Has anyone in the UK volunteered their skills for any projects like those listed before? Would love to hear about your experience.
# Tech
Our site handled a lot of traffic at the last snap election. 2.6m unique visitors in the 5 weeks before the vote, a crazy number during the last 48 hours.
To accommodate this we have a static site builder, with our data in Google Sheets. We monitor github for changes, Sheets for changes, and auto-generate the site. The site builder translates the Google Sheet into JSON.
This then pushes a Cache Purge instruction to Cloudflare. Cloudflare is configured to cache everything at the edge for hours, but in the browser for minutes... meaning we serve virtually nothing from the origin server, and over 99% of reqs from Cloudflare caches.
Doing this meant we had to design everything to just be static HTML and JS. It works well.
We communicate in Slack, use MailChimp for email mailouts, and have a GSuite account with some alias emails.
# What is the org like?
No-one is working on this full-time, but we have a team of ~5 people who all do just a little. It's no burden for this to exist, and the costs are virtually $0 outside of the election period.
The only cost we have is MailChimp during the election period, so we will be crowdfunding to allow us to keep people informed about changes, etc.
We are very much a small group of individuals from wildly different backgrounds and political beliefs who happen to have a common goal but for different reasons. We aren't trying to convince each other about "why" to do this work, only that the goal makes it worth it even though different individuals have different goals.
# Why am I involved?
It is not as if I necessarily believe that the Tories are vile, Labour is better, etc. (Though some in the team do express this.)
What I personally believe is that we should have proportional representation, and that mass tactical voting is an important step towards progressive candidates and progressive parties before we can reach a full PR system. Mass tactical voting applies pressure and encourages progressive behaviour.
My contribution then, is towards fairer election systems.
I would say that not one person who is volunteering, giving up time and skill, or employed to work on anything listed on there... is without bias.
There is no person or group working on anything to do with politics and cited in that doc, that does not have an agenda of their own.
If it didn't do that it wouldn't do anything. Unless I've missed the point.
Of course the Conservatives claim that the evidence itself is biased. I am not joking.
FFTP is biased in favour of the party with the largest share of the vote, or perhaps another way of putting is that the relationship between vote share and number of MPs is not linear.
And beyond this, the British electoral system has consistently favoured Labour for decades (as Boundary Commission changes fall behind demographic change and population movement)
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/boundaries-review-bias-...
I can't see anything that disputes the claim "The Tories are the clearest benefactors" of the UK's electoral system.
The author makes a repeated assertion that boundaries are currently biased "15 seats" against the Tories, but I cannot tell where this number is coming from.
The fact remains that the Tories have won the last few elections by receiving a disproportionate number of MPs relative to their vote share. Moreover, polling suggests that they will continue to have the highest vote share.
Have you considered adding elections when the Conservatives didn't win the most votes to your data set?
1. The Conservative party has proposed some new boundaries.
2. The new boundaries would have given the Conservatives 15 extra seats, according to the 2017 vote share.
3. The current boundaries are very out of date.
4. The new boundaries follow stricter rules about constituency size variation.
5. The new boundaries lead to a reduced number of MPs.
6. 3-5 imply that the new boundaries are fairer than current boundaries.
7. 2 and 6 imply that the current boundaries are biased 15 seats towards Labour.
The hole is in statement 6; points 3 and 5 are irrelevant to the question of fairness and point 4 is weak as there are plenty of ways to gerrymander the boundaries whilst equalising constituency size. What's "utterly bizarre" is that Rentoul expects many people to swallow such a flawed argument.
I was about to pick up a new contract, but now the election has been announced I'm quite interested in joining up to help with some projects like this.
If I can find some interesting/impactful projects I'm happy volunteering full time up to the election.
By the way, how is your site promoted?
Purely organic for the most part.
We have 2 or 3 people on the team who work social media, and TBH this is what the majority of the work is.
They may draft a press release, and send it via email to a few contacts. But for the most part, this is extremely unfunded and independent work, with a few people manually writing all of the social media posts and replies.
This time they're discussing actually cut and pasting templates from Google Docs, so it's improving!
> My contribution then, is towards fairer election systems.
if this is the case the site should allow you to select who you want to win, instead of being "UNITE AGAINST THE TORIES"
There are plenty of places where voting Tory stands essentially no chance of resulting in a Tory being elected, especially in this election. So then you need to figure out who could win, and what the effect on prospects for a future Tory government would be for those options - and vote for the one most likely to lead to overall Tory victory, not for the Tory on the ballot.
The institution is in some sense not partisan but I guess the political makeup of the people there is somewhat like HN (but applied to U.K. rather than us politics), maybe a bit more left leaning and less libertarian leaning.
If you’re interested in getting involved or using your skills but you aren’t really sure what you Gould go to one of their events. They’re in Whitechapel and are pretty friendly.