 Hi everyone, I was just saying I don't think I know like everyone in the room But I think probably a lot of you like it's kind of preaching to quite a little bit So the other thing is I've got Demoxicub did loads and loads of stuff for the election and I probably don't have enough time to talk about all of it So I'm gonna skim over loads and loads of stuff, but Apologies in advance and I come and talk to me about well if you're more interested later on so alright So I'm sim. I'm not showing my screen Was working. Yeah And I run Demoxicub and there's a few people here who like a very big volunteers of that We got a lot of volunteers to help out with our projects What we do improve the democratic process through kind of volunteering building tools and collaborating with like-minded organizations and here's some of the projects we ran over the general election So what I'm going to do is say in General with democracy stuff There's lots people doing loads of interesting stuff in the democratic space There's some people working on like voting reform on new ways of doing voting or talking about online voting or talking about Replacing parliament or the laws or like loads of kind of really big things There's a really good space for that debate But what we wanted to do was start really small and say there's very very basic things of democracy like you know It's kind of quite old-fashioned in a lot of ways and there's lots of good things about that but you know going to community center and writing it across a bit paper is like not a digital thing and Let's look at if there's ways What's the low-hanging fruit in that space that is the first digital stuff we can do And yeah, so we have a long way to go before online voting is something that's just something we can implement It's like you we need to need to do a lot of stuff General elections, so we first start working on the 2015 general election about a year ago properly and There's interesting stuff about it. There's no single owner of the election, which is really interesting. So parliament does some stuff Councils do some stuff the Electoral Commission do some stuff and it's not really obvious kind of like To the citizen like who's doing what it just sort of happens Because of that there's no central source information, so we see that councils have a load of information on the websites The Electoral Commission does parliament does Again, there's the same kind of thing and of course because of that. It's just PDFs all over the place and that's frustrating The first problem we tried to solve was how to find who was standing for election This is like point one on the thing that should be digital is working out who you're able to vote for That's really hard to do or it was really hard to do these were to two screenshots They took from kind of January time, I suppose If you search for like who who are my candidates the Guardian gave you this this is the top result the Guardian Which just says no longer updated that's gone and then Wikipedia had a list of candidates, but it was actually wrong Which is a shame I could have gone and fix that and like you know that but like it's kind of clunky and like a table on a Wikipedia pages And you know it's good, but there's probably a better way of presenting candidates This is what the councils do They do it about three weeks before the election starts. There's 450 councils and they publish Tables so this is my constituency and as you can see it's it's Like similar to that list there, but it's kind of updated It's just their names the the address if they don't have a constituency and like a description of the party This is interesting because it's it doesn't have to be the party name It can just be a description of the political party. So you still don't know like who the person is standing for it's just like This is on my council's website Three weeks before the election and it doesn't really tell me anything about How I might have an informed vote for one of these people This is another example of What's this show? Yeah, there's no party here There's just some people's names and some people's addresses and like this is the state provided way of telling you who's standing for elections so it's kind of completely incomprehensible Bit worse Birmingham decided to do a scan of a print of the table so you can see the nice light artifacts That's not very digital So what we did is we built a website called your next MP which crowdsourced all of this We got it from the statement of nominations later on but there are any publishers. I said three weeks before the election The the data is there the parties know who's going to be standing a long time before that the press know all that kind of stuff And in fact there were loads of stories about candidates being deselected You know months before these nominations were out So there's obviously kind of of interest in the public domain that candidates are selected or deselected but there's no information about them so we crowdsourced all of them we could find and This is what a kind of later version of our website looks like so we got like photos We pulled in Facebook LinkedIn Twitter like all of the kind of like surrounding things So rather than just a list of names and some parties it kind of who are these actual people? If you don't know who to vote for you can go and start research and you can follow on Twitter You can go and talk to them on Twitter all that kind of stuff We did quite well we got about four and a half million page views Election day were really popular. We had like 2000 concurrent users and well you can read the numbers there But kind of more exciting than people using our thing alone We get we like made an open data set which was a Attribution share a like data set that lots and lots of people started using and if that one problem We found with it is that because we just made it open and free to use we didn't know who used it So we were kind of googling around them would find like some website made a tool like oh What do you think of your candidates and then we'd find out they were actually using our data But they hadn't told us about it. So kind of tracking who used it was kind of difficult But the ones we do know about