalAd - putting all 2019 UK General Election campaign ads into a single stream. Email your submissions to everypoliticalad@gmail.com

7charts

https://adsp.al7charts/uk-politics/ - How are the UK’s political organisations targeting Facebook users? We’ve used data from the Facebook Ad Library API to build 7 charts that describe the target audience and topics of the advertising.

Election Leaflets

https://electionleaflets.org/ - This is people-powered election monitoring! Get out your phone and photograph any political leaflets that come through your door. Currently accepting photos of any printed election leaflets.

Under The Radar

h- Sky News is launching a new series 'Under the Radar' to monitor and investigate the political activity online and on social media during the 2019 UK election.

Illuminocracy

https://www.illuminocracy.uk - Dashboard of Facebook Political Advertising data, pulled from the Facebook Ad Library API daily and visualised in Google Data Studio via BigQuery. Shows how much each party is spending each day, and how many views their ads are getting, which are their biggest ads, which ads are new etc. Contact via twitter: https://twitter.com/illuminocracyuk

Ad.Watch

https://ad.watch/ - breaks open the machine of political advertisements on Facebook and Instagram with data of more than 300 parties in 37 countries. Through our interfaces, you can understand targeting and optimisation, compare monetary investment, and trace the timelines of ads. Browse our stories, or ask your own questions

BBC Targeted Advertising Project

https://twitter.com/ruskin147/status/1190684881568882690

Platform Ad Libraries

https://ads.twitter.com/transparency/i/issue_advertisers

https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/2405092116183307?id=288762101909005

https://www.snap.com/en-GB/political-ads

https://transparencyreport.google.com/political-ads/region/GB?hl=en

Political Party Subject Access Request Tool

https://action.openrightsgroup.org/who-do-political-parties-think-we-are-4

Voter Education

WikiProject: Politics of the United Kingdom

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Politics_of_the_United_Kingdom - a community working to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of UK Politics. Create, revise and refurbish articles on all aspects of Politics and Government within the United Kingdom. Please feel free to help out!

Some key articles:

If you’d never edited Wikipedia before, don’t worry! It’s quite straightforward - this introduction is helpful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contributing_to_Wikipedia

Can I vote?

https://canivote.org.uk - It’s not just British citizens who can vote in UK elections.

ElectionHandbook.uk

ElectionHandbook.uk - Compare the meerkat for politicians

Compare parties and candidates side-by-side. Search and upvote the pledges you want them to prioritise. Candidates and journalists can post public questions to candidates. Journalists and verified voters can add local videos and give reasons for and against.

Arranged on swipeable cards that you can compare side-by-side like top-trumps - ElectionHandbook is designed for the a-political voter to use on the way to (or in) the polling booth - and as a record to refer back to at the next election of pledges delivered.

Simple Politics

http://simplepolitics.co.uk/ - Simplifying the world of UK politics and helping you stay on top of it. Current laws, debates and processes - we break them all down for you.

Brexit Diagrams

jonworth.eu/brexitdiagram-series-4/ - Flowcharts that try to plot what will happen on the UK side from now until the new Brexit deadline in October. For each diagram there are four documents released: the draw.io XML file, a high resolution PNG file, a scalable PDF file, and the .ods file used to calculate the odds.

Voting Counts

Votingcounts.org.uk - a politically neutral website that helps young adults learn about the importance of their vote, and provides the information they need to make informed decisions at the ballot box.

Constituency Data #GE2019

https://public.tableau.com/profile/christabel.cooper#!/vizhome/GE2019Constituencydata/START - Electoral results and demographic data visualised by https://twitter.com/ChristabelCoops

Voter Power

voterpower.org.uk - shows people how powerful their vote is compared to the UK average. No obvious API exposed yet, but if that could be done, maybe it would be helpful for building tactical voting sites on top.

Fair Votes Map

https://www.makevotesmatter.org.uk/ge2019-map-candidates-on-proportional-representation

Do your #GE2019 candidates support Proportional Representation?

The map below lists every candidate who is standing to be an MP in the 2019 general election. Coloured entries indicate that a candidate has given their personal view on PR. Where personal views are not known we have listed parties' positions on PR instead.

