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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.
  - sefrost 7y ago
    I don't understand how you can complain the tool is biased against the Conservatives when the purpose of the tool is to prevent a Conservative win. If it didn't do that it wouldn't do anything. Unless I've missed the point.
  - sideshowb 7y ago
    Most people who look at the evidence, inasmuch as reliable evidence can ever exist in the socioeconomic sphere, end up concluding that moving the UK further to the left is not a bad idea. Little wonder that grassroots tech movements look at evidence. Of course the Conservatives claim that the evidence itself is biased. I am not joking.
  - n4r9 7y ago
    Counterpoint: the Tories are the largest benefactors of an unfair fptp-based gerrymandered voting system. In 2017 they received 5% more votes than Labour but 20% more MPs. They're the most obvious target for someone interested in tactical voting, regardless of their political persuasion (they're very unlikely to be a Tory voter).
    - marksweston 7y ago
      This is simply not true. FFTP is biased in favour of the party with the largest share of the vote, or perhaps another way of putting is that the relationship between vote share and number of MPs is not linear. And beyond this, the British electoral system has consistently favoured Labour for decades (as Boundary Commission changes fall behind demographic change and population movement) https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-constituencies-voting-system-labour-theresa-may-dup-a8538971.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-...
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.

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.
- sefrost 7y ago
  I don't understand how you can complain the tool is biased against the Conservatives when the purpose of the tool is to prevent a Conservative win. If it didn't do that it wouldn't do anything. Unless I've missed the point.
- sideshowb 7y ago
  Most people who look at the evidence, inasmuch as reliable evidence can ever exist in the socioeconomic sphere, end up concluding that moving the UK further to the left is not a bad idea. Little wonder that grassroots tech movements look at evidence. Of course the Conservatives claim that the evidence itself is biased. I am not joking.
- n4r9 7y ago
  Counterpoint: the Tories are the largest benefactors of an unfair fptp-based gerrymandered voting system. In 2017 they received 5% more votes than Labour but 20% more MPs. They're the most obvious target for someone interested in tactical voting, regardless of their political persuasion (they're very unlikely to be a Tory voter).
  - marksweston 7y ago
    This is simply not true. FFTP is biased in favour of the party with the largest share of the vote, or perhaps another way of putting is that the relationship between vote share and number of MPs is not linear. And beyond this, the British electoral system has consistently favoured Labour for decades (as Boundary Commission changes fall behind demographic change and population movement) https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-constituencies-voting-system-labour-theresa-may-dup-a8538971.html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-...

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.