There was some discussion wrt using the crowdsourcing framework from
YourNextMP.com to do candidates at the local elections, the main issues
being,

- There being several times more local candidates than westminster
candidates
- The interest per-candidate is lower, so overall there's less incentive
for volunteers and potential users of the data
- Data could be harder to come by for feeding in as a baseline dataset
-- I can't find a list of local candidates on the labour.org.uk site.
- The electoral commission should do it (though waiting for them to do
it seems hopeless)

There's also developer time. I remember there was a slightly lower-tech
website that was trying to get volunteers to get local election
candidates, though they weren't aiming for completeness. Can't remember
the url, though.

So yeah, pretty daunting, though I think some element of crowdsourcing
has to happen in tandem with openelectiondata.org in order to get
completion, and I'm not sure if that's the best use of crowd-time given
the impact. Obviously too late now, but there are elections all the time.

Tim

On 04/05/11 16:33, Matt Ford wrote:
> Thanks for reminding me about that website. I remember seeing it
> before and I think it's the right approach to getting the data we
> need, the thought of having to crowd source 279 local authorities with
> umpteen wards in each authority is not appealing!
>
> On 04/05/2011 09:32, Harrison, Stuart wrote:
>> Sadly, I don't think there is. There's no duty for local authorities to
>> provide election data in any machine readable form, so for most
>> councils, the best you're going to get is PDFs. The Open Election Data
>> project (http://www.openelectiondata.org) (masterminded by Chris
>> Taggart) attempted to get around this by publishing an RDFa schema for
>> local authorities to publish election data on their website, but takeup
>> wasn't great (although we're still using it for this year's elections)
>> and it threw up more questions than solutions.
>>
>> Stuart Harrison
>> Webmaster
>> Lichfield District Council
>> www.lichfielddc.gov.uk
>>
>
>
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