Vote for Policies

voteforpolicies.org.uk - a non-partisan service to help more people vote, and make an informed decision.
Enables a direct comparison of each party’s manifesto policies (but without knowing which party they belong to).
Integrates with: Democracy Club’s WhoCanIVoteFor, mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou

Policy Tracker

policytracker.org.uk - tracks progress on all of the government’s manifesto promises, includes explainers and ways to get more involved. @ukpolicytracker.

ISideWith[b][c]

https://uk.isidewith.com - detailed voter advice tool.

Who Gets My Vote

www.whogetsmyvoteuk.com — university-coalition led vote quiz thingy

Who Should You Vote For

whoshouldyouvotefor.com - Simple quick Voter Advice tool.

Times Voter Quiz

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/who-should-i-vote-for-general-election-2019-quiz-826vp8dp3

Clear The Lobby

clearthelobby.co.uk/ - The laws MPs are voting on this week, explained in plain English. Landing in your inbox every Sunday.

Represent.me

represent.me - Vote on issues you care about. Find out how you compare to parties, candidates and others.

@RepresentLive

MPs on Twitter

mpsontwitter.co.uk - A tool that shows how MPs use Twitter

@UKMPtweets

User Testing Voter Advice Applications (from 2015)

https://www.flourish.org/2015/04/i-find-politics-inaccessible-user-testing-voter-advice-apps/

@frabcus

Design+Democracy Project

http://designdemocracy.ac.nz/ - A New Zealand research unit aiming to ignite a passion for democracy in young people through user-centred design— contributed to a 6%+ rise in youth vote at the last general election with http://onthefence.co.nz/, for which it is best known, but has produced a range of design-led civic education/participation tools. nb. New Zealand (a constitutional monarchy) has a Westminster-model parliament, but German-style MMP electoral system.

EducateGE

https://thepoliticsproject.org.uk/educatege - EducateGE is a collaboration between 24 democratic engagement organisations who have come together to support schools and educators to engage young people in the 2019 General Election.

@PoliticsProject

Lord Ashcroft General Election Dashboard

https://lordashcroftpolls.com/category/elections/ - Each week until the election I will publish my General Election Dashboard, showing the results of my weekly 4,000-sample surveys tracking the intensity of each party’s support among different kinds of voters, crucial measures like best Prime Minister, preference of government, best party on Brexit and what people have noticed in the news, as well as the reaction to topical questions as they arise. Together with my weekly focus groups of different kinds of seats throughout the country, this will help explain the dynamics of the campaign and the factors that will determine the outcome on 12 December.

@LordAshcroft

Secondary income for MPs

https://datalobo.com/mp-earnings/ - Neat aggregation of the declared external income of MPs

@DataLobo

If Informed

https://www.ifinformed.com/results/ - Who would people vote for if they were well-informed?

Disinformation & Misinformation

Full Fact

https://fullfact.org/ - U.K’s fact checking charity. Fact-checks & clarifies misinformation or disinformation being promoted.

@FullFact

First Draft

https://firstdraftnews.org/training/ - Training and resources for journalists and anyone else working in an age of disinformation, including tools and techniques for monitoring online conversations, verifying pictures and images, responsible reporting and more.

Sign up for real-time alerts about disinformation and media manipulation around the general election by emailing partner@firstdraftnews.com

@firstdraftnews

Glitched.News

https://github.com/glitchdigital/glitched.news - A tool for automatically extracting and analysing trust indicators from news articles.

ISD election monitoring online
ISD will be monitoring major social media platforms and alt tech spaces for disinformation, extremist mobilisation and illegal activity throughout the election. See our previous publications for the range of methods, tools and findings (https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/). We’ll be expanding to YouTube and Instagram monitoring for GE2019 as well.

@ISDglobal

National Democratic Institute

Report on Disinformation and Electoral Integrity

Get Bad News

A game that puts you in the mindset of propagandists and agents promoting fake news, propaganda and hate-speech to help the user understand how fake news is made and promoted https://getbadnews.com/#intro

NewsWise

Guardian Literacy programme aimed at school aged children. Covers media literacy on how to engage with news critically.

