For my final project I’m working in a platform to monitor municipal elections in Guadalajara, the aim of the project is to concentrate information about the candidates, gathering the history of them, how did they performed in public positions, how much does they were earning in each public position, etc.
One of the main problems that we have in Mexico is that we don’t have “public memory” of our politicians, we see faces and hear names, but we don’t really know what is their history, how does the have worked, did they did it right or wrong, did they get involved in corruption scandals, what where their position in different matters.
Geting all the above in mind is that a group of friends and me started working in a spinoff of CiudadPixel.mx a blog that we have about cities and technology, the new feature of the blog is called “Monitor Electoral” (Electoral monitor // Alpha version) we are getting the information from the mayoral candidates, from the basic info such as their names, to a time line of their lives, getting political issues, educational ones and other interesting information. The next steps are going to be to add some new functions such as get the proposals of each candidate in different subjects, their teams, and what does the media says about them, also to build a table to run comparisons between them, like a fact sheet for comparing cellphones or computers.
One of the goals of the platform is to evolve to be open source and gain more people who are interested in participating, the idea is to be able to growth the platform to different kind of candidate not just for mayoral candidates. On the other hand this is also the beginning to build a politicians data base, where we could look up, we see some interesting opportunities in having this “public memory” where we could look back in elections campaign to have accountability on the politicians.
We have been talking about the social component of the platform, how could we get the people to engage with the site, how could we empower them? Those are two of the main questions we are trying to figure it out.
You will want to study existing election monitoring and political profile sites and ask your questions of them: How did they attract participation? What were their most useful features according to news stories about the tools? What were their sources of data? Were they in a country or region that had a good open data available they could pull down or was it a lot of scraping they did on the quiet? Perhaps they ran surveys of politicians or citizens to get further data? What content presentation and data visualization strategies did they employ? What seems to work and what seems to make the information less accessible? Check out whether you might want to plug into or at least steal the principles at the heart of http://www.openingparliament.org/casestudies.