“It's like an OkCupid for voting” – the Finnish election engines
snellman.net
snellman.net
The only "major" difference I've managed to find with the Dutch system is a slightly bigger emphasis in individual candidates due to "unsorted" party listings (although the article isn't quite clear about it, if the Finnish parties can sort their own list on the ballot, the systems are pretty much the same).
Other than that, it's mostly minor cultural differences. These kind of "election engines" are all over the place in Dutch elections, I doubt whether that is any different in any multi-party democracy.
Edit: Just looked it up for fun: these things pre-date OkCupid by almost a decade (more if you count the offline versions).
- I'm aware that similar sites exist in other countries. From talking to people in many such countries my understanding is that they are not as influential (see numbers in the post on the reach and influence; e.g half the voters using one of these sites, and a sixth of those users just taking the top recommendation).
- There is no ordering at all to the list, it's formed completely by the voters. (Well, there's an ordering in that everyone candidate is randomly assigned a 2-3 digit id number). This is to me a fundamental difference, since there is no obvious fallback option for "I just want to vote for this party", and that case becomes entirely about name recognition. It should be possible to check whether this really does make a difference, by checking what proportion of celebrities got "accidentally" elected under the different systems.
- Yes, the first Finnish version was from the mid-90s, and the story of the site I built predates OkCupid too. But when you're explaining X in terms of Y, there's no assertion of causality (or even of Y existing before X). What matters is whether Y is a cultural referent that's likely to be shared by the readers.
Unfortunately these election machines always tend to focus on individuals instead of parties. In the Finnish elections a vote to a candidate gives a vote for her party, and the popularity of the candidates within the party decides how the party votes are redistributed, which finally decides which candidates get seats from the district.
This means you always should pick the political party first, and only then look at candidates within the party. Too bad many folks don't realise this, vote for a populist party with candidates to cover even the most ridiculous viewpoints, and indirectly end up voting for candidates who they would never want to vote in.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1799193/disrupting-democracy-keya...
Apparently neither of us lasted though!
It looks hard enough to even get people to vote, they are pretty disengaged towards politics in general, and I don't see how to base a business model on having people spending time fumbling with political stuff. Regularly we see new startups coming in with platforms where voters could engage and do x, y, z. I'm quite sceptical there is a demand for political engagement in the first place large enough to sustain a business model.
But having gone through this, I'm really interested in having your thoughts on that.
(After I left my partner did keep the company alive by pivoting into reader engagement for online news, but in my opinion the vision of helping voters was abandoned.)
Business models we considered:
- Letting politicians pay to get more control over their profile on our site.
- Letting politicians pay to turn on voter engagement features, so that voters could sign up for a mailing list, sign up to volunteer, etc.
- We actually got paid by the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia to license our tech for some kiosks in their exhibit, but the integration effort wasn't really worth what they paid us.
- We had some media companies interested in an embeddable "widget" based on our technology. I think the Economist and the Philadelphia Inquirer used us. This eventually led to the pivot.
- There were plenty of other ideas, but it was all a long time ago. We were very dedicated to protecting our users' privacy, and also to protecting our own reputation as unbiased, so that took many ideas off the table. Taking politician money at all felt super risky, but who else are you going to sell to? EDIT: Also, you have to have a lot more users than we achieved, with a much more vibrant community, for any politician to even care. And unbiased politics is pretty dry. These days I think of politics mostly as entertainment, and we weren't entertaining.
Politics is a tough space, and lots of VCs told us they flat out didn't invest in politics startups. I can't say I really blame them. For all the money in that space, it's not easy capturing it in a way that lets you sleep at night. The voters aren't the ones paying. Media companies are all struggling not to go bankrupt. Also a four-year business cycle is pretty rough.
A lot of startups in that space seem to rely on building a large community of engaged voters, and then they'll figure out where to extract money, social media style. The problem as you point out is building that community in the first place, bacause we'd need a pivotal change in our politicla system for that to happen. Interested voters? There's not a single country in the world where a big chunk of the lectorate dedicate a significant amount of time to figure out how to vote. Money certainly can't be extracted for voters, I don't imagine people paying in one way or another to get tod who to vote for.
Why didn't you follow the money more directly and create a product aimed at politicians or PACs? Couldn't the intelligence you built be used by campaigns?
Were VCs curious about how you would eventually make money out of this?