Civic Tech Field Guide/Fighting Disinformation

https://civictech.guide/listing-category/fight-disinformation/ directory of mostly US focused projects

Tactical Voting/Campaigning

Swap My Vote

https://swapmyvote.uk - Platform that allows voting partners to make their votes count in a different constituency, where each voter’s first preference has a better chance of winning a seat. Non-partisan platform. Build your own tactical (partisan) front end https://swapmyvote.uk/api

Launched early Dec. Ruby devs welcome - please contact hello@swapmyvote.uk or @tdgme on Twitter

Tactical Volunteering

http://tacticalvolunteer.uk/- Volunteer to help campaign teams win the closest seats.

Marginal Locators

My Campaign Map

www.mycampaignmap.com - previously http://mynearestmarginal.com/, first used in 2017 and received lots of press, it’s a tool for distributed election campaigning that is now being developed further, for use even after the next election is over.

Get in contact with digital@peoplesmomentum.com if you’d like to collaborate on integrating School Cuts-style data into the ‘issues map’ section, or other cool data science / decentralised digital organising things you think we could be doing.

Campaign Together

campaigntogether.org - a project to mobilise/coordinate people who want to stop Conservative govt but aren’t necessarily party activists. Identifies and targets marginal seats.

Tactical Voting Advice

GetVoting

https://getvoting.org - run by Best for Britain, does not give recommendations for Scotland/NI, prioritises pro-EU candidates[d][e][f], though treating Labour candidates as pro-EU unless otherwise advised. Some information is provided about how it calculates its advice, eg “Based on a 46,000-strong polling sample ... using multi-level regression and post-stratification (MRP), the only polling methodology that correctly predicted Trump’s 2016 election win [but why is BFB implying it should take any credit for this US polling success?], and the 2017 hung parliament including individual ‘freak’ constituency results such as Kensington and Canterbury”, but other than hints like this, the model is not transparent and consistently reports implausible results (see Hanretty data below). Currently uses polling conducted in October 2019, ie before the election was announced, and will apparently be updated with one further poll. A further ‘Beta’ version of the website is currently under development. Does not publish a list of recommendations for all constituencies, but gives constituency-by-constituency results for England and Wales. No recommendations for Scotland, because apparently Scotland doesn’t need tactical voting (??). Organisers (Best for Britain) have transparency around funding.

A Vice investigation showed this site is run by Lib Dem donors.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/nov/03/best-for-britain-tactical-voting-only-way-stop-brexit

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/general-election-news-latest-best-for-britain-brexit-vote-tool-lib-dems-a9179731.html

Extracted data (3/11) - https://twitter.com/chrishanretty/status/1191349029550080000

Campaign Together

https://campaigntogether.org/ for targeted campaigning

More United

Candidate endorsements for more civilised politics https://moreunited.org.uk/

@MoreUnitedUK

Avaaz SmartVote

https://secure.avaaz.org/campaign/en/votesmart2019/

Tactical voting advice - may be Avvaz’s own or based on another tactical voting site?

Democracy Club Tactical Voting Chat on whatsapp , ,,,.

https://chat.whatsapp.com/CVbBeX3eSI5He5lZf6lhIm

Tactical Voting Advice for Students

mystudentvote

https://www.mystudentvote.org.uk

Student Voter Power

https://studentvoter.info

Student Vote

A non-partisan initiative that guides students registered in multiple constituencies towards maximising the importance of their vote for their preferred party.

We are currently building the tool; anyone with advice or tips please email studentvote2019@gmail.com

StudentVoter.info

https://studentvoter.info/ - There’s a general election on December 12. Every vote counts. And if you're a student your vote is especially powerful. That’s because students can choose whether to vote at your home address, or where you live when you're at university or college. By choosing wisely, and voting in a seat which is more likely to change hands, you can make sure your vote has maximum impact.

TacticalVote.co.uk student voter tool

https://tacticalvote.co.uk/where-to-vote/ - If you're registered to vote in two constituencies (for example if you're a student) and have the option of where to cast your vote, this tool helps you decide where your vote will be most effective in keeping the Tories out.

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The folks behind https://ge2017.org/students are also planning something. No further details yet.

