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#365daysofpolitics day 8: fielding candidates
A bit more manifesto wrangling today, including merging another successful proposal in. Then I’ve spent some of my evening doing my job as Tech officer for Something New. We have two new candidates standing in forthcoming elections – Lindsey Garrett for London Mayor and Jessie Macneil-Brown in Tower Hamlets Stepney Ward – so I’ve been arranging some technical…
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#365daysofpolitics day 7: defending our rights
A quiet day of political slacktivism today. I cleared the backlog of Manifesto proposals I hadn’t read/replied to/voted on. Update: I hadn’t noticed it until now, so I’ve just signed this petition demanding a referendum on the scrapping of the human rights act that the Government wants to force on us. I strongly suggest you sign it too.
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#365daysofpolitics day 6: pleading
I’ve just finished off a bunch of work to the 2015 election stats project I’ve been working on. Thanks to contributions from others, it looks like we now have votes for all constituencies and the validation is passing – woohoo! There’s some next steps, which I’ve created issues for. Feel free to help me out…
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#365daysofpolitics day 5: shout
After doing so little yesterday, I started early today, signing up to volunteer with the People’s Assembly Against Austerity before I’d even gotten out of bed. I’m also planning to go to their protest outside the Bank of England on 20th June – join me! Following my note on day 3 about my new role in…
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Majority Government = Powerful Government: The Stability Fallacy
Our Parliament (aka our legislature) is made up of two “houses”: House of Commons – comprised of MPs, as voted for in a general election House of Lords – comprised of unelected Lords, appointed by the Government When a majority Government (aka the executive) is in place it results in two fundamental truths; More than 50%…
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#365daysofpolitics day 4: every little helps
Today was a family day so I make no apologies for doing one tiny thing today, and accepting a contribution to the GE2015 data project.
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#365daysofpolitics day 3: Officialdom
Today I recommitted to the political party that sprang out of the OpenPolitics Manifesto project. While I got involved a while ago my participation in the last six months has been almost non-existent due to the other pressing issues in my life. That changed today when I agreed to be Something New’s technology officer. I’ll…
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#365daysofpolitics day 2: independent, machine-readable election stats
Having stayed up all night to watch the election (depressing as it was) I took the opportunity to collate the general election results. The project gives us an open data source showing the results for each constituency, and the seats. It’s not quite finished, and I plan to add JSON as well as CSV versions…
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#365daysofpolitics day 1: Voting
Today I voted in the parliamentary and local (district and parish) elections. Choices for the local elections were in desperately short supply. I ended up having to vote Labour just to say no to the Tories.