UK Election Tech Handbook
electiontechhandbook.uk
UK Election Tech Handbook
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Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#2This is a good addition for the Filterbubble breakers section..
"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."
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#3 Some tools might be unavailable due to heavy traffic in this file. [Try again] [Dismiss]
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#4Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#5Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.
I was part of creating the initial version of 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.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#6[deleted]
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#7This 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.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#8Whotargetsme is a good start, but I think this election is one where fighting algorithmically targeted disinformation is going to be absolutely critical.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#9Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.
I'm working on 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.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#10My only concern is that the people who run the tools etc. have their political view. For example "https://tacticalvote.co.uk" is clearly against the Conservative party. So that tool is straight away biased.