You may remember that in August this year, mySociety and Open Knowledge International launched a survey, looking for the sources of digital files that hold electoral boundaries… for every country in the world. Well, we are still looking!

There is a good reason for this hunt: the files are integral for people who want to make online tools to help citizens contact their local politicians, who need to be able to match users to the right representative. From mySociety’s site TheyWorkForYou to Surfers against Sewage’s Plastic Free Parliament campaign, to Call your Rep in the US, all these tools required boundary data before they could be built.

We know that finding this data openly licensed is still a real challenge for many countries, which is of course why we launched the survey. We encourage people to continue to submit links to the survey, and we would love if people experienced in electoral boundary data, could help by reviewing submissions.

The EveryBoundary survey FAQs tell you everything you need to know about what to look for when boundary hunting. But we also wanted to share some top tips that we have learnt through our own experiences.

Do

• Start the search by looking at authoritative sources first: electoral commissions, national mapping agencies, national statistics bodies, government data portals.
• Look for data formats (.shp, .geojson, kml etc), and not just a PDF.
• Ask around if you can’t find the data: if a map is published digitally, then the data behind it exists somewhere!

Don’t

• Confuse administrative boundaries with electoral boundaries — they can be the same, but they often aren’t (even when they share a name).
• Assume boundaries stay the same — check for redistricting, and make sure your data is current.

If you get stuck

• Electoral boundaries are normally defined in legislation; sometimes this takes the form of lists of the administrative subdivisions which make up the electoral districts. If you can get the boundaries for the subdivisions you can build up the electoral districts with this information.
• Make FOI requests to get hold of the data.
• If needed, escalate the matter. We have heard of groups writing to their representatives, explaining the need for the data. And don’t forget: building tools that strengthen democracy is a worthwhile cause.  

mySociety is asking people to share electoral boundary data as part of efforts to make information on every politician in the world freely available to all, and support the creation of a Democratic Commons.  Electoral boundary files are an essential part of the data infrastructure of a Democratic Commons. A directory of electoral boundary sources is a potential benefit to many people and organisations  — so let’s keep up the search!

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Photo: Chase Clark

As we’ve highlighted in recent posts, EveryPolitician is an open dataset.

We’ve always been strong advocates of open data, but there’s no doubt that it come with its own challenges. For example, when data is freely and openly available, without even the need for registration, we have very little idea of who is accessing it. That, in turn, makes it hard to prove that the project is having impact…and subsequently to find funders to support the maintenance of the project.

So we were fortunate that user research interviews for the Democratic Commons led us to Andrew from New/Mode. New/Mode deliver advocacy and engagement tools that are used by hundreds of the top campaign, nonprofits and advocacy organisations around the world.  

These tools are connecting people to their representatives, so information is key: specifically, information on who politicians are and how to contact them. And that’s just what EveryPolitician is, in part*, providing for New/Mode’s tools which are used by groups in Australia, Canada, the US and the UK.

We asked Andrew what impacts have been created through New/Mode’s tools, and he told us that:

• In the UK, ONE’s supporters sent 6,500 emails to MPs over the space of a week, helping to successfully pressure MPs to vote for a Sanctions and Anti Money Laundering Bill that increases transparency and cracks down on global corruption.
• In the US, Win Without War used New/Mode tools with EveryPolitician data to block a defence bill that would have given Trump more nuclear access. The Sunrise Movement is currently using New/Mode tools to push for swift action on climate change.
• In Canada, Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East prompted 16,000 emails to Canadian MPs in support of Trudeau’s comments condemning violence against unarmed Palestinian protesters.

We need more of these stories to help us build a picture of who uses EveryPolitician and why it is important, to make a case for why we should keep working on it. As mySociety’s Mark Cridge outlined in a previous post, we’ve recognised that EveryPolitician can only become sustainable at scale as part of a wider community effort, which is why we are collaborating with Wikidata — but we still need the resources to do that.

Any ideas, or suggestions, please let us know.

