A website for crowd-sourcing structured data about election candidates

candidates.democracyclub.org.uk

YourNextRepresentative ("YNR") is an open source platform for crowd-sourcing information about candidates for political office, and making it available as open data to anyone. YNR collects some core data, including:

• who is standing,
• what party they’re standing for,
• their contact details, and
• their social media accounts.

YNR requires that each change is submitted with a source, so that the collected information can be verified.

Using YNR

To find out information about who you can vote for in upcoming elections, head over to whocanivotefor.co.uk and search for candidates in your area.

To contribute information about candidates, use the YNR application at candidates.democracyclub.org.uk.

Developing YNR

Before you can start modifying the YNR application and website, you'll need to install its development prerequisites -- as detailed in docs/INSTALL.md.

After you've confirmed that the prerequisites are working correctly on your machine you'll be able to use the workflows detailed in docs/DEVELOPMENT.md to make changes to YNR.

Known Bugs

You can find a list of known issues to work on here:

• https://github.com/DemocracyClub/yournextrepresentative/issues

Acknowledgements

This codebase was originally forked from mysociety/yournextrepresentative We no longer track the upstream but we thank mySociety for their work on the project which we have been able to build on.

API Versions

v0.9 is legacy code and is now frozen. v1.0 is currently in alpha. We plan on publishing a v1 API once we have some more feedback from users and we think it’s stable enough.

Statement Of Persons Nominated (SOPN) Parsing

See ynr/apps/sopn_parsing.

Sentry Error Reporting

Sentry is used to report errors in production. We have added a url for sentry-debug to the urls.py file. This is to allow us verify that Sentry is configured correctly and working in production.

Pre-election Tasks

Enable Candidate Leaderboard

The candidate leaderboard shows the most active contributors to the site. It is a way of encouraging volunteers to add more information about candidates and elections.

We take a slice of edits in YNR and assign them to a election leaderboard. This is defined in ynr/apps/candidates/views/mixins.py.

We can modify the old value to reflect the current election. Change, PR, merge, [currently Sym needs to deploy]

If this is a General Election, the parliamentary candidates can be imported using a google sheet csv url with:

podman compose up -d dbpqsl
./scripts/container.run.bash python manage candidatebot_import_next_ppcs --sheet-url SHEET_URL
podman compose down