Thursday 7 May 2015

Democracy Club - A Good Cause!

I got this in my email - they don't have a link to an online copy to circulate, so put it here! Do read and think about supporting them!

From: Democracy Club hello@democracyclub.org.uk
Date: 7 May 2015 17:54

Good evening,

We hope you’re settling in for a long and enjoyable (?) evening.

If you’re not following live - don’t worry, we’re updating YourNextMP.com live as we watch the results from the BBC. At any point in the evening - or tomorrow morning - check your constituency and see whether a winner has been announced.

If you are following live - we’ll see you on the twitter hashtag #YourNextMP and possibly#ElectionNightGames too.

Just under a year ago, we called a public meeting in the basement of a London university to ask what passionate non-partisan volunteers could do to make the 2015 election better. From all kinds of ideas, a small group settled on building a platform to crowdsource a list of candidates. Because everything starts with candidates. Every leaflet, every hustings, every tweet - is ultimately about or from a candidate.

With lots of help from brilliant volunteers and organisations, YourNextMP.com was born. And improved and iterated upon. And over the course of the campaign it has had over one million visitors, who read up on 4,000 candidates. But more importantly, the database was open - anyone could reuse or link it. And they did - from Voter Advice Applications (like Verto, VoteMatch and VoteForPolicies) - to campaigns for the NHS and RSPB - to huge media organisations like The Guardian. Together, we got better information to millions of voters.

To cap it off we helped reboot electionleaflets.org and built a hustings database - the first of its kind in the UK.

But there’s so much more we could do.

Next year sees assembly and parliamentary elections in Wales, Northern Ireland, London and Scotland, as well as London Mayoral election, local elections in England, and Police and Crime Commissioner elections. That’s a lot of democracy.

We would love to keep making our tools better - so that voters can be better informed across all these elections - but everything we’ve done so far has been through kindness of coders and volunteers. Sadly, this isn’t sustainable!

So if you think we should keep working together to make democracy better, now is the time to help build a sustainable future for Democracy Club.

Please click here to chip in £3/month to help sustain Democracy Club through the next elections and beyond.

Thank you again, for all your support, your help, your tweets, your leaflet uploads.

See you on twitter as the results come in…

Andy, Emily, James, Joe, Sym, Tim and all at Democracy Club

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