Give me a hint at how I might find more candidate information

[fawkesley]

I'm keen to contribute but I don't know where to crowdsource this information from.

It would be helpful for me if there were a couple of suggestions on how to add new candidates, contact an existing candidate that's uncertain etc.

[tfgg]

This is a kind of work in progress but there's a guide here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1iA5Tv3ZgjDHWNv6gbNESqL-C7Goz6ZSo1X9pPXwXspA/edit

The site itself could probably do with a succinct summary of that, plus maybe some sort of director that suggests gaps to fill in.

[fawkesley]

Magic, thanks @tfgg

[zarino]

I was thinking exactly this during @tfgg’s talk tonight in Oxford – and then I found this ticket!

It feels like the homepage needs a "I’m in, where do I start?" crash course, that says, like, "Find a constituency with no confirmed candidates on this page, and put it into Google…" etc.

[fawkesley]

Right - listing constituencies with particularly poor information would be
really helpful.

[symroe]

You know we have this?

http://yournextmp.com/numbers/constituencies

It's not ideal as you have to scroll to the bottom, but it's a good start.

I guess the user flow will be:

1. look at their own constituency
2. [read activities like following on twitter, etc]
3. Add / edit their own candidates
4. maybe go and add/edit other candidates

And the last step is what makes a power user.

[zarino]

@symroe – indeed, that's the page I use! (And the one I meant by "this page" in my example above).

Linking to it more prominently (and clearly saying how someone should use it to find low hanging fruit for improving the dataset) is what I think is missing.

[symroe]

Ah, I thought you were referring to a hypothetical page :)

Maybe we should reverse the order, as seeing the most isn't very interesting. And add a "Be the first to add a candidate here" style link next to the constituencies with no one listed in 2015.

[zarino]

The more I think about it, the more I feel like I need a "Challenges" page, where a few easy tasks are presented to me. Like:

• "Here are 5 candidates without a website entry. Can you search for their names on Google and find their website?"
• "Here are 5 candidates without a twitter entry. Can you find them on Twitter?"
• "Here are 5 constituencies with no registered candidates. Can you find candidate announcements for any of them? Try Googling for "[constituency] prospective parliamentary candidate" or "[constituency] reselected"…"

Even just trawling through the constituencies page is a drag, when the software could just present me with a few automatically.

[zarino]

Admittedly, maybe that's a separate ticket. I think Paul’s initial request was for a simple Help page.

(But my underlying suspicion is, even with a Help page, people won’t read it, and you’ll need to hand-hold them through the process of finding constituencies/candidates to edit)