Meta-Tactical Voting Advice

Compare the Tacticals

https://www.livefrombrexit.com/tacticals/ - aggregates data from tactical voting sites

The Times Tactical Voting Guide (may need registration or paywall)

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tactical-voting-guide-who-should-i-back-in-the-general-election-53z9klrbw

The Telegraph Tactical Voting Guide (may need registration or paywall)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/12/06/tactical-voting-uk-general-election-guide-2019/

UK Tactical Voting Sites Compared

Tactical voting 2019 Single Page

This is a ⅓ A4 print out to give to people offline to get them to tactical voting information . - follow guide in the first page to ensure you have an imprint updated correctly. Links to tactical.vote and other information sites largely taken from the electiontechhandbook (thanks)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IbRvElsSgP_HFUhEty0lqrGpd4k5Z6r_cu8gubvE2pQ (v0.2)

(old version - pre- close of registration to give it to people together with a copy of the postal voting form)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1g64iAgSnepfwOQudn6xaJDj78rKcorpmSijwkBNj-sA

Filterbubble Breakers

Listenr

www.facebook.com/listenrconnect - Omegle meets politics. Listenr connects people with opposing political views anonymously through existing messengers (currently FB messenger).

Needs a helping hand! The project was started as an experiment in 2016 and needs volunteers to help revive it. If you’re a PHP developer or a designer interested in contributing to a non-partisan experiment this election, please get in touch!

OneSub

https://onesub.io - Startup news aggregator using machine learning, and analysis of human language (NLP), to help people read normal newspapers while breaking their filter bubble.

Background; Mission, Behavioural Pledges, Guardian piece (includes a few non-UK alternatives)

Contacts; @onesub_ or helpdesk@onesub.io (or @jimbomorrison - or WhatsApp Group if you want me personally)

TalkingEurope

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."

More Filter Bubble Breakers on the Civic Tech Field Guide.

Campaigns

SchoolCuts

schoolcuts.org.uk - Tool that makes gov formula on school cuts transparent, and shows what they mean for the 93% of cuts that schools will receive. User journey: search postcode/school → budget breakdown, /pupil and /teacher shown on individual school card for the 93% of schools that will receive cuts. [g][h][i]

https://nhscuts.org.uk/ “The Conservatives are cutting our NHS.” see https://nhscuts.org.uk/about/ for methodology explanation

Fake Manifestos

https://www.labourmanifesto.co.uk/

https://www.thetorymanifesto.com/

#StopTheCoup

https://www.stopthecoup.org.uk/ protealendar, updates, posters. @stopthecoup_UK

PhoneInBot

https://twitter.com/PhoneInBot - Tweets every time Farage, Ferrari, O'Brien, Mair, Dale, Frei, Rees-Mogg or Boris appear on LBC 📻 or Any Answers? is on BBC Radio 4 so you can 📞

Facebook Profile Frames

https://developers.facebook.com/products/frame-studio/

UK Election 2019: Social media graphics

https://dont-vote-conservative-uk.neocities.org/ - Contains quotes and facts for posting on social media. Deliberately partisan - the purpose of this site is to try and dissuade people from voting for the Conservatives or the Brexit party.

Campaigning & Organising Tools

TweetyourMP

tweetyourMP.com will be running tweetyourCandidate.com again - offering the ability for campaigns to send pre-filled tweets to candidates.

PolicyMogul

www.policymogul.com - Free platform for organisations to see what's happening in parliament, manage their public affairs and campaigning work in one place, and to identify and collaborate with other organisations who share the same objectives.

Public campaigns are made visible to parliamentarians, so they can approach you rather than you having to approach them.

Tapvote - Public Pledge Tools

Tapvote.org - is a public pledge-card platform that helps you win commitments from candidates. If your campaign needs to secure public pledges we’re here to help get in touch.

Advote.org

Advote.org - crowd-funded billboard adverts. This is a new service and we're looking for campaigns with strong communities behind them but with scant funds for advertising. If you have a campaign that needs an innovative way to cut through get in touch!

SpeechifAI

www.speechifai.tech: is a digital campaign suite for word-of-mouth marketing. With SpeechifAI organizations enable their community members to easily compose high quality messages and share them in synchronized posting campaigns on social media. A control dashboard enables campaign coordinators to provide guidance to community members and coordinate what they post. A post-editing assistant helps community members to compose individualized posts that incorporate the campaign’s instructions and the user's personal writing style. With only a few clicks, community members can create impactful social media communication and share it across various platforms in a coordinated way.

