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UK Election Tech Handbook

83 points by benrmatthews 7y ago

rapnie 7y ago
This is a good addition for the Filterbubble breakers section.. https://www.talkingeurope.eu/ 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 7y ago
  Please add it in.
jlokier 7y ago
Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file. [Try again] [Dismiss] I love the way I'm seeing load warnings from Google on this document, as though it's overwhelmed by being listed on Hacker News :-)
sefrost 7y ago
Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.
- jpallen 7y ago
  I was part of creating the initial version of https://www.swapmyvote.uk/ 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.
- buro9 7y ago
  I'm working on https://tacticalvote.co.uk https://tacticalvote.co.uk and volunteered during the 2017 snap General Election too. # 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.
  - obayesshelton 7y ago
    As soon as I saw "UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES" I left the page, regardless of who I vote for this tool is clearly biased.
    - buro9 7y ago
      I was at some of the meetings at Newspeak House from where the OP document originated. I would say that not one person who is volunteering, giving up time and skill, or employed to work on anything listed on there... is without bias. There is no person or group working on anything to do with politics and cited in that doc, that does not have an agenda of their own.
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
mellosouls 7y ago
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.
pjc50 7y ago
Whotargetsme is a good start, but I think this election is one where fighting algorithmically targeted disinformation is going to be absolutely critical.
obayesshelton 7y ago
My only concern is that the people who run the tools etc. have their political view. For example "https://tacticalvote.co.uk" https://tacticalvote.co.uk" is clearly against the Conservative party. So that tool is straight away biased.
- dangerface 7y ago
  > UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES 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.
  - methehack 7y ago
    If promoting voting or identifying the disinformation campaigns of nation states is considered bias, than consider me happily labeled. However, I think there's something categorically different about such tools as they are not so much promoting a specific outcome as allowing for a more representative outcome, aka a functioning democracy where people are exchanging ideas not click rates.
    - dangerface 7y ago
      Our representative democracy is setup as a two party system (first past the post elections) if we want a more representative outcome we should switch to a direct democracy or implement the alternative vote. Free exchange of ideas is my ultimate goal but the average voter doesn't share this goal, they get their information from "authoritative" sources such as "their" party or the mass media. We did have a vote to bring in the alternate vote but every major party (left and right) and media outlet (left and right) slammed it as anti-democratic. We can't depend on the average voter to get informed and vote representatively because the system intentionally prevents this.
      - specialist 7y ago
        "alternative vote" If you mean switch from FPTP to some form of RCV for executive positions or proportional representation (PR) for assemblies, then I agree. For RCV, I strongly prefer Approval Voting, which best balances fairness and simplicity. But we'll get the most benefits from PR.
methehack 7y ago
Does anyone know of a similar resource for the next US presidential election?
- nathan_young 7y ago
  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.
- bszupnick 7y ago
  I'm only hooked in to the Democratic technology side, but there is https://thedemlabs.org/ https://thedemlabs.org/ that collates (and creates) a bunch of technological solutions for campaigns problems. I'm also personally affiliated with https://ragtag.org/ https://ragtag.org/ which is a bunch of volunteers trying to make said resources and tools.
drcongo 7y ago
> Join the WhatsApp group to be kept up to date with major updates & news: WhatsApp Group Yeah, sure, hand over all your political planning to Facebook.
- edsaperia 7y ago
  Do your planning wherever you like, but join the whatsapp group to share general updates.
  - robjan 7y ago
    The main problem is that the WhatsApp group is nearly at its limit and you can see everyone's phone number. This is one of the ways Telegram excels.
- jackbrookes 7y ago
  WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted.
  - drcongo 7y ago
    For group chats? Citation needed.
- mcintyre1994 7y ago
  Every UK political party and MP uses WhatsApp groups for pretty much everything according to Westminster journalists.
nathan_young 7y ago
A lot of these tools have very little money or support. Some of them have had 1m+ views last election. If something interests you, you could offer to help the developers involved. (disclosure: I am involved in the project)

