[okfn-discuss] Fwd: Open Source Voter Guide Platforms?

Wed Jun 18 14:16:49 UTC 2014

Lots of great examples from Europe. What do you recommend we explore first?

From: Steven Clift <clift at e-democracy.org>
Date: Wed, Jun 18, 2014 at 9:15 AM
Subject: Open Source Voter Guide Platforms?
To: newswire <newswire at groups.dowire.org>, brigade <brigade at codeforamerica.org>

With  http://hackformn.org coming up with weekend, I've planted a seed
for a group to crowd-source social media links tied to the 134 state
house seats in Minnesota.

The government collects campaign web addresses and email (some they
added to the campaign fling form at my suggestion a decade ago), but
not social media links, a stock digital photo, or any basic candidate
information.

My goal is to stand up a pretty basic voter guide that builds on our
previous effort to crowd-source social media links for existing house
members: http://bit.ly/mnlegsocialmedianotes

Ideally candidates will be able to upload a stock photo and character
limited free form text, insert a youtube video link, update the social
media links we don't have, and voters will be able to look up the
candidates by their address or a map.

KEY is taking a creative commons approach that says anyone may reuse
the data and therefore lower the cost for the media and others
creating other voters guides.

I know of http://Consider.It which is used with the
http://LivingVotersGuide.org in Washington State, but the frame is to
help people evaluation ballot measures (which we rarely have
state-wide in Minnesota).

Via some parliamentary monitoring circles and Twitter I was sent:

1. http://bit.ly/1lxW68C - 134 voter advice applications spreadsheet -
via https://twitter.com/kamilgregor and a map from Europe
http://bit.ly/1iEejkX

2. http://voisietequi.it runs on django/web.py over python,
Source code is on github, at https://github.com/openpolis/voisietequi/tree/vsq2,
and https://github.com/openpolis/voisietequi-computer

3. http://www.votematch.eu http://www.euvox2014.eu

4. http://volebnikalkulacka.cz http://volebnikalkulacka.sk http://partmonitor.hu

5. ParliamentWatch is running on Drupal.
We released all code on:
https://github.com/parliamentwatch/parliamentwatch
http://www.parliamentwatch.org

So what am I missing?

What code out there would be the easiest to adapt to our stated goal
of a simple system for candidates to be invited to upload ore details
and others to be able to get and reuse the data?

Thanks,
Steven Clift

Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
  Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.org
  Twitter: http://twitter.com/democracy
  Tel/Text: +1.612.234.7072