Loudspeek

You know those “write to MP” forms? They’re a bit outdated nowadays, right? Looking a bit rusty, and not really taking advantage of modern technology. Loudspeek brings a fresh approach to writing to MPs, MSPs, Welsh Assembly members, or any custom targets you define across the country from a single form, allowing you to tailor your campaign’s message to make sure decision makes pay attention the first time round.

Find out more about the revolution in digital lobbying on the loudspeek website, or pop over an email to curtis@loudspeek.cc.

New/Mode- Empower supporters to Email, Tweet and Call their candidates

New/Mode’s affordable and easy-to-use platform can empower your supporters to find their local candidates, and contact them with just one click. We have a comprehensive dataset of all 2019 parliamentary candidates available to use with our email and tweetstorm tools. The tools can be embedded on any website or used as a stand alone action page, and styled in any way you like. (We also have a powerful Letter to the Editor tool to help your supporters get published in local and national newspapers, and click-to-call which can be used with any custom targets.) These tools are available on a month to month (no long term lock in) agreement. Get in touch via email or Whatsapp.

Nudj

https://nudj.app Distributed organising tool. Email max@nudj.app if you’d like a demo.

Cobudget

cobudget.co - Tool for collectively managing budgets and resources.

Loomio

loomio.org - Powerful tool to help groups make decisions together; deliberation, voting, etc.

Tools Roundup: Apps and Digital Platforms for Organisers

Apps and digital platforms for organizers TOOLS ROUNDUP

This doc is a compilation of useful tools and resources we have found on a topic that was requested by our audience community of campaigners. If you have more to contribute on this topic, please write us at: blueprintsfc@gmail.com

Beautiful Rising

https://beautifulrising.org - Inspired by the concept of a “pattern language,” Beautiful Rising teases out the key elements of creative activism:

  • Accounts of memorable actions and campaigns, analysing what worked, or didn’t, and why.
  • Specific forms of creative action, such as a flash mob or blockade.
  • Time-tested guidelines for how to design successful actions and campaigns.
  • Big-picture ideas that help us understand how the world works and how we might change it.
  • Strategic frameworks and hands-on exercises to help you assess your situation and plan your campaign.

dogooder

https://dogooder.co/ Digital advocacy toolbox: Petitions, Email Politicians, Email Decision Makers, Call Politicians, Call Decision Makers, Email w/ Custom Data, Raise Money, Call w/ Custom Data, Surveys, Selfie Walls, Events, Facebook profiles

Digital tools for citizens assemblies

https://research.mysociety.org/publications/digital-tools-citizens-assemblies

2019 Digital Tools for Trade Unions Report

http://www.thefutureworldofwork.org/the-lab/report-connective-action/

NationBuilder

https://nationbuilder.com/europe - Software platform for community organising, groups and campaigns of all sizes - enables you to engage with and mobilise your community of supporters. One integrated platform including easy to create websites and action pages, email system, CRM, and donations.

Specific candidate website themes also available on the theme marketplace: https://themes.nationbuilder.com/

OneFiftyOne

https://www.onefiftyone.run - We’ve created a system that enables NGOs or political campaigns to run a large and scalable volunteer network focused not just on volunteer tracking but volunteer engagement. OneFiftyOne has built-in ways of smartly delegating GOTV efforts to volunteers, connecting people who want yard-signs with volunteers who can get them, and phone-banking. While giving these abilities out of the box, many more volunteer engagement workflows can be created by the campaign for their specific needs. Since we’re in beta, reach out to me personally at binny@onefiftyone.run

Membership

Idea and prototype for a tool to manage members using flexible group-based permissions.

Explanation: https://medium.com/@abscond/membership-a-prototype-ea822b2683b

Code: https://github.com/james/membership/commits/v2

Nametag.chat

Tool for creating small online group discussions around an issue, originally created for political campaigning in the US. The code is open source: https://github.com/davidgljay/nametag, it’s finished and functional, just needs someone to resurrect it.

It creates a shareable link which puts people in a chat rooms capped at a certain size, creating new ones as more people join.

Doorknocking Tools

  • Labour uses in-house ‘Doorstep’ web app. More information here.
  • The Lib Dem’s use MiniVAN https://act.ngpvan.com/minivan
  • https://www.reach.vote/ -- was developed for the AOC campaign and is now being used by the Elizabeth Warren for President campaign. it's not geared to door to door but makes it easy to canvass people on the street, in a crowd.
  • There are also commercially available solutions e.g.
  • https://www.ecanvasser.com
  • https://polisinc.com/ -- which is primarily used for door to door sales in industries like solar and home alarm systems. it was used by the Beto for Texas campaign in 2018 by volunteers to knock over 3 million doors.