83 points by benrmatthews 7y ago

This is a good addition for the Filterbubble breakers section.. https://www.talkingeurope.eu/ 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 7y ago
Please add it in.

jlokier 7y ago

Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file. [Try again] [Dismiss] I love the way I'm seeing load warnings from Google on this document, as though it's overwhelmed by being listed on Hacker News :-)

sefrost 7y ago

Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.

jpallen 7y ago
I was part of creating the initial version of https://www.swapmyvote.uk/ 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.
buro9 7y ago
I'm working on https://tacticalvote.co.uk https://tacticalvote.co.uk and volunteered during the 2017 snap General Election too. # 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.
- obayesshelton 7y ago
  As soon as I saw "UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES" I left the page, regardless of who I vote for this tool is clearly biased.
  - buro9 7y ago
    I was at some of the meetings at Newspeak House from where the OP document originated. I would say that not one person who is volunteering, giving up time and skill, or employed to work on anything listed on there... is without bias. There is no person or group working on anything to do with politics and cited in that doc, that does not have an agenda of their own.
dan-robertson 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

mellosouls 7y ago

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.

pjc50 7y ago

Whotargetsme is a good start, but I think this election is one where fighting algorithmically targeted disinformation is going to be absolutely critical.

obayesshelton 7y ago

My only concern is that the people who run the tools etc. have their political view. For example "https://tacticalvote.co.uk" https://tacticalvote.co.uk" is clearly against the Conservative party. So that tool is straight away biased.

dangerface 7y ago
> UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES 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.
- methehack 7y ago
  If promoting voting or identifying the disinformation campaigns of nation states is considered bias, than consider me happily labeled. However, I think there's something categorically different about such tools as they are not so much promoting a specific outcome as allowing for a more representative outcome, aka a functioning democracy where people are exchanging ideas not click rates.
  - dangerface 7y ago
    Our representative democracy is setup as a two party system (first past the post elections) if we want a more representative outcome we should switch to a direct democracy or implement the alternative vote. Free exchange of ideas is my ultimate goal but the average voter doesn't share this goal, they get their information from "authoritative" sources such as "their" party or the mass media. We did have a vote to bring in the alternate vote but every major party (left and right) and media outlet (left and right) slammed it as anti-democratic. We can't depend on the average voter to get informed and vote representatively because the system intentionally prevents this.
    - specialist 7y ago
      "alternative vote" If you mean switch from FPTP to some form of RCV for executive positions or proportional representation (PR) for assemblies, then I agree. For RCV, I strongly prefer Approval Voting, which best balances fairness and simplicity. But we'll get the most benefits from PR.

methehack 7y ago

Does anyone know of a similar resource for the next US presidential election?

nathan_young 7y ago
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.
bszupnick 7y ago
I'm only hooked in to the Democratic technology side, but there is https://thedemlabs.org/ https://thedemlabs.org/ that collates (and creates) a bunch of technological solutions for campaigns problems. I'm also personally affiliated with https://ragtag.org/ https://ragtag.org/ which is a bunch of volunteers trying to make said resources and tools.

drcongo 7y ago

> Join the WhatsApp group to be kept up to date with major updates & news: WhatsApp Group Yeah, sure, hand over all your political planning to Facebook.

edsaperia 7y ago
Do your planning wherever you like, but join the whatsapp group to share general updates.
- robjan 7y ago
  The main problem is that the WhatsApp group is nearly at its limit and you can see everyone's phone number. This is one of the ways Telegram excels.
jackbrookes 7y ago
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted.
- drcongo 7y ago
  For group chats? Citation needed.
mcintyre1994 7y ago
Every UK political party and MP uses WhatsApp groups for pretty much everything according to Westminster journalists.

nathan_young 7y ago

A lot of these tools have very little money or support. Some of them have had 1m+ views last election. If something interests you, you could offer to help the developers involved. (disclosure: I am involved in the project)