Democracy Club
Democracy Club is a UK nonprofit (registered charity) that builds open infrastructure for elections. Founded in 2015, it operates as a small paid team supported by a large volunteer community who collectively gather, clean, and maintain data about UK elections.
Its core products:
- WhoCanIVoteFor — tells voters which candidates are standing in their constituency and provides candidate information.
- WhereDoIVote — polling place finder, used by councils and media during elections.
- Every Election — open database of every UK election, past and upcoming, with machine-readable boundaries and results.
- Candidates — crowdsourced database of election candidates, with social media profiles and statements.
During UK general elections, Democracy Club's data powers electoral lookups on the BBC, The Guardian, and hundreds of local council websites. The datasets are freely available under open licences.
The organisation occupies a gap: official electoral data in the UK is fragmented across hundreds of local authorities with no central machine-readable source. Democracy Club does the aggregation work and releases it publicly.
Links
- Website: democracyclub.org.uk
- Source code: github.com/DemocracyClub
See also
History
-
2010-01-01
Origins as a volunteer effort collecting candidate information for the 2010 UK general election, working with mySociety
Sourcing: High
Sym Roe was a volunteer for the mySociety enterprise during the run up to the 2010 general election, working to increase the amount of information available online about the candidates.
↗ View source -
2015-01-01
Registered as a Community Interest Company and crowdsourced the most comprehensive UK election-candidate database to date, used by over a million peopleFounding of the organisation
Sourcing: High
crowdsourcing the most comprehensive and accurate database of candidates in recent electoral history
↗ View source