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Status Idea

Federated Voting Guide

An idea raised in DOD discussion: rather than building another voting advice application (VAA) that computes its own "match score," build an aggregator where the voter picks which sources to trust, and the tool simply displays what each of those sources has said about candidates, parties, and policies for an upcoming election — side by side, unranked.

How it could work

  1. Sources (parties, advocacy orgs, commentators, fact-checkers) publish their positions or endorsements in a structured feed
  2. A voter ticks the sources they already trust from a directory
  3. For the voter's electorate, the tool shows: "Source A says X about Candidate 1 on housing. Source B says Y."
  4. DOD provides the plumbing and the directory of available feeds — never an opinion on who's right

This is structurally similar to how this wiki already aggregates organisation activity from RSS/sitemap feeds (util/check_rss.py, hooks/activity_selector.py) — applied to "stated positions" instead of "latest news."

Pros

  • DOD never rates or ranks political actors — it's pure aggregation based on the voter's own choices
  • Decentralised and federated: any org can publish a feed and be added to the directory, no central editorial bottleneck
  • Builds on infrastructure this wiki already has (RSS aggregation, structured data exports)
  • Complements rather than competes with existing single-org VAAs like Build a Ballot — those could simply be one of the feeds a voter ticks

Cons / risks

  • Feed bootstrapping problem: almost no orgs currently publish per-candidate/per-policy positions in a structured format — there's no standard to point them at yet
  • Menu curation: even "which feeds are available to tick" is an editorial choice, though far lower-stakes than DOD ranking candidates directly
  • Cold start for voters: a first-time user doesn't know which sources to tick either — the tool needs a neutral way to help people discover sources without nudging them
  • Echo chamber risk: if people only tick sources they already agree with, the tool may reinforce existing views rather than broaden perspective — true of most information tools, but worth designing against (e.g. optionally surfacing a source the voter hasn't ticked, for contrast)

Open questions & potential evolution

  • Define a minimal feed schema for "positions on candidates/policies" — possibly building on schema.org's Endorsement/Review types or a simple RSS/JSON extension
  • Start small: hand-curate a handful of feeds from orgs already in the organisations index that publish election-relevant content, as a proof of concept
  • Could connect to the Political Creator Map idea — self-declared creator affiliations as one feed type
  • Could connect to the Promise Ledger idea — past-term voting records as a "feed" alongside pre-election promises
  • Likely starts life as a concept page defining the feed format and listing candidate sources, well before any UI is built

Status

This is an idea-stage proposal with no committed owner. If you want to develop it — even just drafting the feed schema as a concept page — raise it in the DOD community channels, then update this page's status to active and add yourself under contributors.

See also