*PS, In case you were wondering which APIs New/Mode uses, here is a breakdown:

• Currently, Open North’s Represent is providing the bulk of the data for Canadian politicians. But senators’ data and Twitter handles for the MPs and senators are pulled from EveryPolitician.
• For the US, Google Civic does a good job of providing the bulk of information, but again EveryPolitician is used for congressional fax numbers and to fill in any blanks with Google Civic data.
• In the UK, New/Mode are using another mySociety tool, Maplt alongside EveryPolitician. EveryPolitician data is only available for the national level of politicians as yet.
• For Australia where they focus on national politicians, the data is drawn from a mixture of Open Australia and again EveryPolitician.

Photo by roya ann miller on Unsplash

What do you want? An update on Democratic Commons!  When do you want it? As regularly as possible!

…well, that’s what you’re getting, anyway. Whether or not you know that’s what you wanted is another matter — because you could be forgiven for having completely missed the Democratic Commons,  the ambitious project that mySociety is helping to develop right now.  

Even more than that — you might think the issues that the project is addressing were all done and dusted years ago. Not having open access to basic data on elected representatives? That sounds like a 2005  issue, especially somewhere like the UK with its thriving Civic Tech sector and a government that’s declared its commitment to open data. And by ‘basic data’, we mean the fundamentals — stuff as simple as the representatives’ names,  the positions they hold and the areas they represent… not exactly rocket science, is it?

But, here we are,  it is almost 2019, and the information on who our elected representatives are is still not easily available as structured, consistent and reusable public data.

And so, we have been busy working closely with Wikidata to support a change. Here’s a rundown of everything we’ve been doing:

• Supporting the gathering of lots of data on politicians internationally — including detailed electoral boundary data
  

We’ve been working with partners around the world to get the basic data on political systems, and who is currently elected into positions, into Wikidata.  And we have the electoral boundary data to match the areas they represent.
From the national, down to the city and local level within these cities, this data is now openly available through Wikidata and our GitHub repositories (we’re just writing the documentation for the latter, so watch this space).

The countries where efforts have been focused to model and/or gather data so far are:
Australia, Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Hong Kong, Italy, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Taiwan and the UK!

Our partners include Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), Fundación Conocimiento Abierto, Distintas Latitudes, g0v, Code for Pakistan, OpenUp, Open Knowledge Bangladesh and Factly.  

• Building a tool to help you visualise Wikidata and discover what data on politicians exist for any country

Specifically, a visualisation tool that helps you explore what data exists that fits the Wikidata every politician data model (see this blog post). mySociety Developer, Alex Dutton, has been fiddling about in his spare time to create this tool, that runs off SPARQL queries.  Take a look to see what structured data currently exists for any given country – and tell us what you think!

Or, if it shows you that there ’s data missing,  get on Wikidata, and make edits. You’re welcome to ask us for help on this and we’ll be very glad to give it, but you should also know that the Wikidata Facebook group is a great place to ask questions if you’re a newbie.