More organizing tools -- including some of those listed here -- in the Civic Tech Field Guide's Organize Campaigns section.

Security

Monetisation

Coil

https://coil.com/ - Couple of lines of code and users will give you money automatically when they spend time on your site. Dev docs here: https://coil.com/docs/#web-monetization

Fundsurfer

https://www.fundsurfer.com/crowdfunding - Reward, donation and crypto crowdfunding platform.

Bring your crowd and get donations for your campaign, e.g leaflet printing, billboard advertising, banners, tshirts, legal fees, and so on. Email info@fundsurfer.com with any questions. Here are some of our election projects https://www.fundsurfer.com/search-projects?query=election

Beckton

https://blog.memespring.co.uk/2017/03/05/beckton-a-tool-to-build-groups-of-paying-members/

Kickstarter, but for subscription. Once a certain number of people subscribe everyone gets charged and the subscriptions begun.

Just a prototype - would be great if someone could run with this.

Visualisation

Constituency Hex Maps

Constituency Hex Maps - prior to the 2017 General Election, we created a ‘hex map’ of the UK to allow impartial visualisations of data. By removing the visual weighting seen on geographical maps (physically small constituencies with huge populations, or physically large constituencies with a low population), you get a more balanced map. The hex maps are available openly via GitHub if you want to make your own visualisations. Brought to you by ODI Leeds

R-based hex maps and constituency data, including census data and past election results, are available in the parlitools package.

Election Tools by Flourish

https://flourish.studio/2019/04/15/report-on-elections-with-flourish

Data Journalism Tools

A curated list of tools for processing, fetching, and visualising data https://datajournalism.tools/

Deprivation by Constituency

http://www.statsmapsnpix.com/2019/11/a-deprivation-by-constituency-chart.html

Election Maps UK

https://electionmaps.uk/polling

Current polling showed in an attractive way.

Perspektive

https://www.prespektive.org/

Simple infographics providing people with perspective on the figures being thrown around during this general election.

Candidate Gender Balance

http://5050parliament.co.uk/5050data/

Visual representation of all the ballots’ gender balance (2019 and 2017).

Prediction

Good Judgement Open - https://www.gjopen.com/questions/1354-will-a-political-party-gain-an-overall-majority-of-seats-in-the-house-of-commons-at-the-next-uk-general-election

Crowdsource predictions

2019 General Election Predictor

https://livedataoxford.shinyapps.io/TacticalVoting_GE19/

Predicts election results given polls and % of tactical voting.

Smarkets - https://smarkets.com/event/829237/politics/uk/next-uk-general-election/most-ge-seats

Prediction market on election outcomes including all seats.

Project Ideas - looking for people

Test Your MP

Poll the They Work For You API for issues and then ask how people would vote on them. Then compare that to how their constituency MP voted. Then find some way of helping them see if they should change/try and recall their party’s MP.

Party Purses

How much money do the political parties have? This resource might be useful - https://www.facebook.com/ads/library/report - Who Targets me are trying to make some of this kind of data accessible

Crowdsourcing manifesto costs/benefits

How could these be crowdsourced/error checked?

SomethingNew crowdsource theirs https://somethingnew.org.uk/faqs.html#manifesto - @joshr

Domain Names

GE2019.com

Website for sale - message @joshbal4 on twitter for a better price!

GE19.net and GE19.org, Vote19.uk and Vote19.co.uk

Message @peymanity on twitter

If anybody gets a website ready to go and is only missing a snappy primary domain to go with it, feel free to ask and I will be open to donating or selling cheap (approx covering costs) for the right cause. Or commercially for the other causes 🤷‍♂️

VAA (e.g. updated version of GE2017), GOTV, Labour-friendly stuff, or progressive causes (but not remain ones), are welcome to apply for either the ge19 pair or the vote19 pair.

Misc

2017 Election Tech Handbook

http://bit.ly/GE2017TechHandbook - we made a handbook for the 2017 election as well!

