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fearmeforiampinkI 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:
So, anyone interested? Feel free to pass this link on to people you think might be able to do it.
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.
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Date: 2011-06-20 05:43 pm (UTC)So you're generally working in the UD offices? Say hi to James for me.
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Date: 2011-06-20 06:00 pm (UTC)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.