• Talking to lots of people about their need for structured, consistent and reusable data on elected representatives
  It’s all very well having all this data, but it doesn’t count for much if people aren’t using it.
  Over the past few months, I’ve been connecting with people and asking how they currently access and maintain data on politicians, and, the implications this has on their work (you may have seen a recent post asking for more examples: this still stands!).
  I’ve also been exploring how people think they could contribute and benefit from being part of a collaborative effort. Here’s a rundown of a few choice conversations:
  • We’ve spent time with Democracy Club, Open Data Manchester and Open Council Data talking about possible approaches to making UK councillor data more accessible. Sym has nicely summarised where we’re at here. I recommend joining the Democracy Club slack channel #councillors if this is something that interests you.
  • Talking to UK focused organisations such as campaign organisation 38Degrees, the brain injury association Headway and the creator of the iparl campaigning tool from Organic Campaigns about how they currently gather and maintain data on elected politicians (ways range from paying for detailed data to supporting political students to maintain spreadsheets); and exploring what they need from data for it to be useful in their work, and the implications of not having this data up to date (small charities struggle to run e-campaigns, for example, that ensure their supporters can connect to representatives).
  • Talking to international organisations who build software for nonprofits and campaigners — like New/Mode, Engaging Networks and The Action Network  — about their data needs, the struggles of candidate data, and whether any of the new data we’ve been collecting can be helpful to them (it can!). In particular, it was great to hear how useful our EveryPolitician data is for New/Mode.
  • Checking what support we can offer to our partners (as listed above) to increase reuse and maintenance of the data in the regions where they work. Also: if you know any further groups interested in reusing data on politicians for their work, please tell them about us.
  • We met with staff at Global Witness and heard how they’re using EveryPolitician data on politicians to uncover potential corruption.
  • And we checked in with the University of Colorado for an update on their project to model the biographies of members of Congress  and see if a politician’s background affects voting behaviour.  
  • We’re also supporting editathon events to improve political data, being delivered by SMEX in Lebanon (read about their event here), France based F0rk and Wikimedia España.
  • And last but very much not least: I attended the Code for All conference. It was really inspiring to meet people from our previous collaborations through Poplus such as Kharil from the Sinar Project, hear some amazing speakers and meet lots of new friends, who we hope to see more as mySociety is now a Code for All affiliate organisation. Also, I surprised myself with my enthusiasm for talking about unique identifiers over a glass of wine…!

What next?

Through November and December, we will be focusing on:

• Delivering changes to the EveryPolitican.org site to reflect our desire to source the data from Wikidata (not the current arrangement of 11,000 scrapers that keep breaking!) and offer more guidance on how to contribute political data to Wikidata.
• Working with Wikimedia UK to create some engaging ‘how to get started on Wikidata’ and ‘editing political data’ resources to share with you all.
• Making sure lots of people know this data exists, so they can use it (and hopefully maintain it). Got any ideas?
• Finding out what support is needed to continue this work internationally and keep gathering people who also think this work is important — and putting together funding bids so that we can keep supporting this work

Want to get involved? Here’s how

• Contribute to the Wikidata community: if you are Wikidata user, or keen to learn, the first step is to visit the Wikidata project page on political data. If you need guidance on tasks, do feel free to add to the Talk page to ask the community.
• Join the conversation on the Code for All Slack channel #democratic-commons: https://codeforall.org/ (scroll down and find the ‘Chat with us’ button).
• Tell us (and others) how you think you would use the data: this project can’t just be about collecting data for its own sake: it’s about it being used in a way that benefits us all. How would the Democratic Commons help your community? We’d love people to share any ideas, data visualisations, or theories, ideally in an open medium such as blog posts.  Please connect with Georgie to share.
• Something missing from this list? Tell us! We’re @mySociety on Twitter or you can email democracy@mysociety.org.

Photo by Artem Bali on Unsplash

Forgive me if the title of this post makes us sound like a price comparison site — it’s just that if you are, mySociety is interested to hear from you.

We’re hoping to hear from people who spend a lot of energy collating data on UK politicians — where you have to go through a process of collecting basic info like politicians’ names, parties, and the areas they represent, before you can even get to the real work of your project.  Specifically, we are interested in learning more about the impact this additional effort has on your work; the staff time it is costing your organisation, or the issues it creates in connecting citizens to their representatives.

Recently, mySociety met with Democracy Club and Open Data Manchester to discuss the lack of open data on UK councillors, what could or should be done about it, and by whom. Sym from Democracy Club has brilliantly covered the who, what and how background to our meeting in a series of posts and I really recommend reading these.

But first things first. We all recognised that before we travel too far down the road of planning something, we need to understand why.

Why should there be open access to basic data on all of our elected representatives?

Collectively, we agreed that the basic data on our elected representatives should be available as structured, consistent and reusable public information; who represents you at each level of government should be a public good and we believe that there is an obligation on authorities to ensure this information is made freely available in a structured way. The arts and sciences already recognise this concept of ‘commoning’; the same beliefs underpin mySociety advocating for a Democratic Commons. Plus, like Sym,  we agree that “access to good information is vital to a well-functioning democracy”.

