I need to be clear – I’m not blaming the candidates for this, as I’m well aware not everyone is comfortable in the digital world. No, who I’m very clearly blaming here are the main parties, who seem not to offer digital training and support to their candidates.

So many candidates used free webmail addresses and did not even have an email address supplied by the party. Surely this would look like a bit more professional?

Also, many candidates struggled under the amount of email they received. Apart from one candidate …. “Something New” candidate James Smith is a computer programmer, so wrote a system to help him deal with all the incoming email. His blog on the topic is a good read.

I’ve heard stories of other candidates who were unable to get anything done other than just emailing back to bulk messages, replying to each email individually!

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So I’ve created a script that helps manage this.

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To build my database of potential voters, this is amazing. Suddenly I have 100 more people who I know care about certain things, whom I can email about events, updates, blog posts, etc. People who want to hear back.

This computer system, basically a specialised Customer Relationship Management  system (CRM) handles the grunt work and allows James Smith to focus on the politics. This is brilliant. Here’s my question: why aren’t all the main parties providing a system like this to their candidates as a routine matter?

While some candidate websites were great and very informative, many were terrible with very little useful content.

Basically, while I appreciate that there is and will always be a heavy offline component to campaigning, in this age so many people want to easily look up information online, and digital technologies can help so much. Why would parties pass on that opportunity?

There were several new challenges to work on for this project, and to launch really quickly I just forked the code base and hacked any changes I needed directly into the core system! This was great, but after the site was live for a week I had to spend a horrible few days picking the changes apart and pushing some back to the Open Source core, pushing some changes to a extension just for this site and in some cases making the core more extendable to accomodate that. I’m pleased to say MeetYourNextMP is now run directly from the latest Open Source code from OpenACalendar with an extension and after the election there will be a new release of OpenACalendar (and the sites that run on that like OpenTechCalendar) with all kinds of goodies.

MeetYourNextMP is doing well, listing over 540 events in over 240 seats. It’s had great feedback and has been listed by all kinds of people like Citizens Advice Bureau, MIND for better mental health, The Campaign against the Arms trade, MacMillian Cancer Support and more.

It’s now 30 days to the election, and I’m not sure what that will bring for the site. I think it’s clear that there is already enought evidence to say both that some things have worked really well and that people really want a site like this, and they really want it to work well – for a first try at this that’s a great outcome. For me personally, it’ll be a tiring crazy month and I’ll be glad when it’s over!