On 4 January 2011 20:32, Matthew Somerville <[email protected]> wrote: > Of what you describe, the mapit bit is only a tiny part - if you only want > the Welsh Assembly, it's simply request e.g. > http://mapit.mysociety.org/postcode/CF37+1DU (HTML version at > http://mapit.mysociety.org/postcode/CF37+1DU.html ) and look for the WAC and > WAE entries in the JSON response. The other things you ask for (e.g. adding > candidate info) are a bit more complicated :-) > > You probably want to check out http://www.yournextmp.com/ which did > something similar to what you describe at the 2010 general election; the > source code is available at https://github.com/evdb/YourNextMP.com
It certainly is more complicated (says I who ran it). YourNextMP worked mostly due to the crowd power that DemocracyClub provided - most of the candidate info was crowdsourced. The crowd was effective because the ratio of interest to the number of candidates was high. For other elections this ratio of candidates:interest ratio is not so good so the crowd route may not work. (General election 4150 candidates to national coverage for several months. Local elections 60000ish candidates to brief local coverage). As the electoral system is (rightly) so distributed it is hard to gather the information on the candidates from a central source. Party websites were incomplete and many candidates are not affiliated with web savvy parties. Returning officers provide candidate details when nominations close - and then often as PDFs on all the different council etc sites. The location to constituency mapping was trivial for me to do due to the excellent TheyWorkForYou API. I think it would be excellent for all elections to have a 'who are my candidates' facility so would be happy to help in any way. Cheers, Edmund. _______________________________________________ developers-public mailing list [email protected] https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public Unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/options/developers-public/archive%40mail-archive.com