However, tangible examples are better than abstract beliefs, which is why we are interested in finding cases that demonstrate the potential social impact from opening up this data.

We already know that:

• Open Data Manchester spent a lot of time collating data on English Councillors so that they could match who local representatives with the most localised level of deprivation profile, a Lower Super Output area. ODM hope that “the dataset will add to the understanding of the local political landscape in England” and will allow for further enquiry where patterns of representation exist.
  Oh, here is Open Data Manchester’s beautiful visualisation of “The deprivation profile of each local authority (most deprived from the top left, down)  and the party with the most power”

• We are aware of a number of charities that are independently gathering and maintaining basic data on politicians, a duplication of efforts and resource that could be better spent in other ways. And, that the cost of accessing Councillor Data is preventing some small charities running e-campaigns.
• Organisations like Global Witness are using EveryPolitician data to spot potential corruption — but this data currently exists only at the national level, both for the UK and internationally.
  
• And, we recognise that there are many commercial players in this space who provide complete and up to date data on politicians, which often includes more detailed biographical or political background. That’s not what we’re trying to replicate; instead, we all feel that there should be basic fundamental and up to date data on who our politicians are, freely available for anyone to use for any purpose.

We would love to have more examples to add to this!  If you — or someone you know — has an idea for a piece of research or service that you could run if only this data existed, or spends time moaning about finding it, please get in touch with me, georgie@mysociety.org.

P.S if you would like a copy of ODM data visualisation, it is available to buy/ download in A2 

Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash

Earlier this year, we were fortunate enough to be contacted by Brian Keegan, Assistant Professor in Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, who specialises in the field of network analysis.

Brian and his team were planning to mine the official biographies of every legislator published by the Library of Congress – going back to the first Congress in 1789 –  and add the information as structured data to Wikidata. Having heard of our involvement with  WikiProject Every Politician, they wanted to understand more about contributing.

The research team, which included professors from the Libraries, Political Science and Information Science departments, planned to combine this biographical data with more common data in political science about voting and co-sponsorship, so that interesting questions could be asked, such as “Do Ivy League graduates form cliques?” or “Are medical doctors more likely to break with their party on votes concerning public health?”. Their hypothesis was that the biographical backgrounds of legislators could play an important role in legislative behaviours.

However, the first big step before questions could be asked (or SPARQL queries made) was supporting undergraduate students to enter biographical data for every member of Congress (going right back to the first) on Wikidata. This has not generally made it into the datasets that political scientists use to study legislative behaviour, and as students began to enter data about these historical figures, it quickly became apparent why: non-existent nations, renamed cities, and archaic professions all needed to be resolved and mapped to Wikidata’s contemporary names and standardised formats.

Nine months on, the team and ten undergraduates have revised over 1,500 Wikidata items about members of Congress, from the 104th to the 115th Congresses (1995-2018) and the 80th– 81st Congresses (1947-1951), which is 15% of the way through all members dating back to the first Congress in 1789!

They started running SPARQL queries this summer.

Joe Zamadics, a political science PhD student who worked on the project explained the potential of combining these data:  “One example we tried was looking at House member ideology by occupation. The graph below shows the ideology of three occupations: athletes, farmers, and teachers (in all, roughly 130 members). The x-axis shows common ideology (liberal to conservative) and the y-axis shows member’s ideology on non-left/right issues such as civil rights and foreign policy.  The graph shows that teachers split the ideological divide while farmers and athletes are more likely to be conservative.”

The team are keen to highlight the potential that semantic web technology such as  Wikidata offers to social scientists.

For the full Q + A with Brian and Joe see the mySociety Medium post. 

Photo by Jomar on Unsplash

For a large part of next week, mySociety team members Mark, Rebecca and I will be attending the Code for All Summit, this year to be held in beautiful Bucharest.  

