Problem Addressed
E-petitions are good for democracy because they let people publicly signal what they care about but we under-use them by focusing on national totals. Without constituency filtering and relative salience, we miss local hotspots, can’t compare areas fairly, and act too late.
Approach & Implementation
Volunteers at Campaign Lab Hack nights adressed this challenge by working to build a new tool that resolves this problem. They used the data from the Epetitions website and built a tool that breaks it down by constituency. Then they introduced a salience tracker and an issue breakdown to help find out what citizens care about the most.
Resources
Github Link: https://github.com/CampaignLab/petitions-by-locality
As is the case for all of our tools, iterative improvement is only made possible by testing and user feedback. If you have any feedback for this tool, please feel free to get in touch with [email protected]