What problem are you solving?:

We are helping to shrink the huge gap between the things Czech and Slovak politicians really do and what is known about it among people (eg. through media). We work on leveraging the knowledge of voters before elections about the politicians’ real work and their stands in different policies. We would like to support the both way communication between the people and their politicians.

Note: the answer to “What country will this operate in?” should really be “the Czech Republic AND Slovakia”, but the form allows only one answer.

Describe your idea:

Further development of a website focused on continuous parliamentary monitoring and “voting advice applications”(VAAs) for the parliaments that we already cover – CZ, SK and EU. To extend the project for regional/city “parliaments”. Our system is ready for multiple parliaments and to be open for anybody to administrate one.

Details:
VAAs: An easy overview of where the parties stand on different topics with respect to the user. (2010 elections – CZ: general, Senate, cities; SK: general). We want other versions – mobile, Fb, for news portals(we’ve done this), game or paper.
Monitoring of politicians’ work: Analyses of voting behavior, activity, votes on particular topics, providing system for others’ areas of interests. Summaries to be send to the media regularly.
API: To share all the data we gather.
Write to your MPs: To rebuild our simple application with the ideas from WriteToThem. The more complex selection of addresses (committees, etc.) will be preserved.

What country will this operate in?: Czech Republic

Who are you?:

KohoVolit.eu (”Who to vote for”) is a Czech-Slovak project and an NGO of the same name. It was launched in 2006 before the general elections in Czechia and Slovakia. We developed our first “voting advice applications”(VAAs) that time. It has been implemented for 5 elections in CZ and SK so far, the VAA for European elections earlier this year was tested by 60 000 – 70 000 people. Later we have added a section of analyses and a simple tool “write to your MPs” which is being used by the public and NGOs. From the very beginning to the present days, it has been all prepared on a voluntary basis. Almost all costs are paid by ourselves, which is really “the” limitation we face. We have been able to run the project only because our mini-team (2-3 people) consists of people who can implement it – programming (university degree and two of us actually making their living as a programmer), analytics (PhD and years of working experience) or management (years of experience).