Code for All, for those who don’t know, is the largest international network of Civic Tech organisations who “believe that digital technology opens new channels for citizens to more meaningfully engage in the public sphere and have a positive impact on their communities”.

And, as a collective, they have achieved some brilliant things;  developing open source toolkits for disaster relief, schooling future generations and making laws and governments more accessible to citizens around the world.

This year, for the first time, Code for All takes the form of an open doors summit, as the aim is to get “every great mind of Civic Tech” together, not just the official Code For All affiliates. Under the title of “The Heroes of Tech”, it will focus on the barriers, challenges and the future of Civic Technology and explore the conference themes of The Power and  Impact of Civic Tech, Scaling Civic Tech,  Civic Tech & the Wider Context and Sustainable Civic Tech.

Our Head of Research, Dr Rebecca Rumbul,  will be leading a workshop to explore how to best to evidence Civic Tech, disseminate learning in the impact field and explore what themes and activities will be featured in mySociety’s next Impacts of Civic Technology conference (TICTeC) in Paris, March 2019, and our Chief Executive Mark will be delivering a presentation and workshop, to co-define and develop a declaration for the Democratic Commons.

We will be sure to report back!

Since 2015, mySociety have collected and shared open data on the world’s politicians via the EveryPolitician project. 

And while we receive emails from across the world pretty much on a weekly basis, asking us to update a dataset, we still can’t say exactly who uses the EveryPolitician data, and for what purpose.

This is largely because we want to place as few barriers as possible to using the data. Asking folk to fill in a form or register with us before they access data which we believe ought to be free and accessible? Well, that would be counter to the whole concept of Open Data.

But that said, it’s really useful for us to hear how the data is being put to use, so we were very pleased when Global Witness sent us their report, The Companies we Keep.

This fascinating read shares the results of their analysis of the UK’s Persons of Significant Control Register (PSC) in which Global Witness used EveryPolitician data to see if there are politicians who are also beneficial owners of a company registered to the UK.

In order to interpret and compare datasets (which also included sources such as the Tax Justice Network Financial Secrecy Index), Global Witness and Datakind UK built two tools:

• An automated system for red-flagging companies
• A visual tool for exploring the PSC register and other associated public interest datasets

The red flagging tool can be used to uncover higher risk entries, which do not indicate any wrongdoing but could be in need of further investigation… such as the 390 companies that have company officers or beneficial owners who are politicians elected to national legislatures, either in the UK or in another country.  

The report also highlights some of the challenges faced by Companies House that prevent the register from fulfilling its full potential to help in fighting crime and corruption. We recommend a full read: you’ll find it here.

It is very helpful for us to demonstrate the uses of EveryPolitician data, both for our own research purposes and to enable us to secure the funding that allows us to go on providing this sort of service.

If you have or know of more examples of the data being used, please get in touch with me, Georgie. And if you value open, structured data on currently elected politicians, you should get involved with the Democratic Commons; this is a developing a community of individuals and organisations working to make information on every politician in the world freely available to all, through the collaborative database Wikidata.  

Photo by G. Crescoli on Unsplash

You may remember that thanks to a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, mySociety has been working to support increasingly authoritative data on the world’s politicians, to exist on Wikidata as a key part of developing the concept of the Democratic Commons.

And, this summer mySociety welcomed two members of staff to support with the community work around both Wikidata and the Democratic Commons. In May, I (Georgie) joined in the role of ‘Democratic Commons Community Liaison’ and in late June I was joined by Kelly, mySociety’s first ever ‘Wikimedia Community Liaison’… and it’s about time you started to hear more from us!

I’ve been climbing the learning curve: exploring the potential moving parts of a global political data infrastructure,  finding out how the communities of Wikidata and Wikipedia operate, attempting to take meaningful notes at our daily meetings for the tool the team developed to improve political data on Wikidata and making sense of the complexity in creating interface tools to interpret the political data already in Wikidata. Oh, and supporting a “side-project” with Open Knowledge International to try and find every electoral boundary in the world (can you help?).  

