#ge2015 election project @meetyournextmp looking good, 30 days to election!

For the General election I’m working on MeetYourNextMP with the other volunteers from Democracy Club. This site, using the community calendar software I work on (OpenACalendar), lists indepedent hustings around the UK.

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!