At Code The City 22 we started Meet Your Next MSP, a project to list hustings for the Scottish Parliamentary election. The team comprised of James Baster and Johnny Mckenzie.
James Baster had prior experience working on a similar project for the UK general election in 2015, where they listed over 1000 events in a project that was cited by many charities and campaigns. This showed him that there was interest in such a project. It also showed that many people don’t even know what a hustings areis, so the project deliberately tries to be accessible in order to introduce others to these type of events.
At Code The City 22 we built a basic working prototype; a git repository to hold the data; a Python tool to parse the files in the git repository to a SQLite database, and a Python Flask web app to serve that SQlite database as a friendly website to the public. This website invites submissions to the crowd-sourced data set by means of a Google form.
Thanks to Johnny who wrangled data from National Records of Scotland to make a dataset that mapped postcodes to areas; vital for powering the postcode lookup box on the home page of the site.
Storing data in a git repository is an interesting approach; it has some drawbacks but some advantages (moderation by pull requests and a full history for free). Crucially, it’s not a new idea and is something many people already do so it will be interesting to learn more about this approach.
Since the hackathon, the website has been tweaked, the Google form replaced with a better custom form and the website is now live!
We will run this over the next month and see how this goes.
And after the general election, the lessons won’t be lost. What we are essentially building are tools that let a community of people list events of interest together, with the data stored in a git repository. We think this tool could be applicable to many different situations.
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