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Have you ever typed a phrase like ‘what’s the time in New York’ or ‘what is 28 km in miles’ into Google? If you’ve done so in the last couple of years, you’ll have seen answers given on the results page itself, inside dedicated answer boxes.
For the next couple of weeks, Google users in Britain who search for key election data will see the answers presented in-page in this increasingly familiar way.
We’re delighted to share the news that these answers are being supplied as open standard data from Democracy Club’s brilliant, volunteer-powered YourNextMP project, as well as our own long running TheyWorkForYou. The aim is to make information easily accessible to anyone who seeks it: we are one of a few data sources to be supplying Google.
We’re particularly excited about this because YourNextMP is powered by PopIt, a Poplus Component which is used to create nice clean open standards Popolo data on politicians.
We think that adoption of open standards data by companies as big as Google points towards a promising world in which there is a lot more good quality, open standard data on political issues of all kinds.
Try it for yourself: search for uk election candidates or a question like who can I vote for?
How was this made possible?
We’re so delighted to see essential civic data being brought to the search engine’s vast numbers of users. It’s all down to the power of open standards and re-usable open source software.
YourNextMP provides feeds via an API, which are available for anyone—large organisations like Google, or individual people like you, perhaps—to use in their own projects.
YourNextMP’s use of the Popolo open standard for government means that the data is clean, machine-readable and easy to slot in anywhere—including Google.
Three cheers
We think a few shout-outs are due. This simple but far-reaching usage of YourNextMP data is only possible because of many good people bringing good things together:
- Democracy Club, and the huge amount of work that this volunteer-run organisation put in to gather and check candidate data
- The many volunteers who gave their time in adding and refining that data
- Popolo, driven by the work of James McKinney
- Poplus, because YourNextMP is based on the people-and-positions storing Component, PopIt
- Google.org, whose funding allowed the creation of Poplus in the first place.
What YourNextMP has achieved
Just as was hoped, YourNextMP data has been used to underpin a variety of projects by many individuals and organisations.
Google may be the latest and the biggest, but we’re no less pleased to see how it has made possible numerous tools to educate or inform the public before the election, as well as powering stories and infographics in several national newspapers. See our previous post for more details on this.
And there’s more. YourNextMP, because it’s built on Open Source code, won’t be going into hibernation until the next election in this country.
The UK voting may be over on May 8, but there are elections all over the world still to come. Our friends in Latin America will be taking the code and adapting it for use in Argentina whose election process starts in August. ¡Viva YourNextMP!