Database… designer/maker/thing/person sought

[fearmeforiampink]

I am currently volunteering for Unlock Democracy whilst I look for a paying job in the third (not-for-profit) sector. One of the things I've been doing recently is looking at people who've joined the House of Lords over the last year or two, and seeing how much they've donated to any political parties. Some of them have donated a lot.

I've been doing this through the Electoral Commission's online searchable database. However, the database is fairly limited in how you can get information out of it; I can search for a name, I can search for individual donations above a certain amount, or between certain dates, but I can't search for things like total donations over a given amount (which would be really useful for tracking if donating a lot gets you influence/peerage/whatever else).

I was discussing it with the director of Unlock Democracy, and he said that funding could be found to pay someone to make a more useful searchable database for UD (and presumably other democratic reform organisations, possibly also for the public) to use. I don't know exactly how much it would be, but given that it's a largely one time job that shouldn't take too much time to put together, I'd imagine the hourly rate would be fairly good.

You'd need take the data (the data from a search can be downloaded as a CSV file, I'd imagine that we can get the entire database by one of a) a sufficiently wide search b) asking the Electoral Commission nicely or c) a number of sufficiently wide searches.) and turn it into a database that had more ways that you could search it, order it and so forth.

A proper brief for what we're after can come from more specific discussions once someone's more actively involved. However, just off the top of my head, we'd want:

• ability for it to work out the total donations given by each donor, and search for total donations above a certain level, or provide an ordered list of total amount donated by people.
  
• If possible, some sort of wildcard search/ordering that would allow you to note that a large number of donations have come from several different person/company names, but all have "29 Acacia Road" as part of their donor description, and all are to the Labour party or it's MPs/suchlike.
  
• The ability to add more data to it. The electoral commissions search outputs as comma seperated variables, UD/whoever could get someone to ask the database for the new entries once a month and add those. It's probably achievable to have the person doing the inputting being at least somewhat technical (high level user rather than programmer level though probably).
  
• Probably other stuff, that I'm not currently aware of, but which would be explained in a more fulsome discussion with the people that'll be funding it's creation.

So, anyone interested? Feel free to pass this link on to people you think might be able to do it.

Comments

[matgb]

Not within my skillset, I hate extracting data--playing with it afterwards is something i'm good at, running queries in the first place I just find frustrating.

So you're generally working in the UD offices? Say hi to James for me.

[fearmeforiampink]

He's been out a certain amount, what with his impending wedding. But I'll say hi when I see him.

And yeah, I've been in UD a fair amount in the last eight months; Yes London used their back office, and I was first a general volunteer, then a volunteer phonebank manager there. When they started paying me, I was in UD less, but still a reasonable bit. Then after the campaign, I spent a couple of weeks being paid to call Yes donors up for them and offer free membership to UD. Now I'm doing volunteering for them as a way to keep myself in the work get-up-in-the-morning habit, to get more experience in the sector, and because it's stuff that matters.

[pewterfish.livejournal.com]

Interesting, but I'm currently massively overcommitted. Happy to act as a rubber-duck for the person implementing if they want someone to bounce ideas off, though: I have some experience with SQL and PHP, at least.

[one-wingx.livejournal.com]

Bah, were I not massively busy, I'd be intrigued. Hope you find someone.

[fearmeforiampink]

Given that I've now had at least four people basically go "I have the skills but not the time", I was correct in my assessment that the task is eminently achievable within the skillset of my wider friendsgroup, so I'm fairly certain I'll find someone. I could probably teach myself sufficiently to do it, I just a) don't really want to and b) think it'd be better done by someone who already knows what thhey're doing.

To be fair, if it doesn't get snapped up immediately, then the need will still be there later, so it can be done later if there's no availability now but some later.

[portilis.livejournal.com]

Email me with stuff?

Only issue would be it'd be a long-distance thing for me.

[lokean.livejournal.com]

Somewhat interested, and built a database for data collection and implementation of GSK's new LIMS before they fired me for not liking the people in charge, so probably have the skills.

By the sounds of it you're not even looking for a system with high degrees of parallel use or write transactions, so it could probably be implemented in Access or OpenOffice-Base (yes, I know they're not really DBMSs, but it _is_ easier for a mid-level user to, for example, generate their own custom queries when they have access to a GUI and wizards, rather than writing it in SQL)

Of course, I could be wrong. How many parallel users would you be expecting, and would they be expected to have write access to the database, and would you want a GUI with forms and dropdowns and soforth?