Bureau Local 2019 election reporting toolkit

https://docs.google.com/document/d/10U4tLr-dtvKtvRNh5wC_92H7sR1TMeC5kAaziDFGghI/mobilebasic?pli=1

see also https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/explainers/join-our-network

Participedia

https://participedia.net/ - A global community sharing knowledge and stories about public participation and democratic innovations.

votebuilder-xls2json

https://github.com/isms/votebuilder-xls2json/blob/master/README.md

Converts non-standard NGP VAN Votebuilder [Connect] .xls exports to JSON. These are the exports from screens like Counts and Crosstabs, which are actually in a form of HTML but have an XLS extension, to ensure they are associated with XLS in Windows.

Metomic

Metomic.io -- startup building products to handle user data ethically. Current product is an alternative to your standard intrusive cookie banner; gives users granular control over over cookie preferences. Going beyond cookies, we are working on tools to help users perform subject access requests more easily, and for organisations to deliver those more easily too.

GE2019.org

Contact @clry2

Our World In Data

https://ourworldindata.org/ - Research and data to make progress against the world’s largest problems. To work towards a better future, we need to understand how and why the world has changed up to now.

OWID would love your help improving their visualisation tooling - https://github.com/owid/owid-grapher/issues

twiDAQ

https://play.twidaq.com/-/uk-politics/ -- an (old) Twitter stock exchange game, potentially being resurrected. When running with > ~2,500 players it should start to generate some interesting, public, real-time, political sentiment analysis -- think second-screening while watching BBCQT.


Could use help from TweetyourMP, TwittElection & TweetMinster to build & maintain indices. Planning to clear out and rebuild with just UK political twitter handles for now. ( jim@twidaq.com / @jimbomorrison for contact - same chap/team as OneSub, above )

github.com/generalelection

https://github.com/generalelection - found this, not sure what it is

Collection of Digital Research Methods

https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDatabase

Non UK projects - Worth taking ideas from

Rock The Vote

https://www.rockthevote.org/

Voter information campaign

Obama Doing a Voter Information Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGJoizYE4Js

Really well put together video explaining common issues people have with voting

TurboVote

https://turbovote.org/?r=democracy-dot-works

Voter information tool

Nased

https://www.nased.org/

Election administration best practises

Ballot Scout

https://www.democracy.works/ballot-scout

Tracks postal votes

National Vote File

https://www.nationalvoterfile.org/

Crowdsourced voter data which is usually expensive and hard to obtain

Track Issues Voters Care About

http://www.issuevoter.org/

Voters get emailed on bills they care about and can email their representatives

Carpool Vote

https://carpoolvote.com/

Help voters get to polling station

Maps for Change

https://github.com/Maps-for-Change

Mapping important elements

Every Public Meeting

https://everypublicmeeting.com/

Showing a list of… every public (political) meeting.

Vote.org

https://www.vote.org/

Voter information

Gerrymander

http://gerrymander.princeton.edu/

Anti Gerrymandering tool

Magnify Progress

https://www.magnifyprogress.com/

Platform for activists to interact with normal people

Spoke

https://opensource.moveon.org/spoke-p2p

Text your campaign supporters

On the Fence

http://onthefence.co.nz/

A Voter Advice Application aimed at young New Zealanders for the 2017 General Election.

2020 Campaign Tracker

https://2020campaigntracker.com/ - tracking adverts across the campaign

Now check out the Political Data and Events & Community pages!

[a]There could be party records too

[b]These could compare your answers to your MPs using the TheyWorkForYou API. You *would* have voted like that, but *they* voted like this.

[c]da, comrade

[d]In practice this does mean quite a significant Liberal Democrat bias, including over Labour candidates who may have a better chance

[e]It's not "bias", it's what happens when the Labour vote goes from 40% in 2017 to 23-26%; and the Lib Dem vote goes from 7% in 2017 to 17-20% - esp. in southern, urban & suburban seats. See the Observer piece linked in the description.

[f]Can expect to see loads of their recommendations change now that LDs are sliding in the polls, then...

[g]Love this resource - is there anyone here who could do something similar looking at the effect of cuts to the police budget on, eg., number of local ward officers, regular community contact etc.?

[h]I think +joseph@simmsreeve.com is working on a thing to make these easier to make

[i]Hey Tim, happy to chat about this!