Does anyone know of a similar resource for the next US presidential election?
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.
UK Election Tech Handbook
21–30 of 49 posts
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
As soon as I saw "UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES" I left the page, regardless of who I vote for this tool is clearly biased.
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.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#23This is a good addition for the Filterbubble breakers section.. 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."
Please add it in.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 s…
Hey, thanks for the reply, I really appreciate it. I was about to pick up a new contract, but now the election has been announced I'm quite interested in joining up to help with some projects like this. If I can find some interesting/impactful projects I'm happy volunteering full time up to the election. By the way, how is your site promoted?
> By the way, how is your site promoted?
Purely organic for the most part.
We have 2 or 3 people on the team who work social media, and TBH this is what the majority of the work is.
They may draft a press release, and send it via email to a few contacts. But for the most part, this is extremely unfunded and independent work, with a few people manually writing all of the social media posts and replies.
This time they're discussing actually cut and pasting templates from Google Docs, so it's improving!
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#25A 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)
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#26My 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.
Think about the name... You have to vote tactically against something ergo someone
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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.
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.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#28> 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.
WhatsApp is end-to-end encrypted.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#29My 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.
Only trust mutual mistrust.
When all the belligerents, err aspirants, certify the results, then it's probably good enough.
Re: UK Election Tech Handbook
#30Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.
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.