A Talk from OpenTech 2015 about a tool I wrote for monitoring parliamentary candidates on Twitter during the 2015 UK general election.

1. Twittelection
Twitter in the
General Election
http://twittelection.co.uk
Dave Cross
@davorg
@twittelection

2. Twittelection
●
What?
●
Why?
●
How?
●
What happened?
●
Was it worth it?

3. What?

6. TwittElection
●
Twitter account
– @TwittElection
●
Twitter lists
– One per constituency
●
Web site
– twittelection.co.uk
– Page per constituency
– Stats

7. Why?

8. I ♥ Elections

9. I ♥ Twitter

12. Elections +
Twitter =
Awesome

13. How?

14. How?
●
Technology
– Pretty easy
●
Data
– Much harder

15. Technology
●
Twitter
– Lists & Widgets
– Recent changes
●
Perl
– Net::Twitter
●
Github pages

16. Technology
●
Bootstrap
●
jQuery
●
Modernizr
●
Initializr

17. Data
●
Much harder problem
●
650 constituencies
●
~6 candidates per constituency
●
~4000 candidates
●
No centralised data source

20. YourNextMP
●
Crowd-sourced list of candidates
●
Party affiliation
●
Twitter username
●
And an API

21. Technology + Data
●
YMNP API
●
JSON
●
Basic data munging
●
Twitter List API
●
TwittElection

22. What
Happened?

23. Basically,
it worked

24. A few bugs

26. Interesting
error codes

27. 403 & 429

28. 108

29. Adding non-
existent user to
a list

30. Typo in
Twitter name

31. Changed
Twitter name

32. 106

33. The user has
blocked you

34. @glenntingle

35. @glenntingle
(UKIP Norwich North)

40. See also
@timscottukip

42. Some people don't
understand
crowd-sourcing

45. Statistics

46. 72%

47. Candidates By Party
Party Twitter No Twitter
Conservative 84% 16%
Labour 93% 7%
Lib Dem 70% 30%
UKIP 51% 49%
Green 77% 23%
SNP 100% 0%
Plaid Cymru 83% 17%

48. Was It
Worth It?

50. Was It Worth It?
●
Small number of users
– Lack of marketing
●
No stats on Twitter lists
●
People said nice things

51. Next Steps
●
Make it configurable
●
Promote code
●
http://github.com/davorg/twittelection
●
Re-use in other elections
– UK & International
●
Twitter + PopIt

53. Questions?
@davorg
@twittelection