this is the most exciting one We got Google as a partner and they pulled in our data set So you can whereas but the start of the thing I said I googled who can I vote for and it gave me some really bad information from the Guardian Google built a widget for us. So when you search who can I vote for you had this thing you put in Where you live and then it just gave you the list embedded in Google search for who can vote for so like that's our biggest kind of Headline success story of like we took this data. There's normally PDFs We got it on the Google and actually on election days on the home page. They linked this widget on the home page This kind of shows the the need so the dots there of Is the day that the nomination papers are released So the day that kind of the best version of the state provided data is released and you can see we had From over here we had loads of users. Sorry. There's no numbers on this graph. They probably crop small But the numbers are big like just trust me. It's not like five people Yeah, so for reuse as I said, we had a CSV snapshot of the data generator of 15 minutes It was updating quite frequently at some points like people were adding email addresses all was high and all that kind of stuff It was formatted the back end was done in the my societies popolo format Which is one of my studies the populous foundations popolo format Which is a way of storing people as they write to organizations and doing loads of kind of complex There's lots of educators like people change their names or they have weird titles or they have alternative names and that kind of stuff So that was how the whole website was based it was kind of built that and the export was in that format The nice thing about that is there's loads of tools that they've written that just read in from that format So you could have built a write your candidates tool by literally like pasting the URL of the API into the hosted tool And then having it exist which was really exciting Yeah, the back end was my society's pop it which is a Software implementation of that thing. It's a kind of node MongoE kind of thing that does that And what we're doing next is taking this to other countries, which is kind of exciting So hopefully we're gonna have a front end to who are my candidates in every country across the world Off the back. So the interesting thing is like what we were hope what we thought originally was that We would just crowdsource the database have a day set there and then people you know We leave it lying around and then some people would go and make some really cool stuff out of it And some people did make some stuff off it Which is very exciting Most of them looked a little bit like the website that we made which was like a list of candidates, which is you know Which is cool, but it wasn't like Really kind of like bold exciting crazy projects out there So we did a couple things that first of all we just decided to make our website We realized that our website was actually the website that people wanted to like to look at and we were getting a little traffic So we made our website better and I'm more user-friendly We also had several side projects that use the data. So we had like No, when you got a list of candidates you kind of want to know what you can do with them And it turns out they'll go to public debates before an election called hustings So we made a directory of hustings So you kind of know no way you can go and meet them We asked them to upload their CV, which is a kind of interesting Like another iteration on on the council run just a list of names And now we give you names in a photo and Twitter profile and stuff But the CV is like if you frame becoming an MP is applying for job then a CV is really important It's only one data point, but it's still significant more than we have Electronmentions is really interesting. So the the database was sourced. We had just like source URLs for all of the edits for your xmp. So it was all all we could back it up and someone went and scraped basically all of the news articles. They're normally news articles that are saying this candidate's been selected scraped all the news articles and Pulled out kind of extracted quotes from the candidates. So you could say X said, you know They oppose this or something and then you could pull those all out And we put them on election mentions.com and election leaflets is a way of crowdsourcing Election leaflets of the candidates ascending and like having that exposed and kind of transpire an open archive that's built in real time All those sites got got a load of I mean, yeah, we had a load of candidates a load of leaflets Quite a lot of CVs. I'm kind of surprised at how many CVs we got in the end. It's kind of exciting Thousand public debates or the hustings I've got any dope from from my local hustings I added one to the site and because of that whole housing association Discovered it and they like sent it around turning to 30 more people turn up to the hustings than they were expecting Which meant not everyone could fit in but one of the people who turned up who they weren't expecting was one of the candidates Who hadn't been invited and he only found out about the hustings because of the site So he turned up at the table and was like well I'm gonna just sit here anyway and take part because Yeah, and then loads of press mentions we scraped for basically every every newspaper and local newspaper and load of blogging sites And got loads of mentions of candidates. There's kind of really rich data set there of It's all text, but it's kind of like you can extract out loads of interesting stuff out of that text There's a similar story for polling stations as with candidates. So again every council Maintains where you should vote so we kind of we fixed the problem of like who who's on the ballot paper But it's still quite hard to find out where that ballot paper is going to be You get a polling card. That's fine. A lot of people lose their polling card If you've got it pinned on the fridge and then like you go to work and forget to bring it with you You want to vote on the way back from work? You just like it's really annoying On election day, we saw hundreds of people just tweeting