And if you are in any of the relevant open Slack channels (what is Slack?), you may have seen my name on the general introduction pages, as I have been shuffling around the online community centres of the world — off Wikidata Talk that is — trying to find  the people interested in, or with a need for, consistently and simply formatted data on politicians, but who aren’t already part of the Wikidata community.

That’s because, the issue the Democratic Commons seeks to address is the time-consuming business of finding and maintaining data on politicians, work that we suspect is duplicated by multiple organisations in each country (often all of them having a similar aim), that is slowing down delivering the stuff that matters. This has certainly been mySociety’s experience when sharing our tools internationally.

And the solution we propose  — the Democratic Commons — is that if people and communities worked together to find and maintain this data, it would be better for everyone…  ah the paradox of simplicity.

Update on efforts to support the Democratic Commons concept

With each interaction and conversation that we’ve had about the Democratic Commons with partners, we’ve continued to learn about the best role for us to play. Here are some initial actions and thoughts that are shaping the work; please feel free to comment, or even better,  get involved  🙂

Making sure the concept is a good fit through user research
We have set a goal to carry out user research on the concept of the Democratic Commons. So far, we have lined up calls with campaign staff  (who are interested in using and supporting open political data through their UK campaigning work) and journalists in Nigeria (who have expressed a need for the data) and I am lining up more calls — if you have a need for or can contribute political data, let’s talk.

Bringing the Open Data/Civic Tech and Wiki communities together?
From my experience to date, the Civic Tech and Wiki communities appear to operate quite separately (I am very open to being proved wrong on this point!).

I am just getting started within the Wikidata/ Wikimedia communities (that’s more for Kelly) but on the Open Data/ Civic tech side,  there are questions about data vandalism and the potential to trust the data from Wikidata, arguments on the benefit of using Wikidata (especially where you already have a lot of useful data) and on whether there is a need to invest time in learning SPARQL, the query language that allows faster retrieval and manipulation of data from databases.

Misconceptions are not unusual in communities online or offline, but it is a gap that our work focus, communications and tools hope to help close. If you have ideas on blogs, video tutorials or articles to share to read around these concepts, please get in touch.

Working openly in existing global communities (off Wiki)
We are aware that, off-Wiki mySociety is leading the work to develop the Democratic Commons, however, we know that we need to be delivering this work in the open for it to be owned by other people outside of mySociety, and finding the right homes to talk about it (off Wiki) has been important.  In order to work openly, we have a shared #DemocraticCommons Slack channel with mySociety and Code for All; see ‘Get involved’ below to find out how to join the conversation.

We also plan to document the learning involved in the process through blog posts and documentation, to be uploaded publicly.

And, supporting local communities to develop, where possible
A global network such as Code for All is very useful in supporting a concept like the Democratic Commons, however, the bulk of need for the data will likely be country-specific. Together with our partners and collaborators, we are exploring what is needed and how to support local communities:

• Through the remainder of our Wikimedia Foundation Grant, we are supporting community events and editathons: in Lebanon with SMEX, in France with newly formed organisation F0rk, and in Spain with Wikimedia España.
• Some groups we are working with, such as Code for Pakistan, plan to set up a channel on their Slack instance and use their Whatsapp community to discuss the data use and maintenance.  
• In my own country, the UK, we are talking to mySociety’s community and collaborators to understand how the Democratic Commons could benefit organisations and work in practice here. If you want to be involved in this work, please contact me.
• We are listening to understand what support is needed with collaborators in the global South, as we’re well aware that it is a lot to ask people to work on a voluntary basis and that adequate support is needed. I hope we can share the learning and use it to shape any future projects that may emerge.

How to get involved in the Democratic Commons?

