Hi all, Thanks. YourNextPCC ended up getting quite reasonable traffic. I think I achieved my goal of building on yournextmp's attempt to provision open data about candidates and help voters by drawing in more sources of information about candidates, along with some healthy competition with sites like policeelections.com and the Home Office's own site choosemypcc.org.uk (a first! even if they did have trouble making candidate websites into <a> links!).
I hope the government doesn't take away from this the idea that online provision of candidate information is pointless -- if anything, this was one of the best elections for online information, serving well those of us who expect everything to be online; just they failed to plug the gap from the lack of partisan leafleting, not that I think that party leaflets should have to be the voter's main source of information. Turnout is also going to be a bit more complex, not helped by e.g. the front page of the BBC barely mentioning it on the day, and people who deliberately decided to stay home due to opposing the election idea itself. It is also sort of surprising of that even having gathered manifestos, CVs and news stories for most candidates, there's stil a strong temptation to vote along party lines... I think there was something missing still. Maybe a good survey. Tim On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Edmund von der Burg <[email protected] > wrote: > On 16 November 2012 09:42, Tom Steinberg <[email protected]> wrote: > > I think it is worth bigging up Tim Green who took time from his own > > life to build http://www.yournextpcc.com to plug at least some of the > > gap. > > Certainly: Big hurrahs for Tim! > > Tim was also one of the reasons that YourNextMP.com worked for the > 2010 general election. > > One of the motivations for that site was that for some parties a lack > of information was a benefit. My hunch was that people voted for the > BNP because they didn't like the other parties, rather than because > they liked the BNP. By shining a light on them and making the > individual candidates more that just a name next to the party on the > ballot I hoped that people would dig deeper and make a more informed > choice. No idea if it worked, I hope it did. > > I still wonder if in some elections the best campaigning strategy is > to stay at home and rely on unthinking party loyalty? In some cases > saying anything will just lose you votes. Obviously I don't like this. > > The next time there is an election we should strive to make > information readily available as we've been doing. But we should also > take some time to make it clear where it is not available, where > candidates are hiding? Staying at home should be the worst thing a > candidate can do - if they don't campaign there should be a way to > call them out on it. > > Anyhoo, good work Tim! > > Cheers, > Edmund. > > _______________________________________________ > developers-public mailing list > [email protected] > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public > > Unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/timothy.green%40gmail.com >
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