How a group of civic technologists helped swing UK’s General Election
By: Manisha Ganguly
Tags: Politics, 2017 General Election, Technology, Elections, Data Science

It’s 10pm on Election Night at the packed War Room inside Newspeak House, and exit polls are about to be announced. A Wikipedia editathon is in progress, and when the results are projected onscreen, a mixture of groaning, swearing and cheering breaks out. It’s not the Labour majority they were hoping for, but the Conservatives are down by 17 seats. John turns to me excitedly and says: “Our model turned out to be the most accurate after Yougov! And we only began two months ago with a team of volunteer data scientists who’d never met before and had no experience of handling electoral data.” He shows me the screen where he’s adjusting the data, as behind me, a group of Labour supporters in red continue a heated discussion about Corbyn’s chances.

John Sandall is project manager for SixFifty, one of the many groups of civic technologists who’d been working out of the five-storey building in Shoreditch, building tools for the general election. Like SixFifty, most tonight are volunteers who had organically come together to address the needs of this election using technology.

Newspeak House in London has been growing into a hub of activity for technologists and activists over recent years. In the past, it has hosted hackathons, screenings, round-tables and community organising workshops focusing on digital transformation of civil society and the public sector. “When the election was called, I was aware of a significant community of people building technology to influence the election but I knew there’s not been much coherence to this movement,” says Edward Saperia, Dean of Newspeak House. “Because it only happens every 5 years, you don’t get a lot of stability to keep building. The advantage of this is that every time an election comes around you can start from scratch because technology moves a lot in 5 years: if you look back at 2010, we didn’t have smartphones.”

Newspeak House/ Photo: Edward Saperia

Within days of the Snap Election being called, Ed had announced the creation of War Room, a co-working hub set up at Newspeak for the 7 pre-election weeks. But getting technologists, campaigners and journalists under one roof is always a challenge, so Ed turned to social media.

Edward Saperia, Dean of Newspeak House/ Manisha Ganguly

“I created a set of online collaborative documents to collect useful resources for people building technology around the election and shared it around different groups: at last look it had 70 projects listed: from campaigning, to investigative journalism and infrastructure. Lots of community activities were going on where people were commenting, requesting and supplying data-sets.”

Jeremy Evans and Matt Morley, of the start-up Explaain were the first to snap into action. Within 7 minutes of the election announcement, they’d secured the URL for GE2017. “We soon heard about the War Room that Ed had set up and simply turned up. Most of our best opportunities came from connections made at Newspeak, and it’s hard to think of an election-related tech product that didn’t have a connection to the building in some way.”

What followed from this was a remarkable collective attempt at creating digital tools to help people make informed decisions before heading to polling stations: from finding local candidates and voting booths, to automated fact-checking of campaign propaganda and guerrilla-marketing manifestos using games.

Sam Jeffers, co-founder of WhoTargetsMe, a Chrome extension to monitor targeted advertising on Facebook by campaigning political parties, tells me the Press attention for their project has been overwhelming- New York Times, BBC, the Guardian, even Breitbart. “We [Louis Knight-Webb, co-founder] hadn’t even actually met when we began working together.” David Kitchen, of Tactical2017 a website advising on tactical voting, echoes this sentiment: “I saw a spreadsheet which Becky Snowden up in Yorkshire had created and got in touch to build the website. We’ve never actually met.”

A hackathon at Newspeak House/ Photo: Ed Saperia

The combined efforts at Newspeak saw 100,000 new voters registered by election day. GE2017 alone had secured 2.5 million unique visitors by the end of the election, double the previous record for a UK voter advice tool. Ed adds, “We also held a round-table discussion with representatives from Google, Facebook, Twitter, Electoral Commission, Parliament Digital Service, Democracy Club, Bite the Ballot, Full Fact, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The BBC, The Guardian, Labour Digital, etc. to work on a voter registration strategy.”

As a result, this year’s election saw the largest voter turnout in 25 years, with more than half the youth showing up to vote. In the aftermath of the election, where the Conservatives lost out on the expected landslide majority, I meet up with some of the technologists involved to assess how their efforts impacted this change.