Pombola, a new name for Mzalendo

We’ve got some exciting news at mySociety.

As you know we’ve been helping with the Kenyan Mzalendo website for a while now. And, we’ve been lucky enough to gather interest in Mzalendo‘s codebase from a number of other countries.  These range from Ghana to South Africa, and even as far afield as Paraguay. It’s amazing and humbling for us, but we’ve recently realised one thing: Mzalendo has a wealth of history in Kenya, and an amazingly complex political association. It’s also the name of the website there. So we needed a new name that would allow the code to be changed without the change being associated with the original Kenyan Mzalendo.

Enter Pombola. This is the new name for the codebase which powers TheyWorkForYou, Mzalendo, Odekro, ShineYourEye, work-in-progress Kuvakazim and other parliamentary monitoring websites across Africa and the world.

You may ask, “Why Pombola? What does it mean?”

Well, it is a pretty easy word to remember.  And no one else is using it (possibly because we created it!). The word is a mix of the initials PMO (Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation) and Tombola.

A Tombola?” I hear you cry in surprise. Well, in a Tombola, you are making a choice with no information at all – just selecting a ticket and hoping that you get lucky.  A Pombola site aims to be the opposite – you’ll get as much information as possible about your elected representatives, so that when you make a choice in future, you’ll have all the facts.

If you’re interested in using the code you’ll find the repository here on github, along with some documentation.

If you’re not technical but still want to use this then please contact me and we can discuss what we can do!

And remember, this may monitor parliaments now, but you could use it for anything (*)

(*) Disclaimer: please only use for good.

[1] Girl with Balloons from Courtney
[2] Air map from OpenFlights.org

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