On Sunday 1st and Monday 2nd June, we held two back-to-back hackathons packed with energy, ideas, and action. Here are some highlights of what our Campaign Labbers got up to!
Attendance Monitor for Reform Councillors:
In the wake of the May 1st election, Reform won many new council seats. This is a dangerous sign of the rise of the far right but also an opportunity to hold Reform to account for their actions in power. To capitalise on this opportunity, we worked on a tool to track Reform councillors’ meeting attendance. Some councils publish attendance records outright, so we created a tool to scrape those records. For those councils that do not we needed a workaround – so our community built a tool to extract attendance data directly from council meeting minutes. We are still working on adding new councils, but ultimately we will have a tool that will allow us to see the attendance records of every Reform councillor, and hold them to account accordingly.
Reform Failures by Postcode:
One team looked at the ways in which we can raise the visibility of Reform failures. They scraped the X account @reformexposed, which tracks many stories of Reform failures, tagged stories by location, and built a front-end tool to explore them geographically. This tool, which is still in development, should help people check how Reform’s failures have affected them locally and help to bolster the scrutiny of the performance of elected Reform UK officials.
Bubble Project:
This tool will allow progressive campaigns to target political geographies such as ward or constituency boundaries with digital advertising on Google and Meta. By default, these advertising platforms make it hard to target adverts at electoral geographies. Using this tool, we can build electoral maps for targeted advertising and target adverts more precisely than ever before!
Green Pathways:
This project is designed to help residents affected by the changes to PIP. The tool allows constituents to record their testimony and uses AI to help them edit it into a format that will maximise impact. Now in final testing, this project is nearly ready to launch! It’ll help users contribute to the government Green Paper on PIP reform and deepen democracy by facilitating MP-constituent engagement.
E-Petitions by Constituency:
Finally, in this spotlight, the E-Petitions by Constituency tool – which is now live – lets users see which e-petitions matter most in each parliamentary constituency. There are settings to figure out how much a petition was signed in one constituency, so you can tell what petitions crop up the most, and a tagging system to figure out which issues appear across multiple petitions. It’s optimised for desktop at the moment, so avoid mobile use. Check it out here.
This was only a taste of what we got up to, with volunteers working on many projects that did not get a write-up here! These hack nights show what’s possible when passionate people come together with purpose. Whether it’s countering disinformation, building civic tools, or visualising complex data in powerful ways – our community is constantly pushing forward.
If you’re excited by any of these projects or have an idea of your own, we’d love for you to get involved. If you’re curious, feel free to come along to our next hack night or get in touch with me for a chat!