that they want to vote But they have no idea where to go, you know, so there's a problem here. So we can make the case for Saying you need to be able to Google, you know, where do I vote or where's my polling station? And in fact, I think that was like the third most Google search term in the UK on polling day is like where's my polling station? And there's no answer for it There's no answer online at all because again, it's like 450 councils published PDFs that are incomprehensible for people to do So we need to try and fix that. We tried our best. We basically Failed this time around. We did an FOI to every council Lots of them didn't respond at all, which is a bit worrying for people who like FOI And we only got 15% of the data that we asked for like a 15% worth of councils gave us the data, which is But we made this nonetheless Basically, if we didn't have the data, it would say here's your council phone number You should go and do it But if it did work, it would look something like this where you could say It's not very easy to understand but like this is where you live and this is where your polling station is And it would give you Google walking directions and that kind of stuff This is more of a kind of proof of concept of here's where we should be if If the state was available, if the council's made it freely available You can make tools like this and like lots of councils make their own tool on their own website for it But one of the problems is if you don't know Who your council are or like if you don't if you don't any way engage with the state You just heard on the news that you have to go and vote and like you registered on gov UK But gov UK doesn't tell you anything more than just where to register and like you're not top It's just kind of broken like if you were to do it as a kind of service design It would just leave you hanging all over the place So a centralized place to find out we account with your polling stations regardless of who your councillors and without you Having to know anything more than what your postcode is is there's a kind of good case for that This is my controversial statement The open data isn't enough so a lot of councils already have polling station data on data gov UK But that sitting there Didn't help anyone find out where to vote, right? I mean like probably this is you know semi-controversial like it's a conversation starter, but Let's start with using a need of like let's find the polling station and as soon as we explain that to a load of the councils They suddenly were really on board with understanding why they needed to open this data up, right? So like let's use that as a turn it round You can imagine like the the the open nature is a tool for doing that. It's not the solution in itself and Perhaps no one's saying it solution itself But there's lots people who just say sort of like all the solution to Fixing load government office to open the data actually if you end up with 450 differently formatted fragmented datasets on data gov UK That's not actually going to help anyone. So like I kind of want to find ways of making Opening the data just a part of fixing the user needs rather than rather than being a solution Like I say it's deliberately controversial and maybe arguing against the straw man But there's Q&A's right. So like this is what it's for Oh, yeah, and the fragmented data bit like There's loads of problems that we have where 450 councils manage a thing and they do it slightly differently and People have tried to solve it so like openly local tried to solve it And it's just really difficult maintaining updated datasets from all of these councils. I really want to figure out a way of Solving that fragmentation somehow Well still maintaining local councils probably, you know, it's kind of Right. So next steps democracy isn't about elections. It's about everything else in between elections the 7th of May this year was about the only day that you have a really good answer to the question How do I engage with the state? But on every other day, like how do I engage with the state in a meaningful way that's gonna like make things happen in the way That I think they should happen It's kind of hard to answer question any other day of the year and I want to try and Do that. So there's this idea of the do something dashboard, which is literally what can I do right now? You know put my postcode maybe or just and here's a list of things you can do and maybe you care about these five topics So we'll try and match the things you can do to the topics you care about maybe not Some people do this already like my society's tools are really good at sort of taking a little nibble into this Fixed my street is there's nearly always something you can do a fix my straight just by going for a walk or whatever And then we get into these other kind of fragmented datasets like Council meetings How do you figure out when the next council meeting is or when your next MP surgery is or loads of other things? You might want to do but it's kind of hard to discover them. So that's that's the discovery phase of the do something dashboard and They're like the really final thing is let's not make people understand the country's org chart in order to interact with it. So Westminster MPs only have a certain remit. They don't do bin collection. They don't really do like European stuff or international stuff in the same way as we think about them They are French on that way, but they don't really, you know, your Westminster MP isn't responsible for Immigrants coming to your street if that's what you care about, right? They can't really do much about it Same way, councils can't do things. So the things you care about really might not map on to the way that you understand the country to be run And like really how many people here really understand Exactly what it is their district council does or there or their city council does all the council What is their remit? What do they do? Let's figure that out and let's not figure that out by teaching the whole country what the council's remit is Let's figure out by just saying here's a problem. I've got Help me fix it and then somebody is in government to fix that. So that's all I've got please like