• Contribute to the Wikidata community: If you are Wikidata user, or keen to learn,  visit the Wikidata project page on political data. If you need guidance on tasks, do feel free to add to the Talk page to ask the community, or get in touch with Kelly, our Wikimedia Community Liaison: kelly@mysociety.org.
• Join the conversation on Code for All Slack:  If you would like to join the Slack conversation, join here: https://codeforall.org/ (scroll down and find the ‘Chat with us’ button).
• Look for electoral boundary data: We are working with Open Knowledge to find electoral boundary data for the whole world. See more about that here.
• Keep up to date and subscribe to our Medium blog: Sometimes these Democratic Commons posts are a bit too in-depth for the general mySociety readership, so for those who are really interested, we plan to share all we are learning here.
• Share the concept with contacts: Please share the message on your platforms and encourage potential users to take part in research and get involved. We recognise that our view  — and reach — can only be anglo-centric, and we’d so appreciate any translations you might be able to contribute.
• Tell us (and others) how you think you would use the data: This can’t just be about collecting data; it’s about it being used in a way that benefits us all. How would the Democratic Commons help your community? We would love people to share any ideas, data visualisations, or theories, ideally in an open medium such as blog posts.  Please connect with Georgie to share.
• Something missing from this list? Tell us! We’re @mySociety on Twitter or you can email georgie@mysociety.org or kelly@mysociety.org .

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Image: Toa Heftiba

We, and Open Knowledge International, are looking for the digital files that hold electoral boundaries, for every country in the world — and you can help.

Yeah, we know — never let it be said we don’t know how to party.

But seriously, there’s a very good reason for this request. When people make online tools to help citizens contact their local politicians, they need to be able to match users to the right representatives.

So head on over to the Every Boundary survey and see how you can help — or read on for a bit more detail.

Data for tools that empower citizens

If you’ve used mySociety’s sites TheyWorkForYou — or any of the other parliamentary monitoring sites we’ve helped others to run around the world — you’ll have seen this matching in action. Electoral boundary data is also integral in campaigning and political accountability,  from Surfers against Sewage’s ‘Plastic Free Parliament’ campaign, to Call your Rep in the US.

These sites all work on the precept that while people may not know the names of all their representatives at every level — well, do you? — people do tend to know their own postcode or equivalent. Since postcodes fall within boundaries, once both those pieces of information are known, it’s simple to present the user with their correct constituency or representative.

So the boundaries of electoral districts are an essential piece of the data needed for such online tools.  As part of mySociety’s commitment to the Democratic Commons project, we’d like to be able to provide a single place where anyone planning to run a politician-contacting site can find these boundary files easily.

And here’s why we need you

Electoral boundaries are the lines that demarcate where constituencies begin and end. In the old days, they’d have been painstakingly plotted on a paper map, possibly accessible to the common citizen only by appointment.

These days, they tend to be available as digital files, available via the web. Big step forward, right?

But, as with every other type of political data, the story is not quite so simple.

There’s a great variety of organisations responsible for maintaining electoral boundary files across different countries, and as a result, there’s little standardisation in where and how they are published.

How you can help

We need the boundary files for 231 countries (or as we more accurately — but less intuitively — refer to them, ‘places’), and for each place we need the boundaries for constituencies at national, regional and city levels. So there’s plenty to collect.

As we so often realise when running this sort of project, it’s far easier for many people to find a few files each than it would be for our small team to try to track them all down. And that, of course, is where you come in.

Whether you’ve got knowledge of your own country’s boundary files and where to find them online, or you’re willing to spend a bit of time searching around, we’d be so grateful for your help.

Fortunately, there’s a tool we can use to help collect these files — and we didn’t even have to make it ourselves! The Open Data Survey, first created by Open Knowledge International to assess and display just how much governmental information around the world is freely available as open data, has gone on to aid many projects as they collect data for their own campaigns and research.

Now we’ve used this same tool to provide a place where you can let us know where to find that electoral boundary data we need.

Where to begin

Start here  — and please feel free to get in touch if anything isn’t quite clear, or you have any general questions. You might want to check the FAQs first though!

Thanks for your help — it will go on to improve citizen empowerment and politician accountability throughout the world. And that is not something everyone can say they’ve done.

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Image credit: Sam Poullain