Tuesday, 16 March 2010

What am I doing?

As you can see from the sidebar description as well as watching our democratic process at work I am doing this to see how technology might be beneficial to the democratic process.
Let me be clear this is not about electronic voting or counting, we are not in a position to do this securely at the moment and possibly never will be. For more on the electronic voting pilots and counts carried out in the last few years read the Open Rights Group's reports on the matters.

No this is about spreading information to the electorate, before during and after elections at all levels to promote engagement.
Before is trying to show the mechanisms running up to polling day, so for example will promoting the candidate nomination process widen the interest in standing for election away from just members of the main parties?
During is going to first be the depressingly familiar modern task of trying to get the electorate to care enough to go vote, then it will be looking at useful ways of getting the rumours and results out from the count, what formats will be best, just tweeting? Some XML format or other? HTML with RDFa? It is this point where I am interested in your opinions an also want to encourage you to do something similar in your area.
After I will definitely want to review what was done and see what improvements can be made for next time (which could be in fairly quick order if the local and general elections are on different dates) .

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