Websites – Kimondo

Following the initial joy and elation at discovering we’ve got yet another chance to express our electoral opinions I’ve updated TweetYourMP.com to now include candidate information for the forthcoming 2017 snap General Election, and I’ve even managed to secure yet another dot com – TweetYourCandidate.com includes the details of over 3,000 candidates standing in the 650 constituencies across the UK.

Fortunately this time around I’ve been able to make use of the very useful candidate data from The Democracy Club which has saved a lot of time and made it possible to turn update the site in a very short space of time.

This time around there’s a new feature to play with: the campaign generator makes it possible to create your own pre-filled twitter campaigns to share.

As an example I created a very simple campaign – posing possibly the easiest question to people vying to be your Member of Parliament:

https://twitter.com/kimondo/status/859686716080357376

As I live in the Vauxhall constituency of former MP Kate Hoey I have had a number of replies:

First to reply was Harini Iyengar for The Women’s Equality Party:

https://twitter.com/Harini_Iyengar/status/859735962213122056

and now without the ringer:

https://twitter.com/Harini_Iyengar/status/859737011439251456

Then Mark Chapman for the Pirate Party:

https://twitter.com/Pirate_Lennon/status/859738317297942528

George Turner for the Lib Dems:

https://twitter.com/georgenturner/status/859738670219309058

and Gulnar Hasnain for the Greens

https://twitter.com/gulnar73/status/859742839361736704

Sadly I’ve yet to receive replies from Kate Hoey (The former Labour MP) nor Dolly Theis who is the Conservative and Unionist Party candidate, although in the case of the latter I did tweet later as my initial candidate list didn’t include her twitter details. UKIP are not running in Vauxhall.

So far a number of campaigns have made use of the tool – which is provided free of charge, as a spare time project.

To ask the same question to your candidates visit TweetYourCandidate.com

Since I’ve upgraded my hosting, one thing I’ve been wanting to do was to find a proper home for my Tweet Your MP script.

This is a php based script that looks up a UK parliamentary constituency given a postcode, and then returns the details of the MP using it’s own database. It’s been a handy resource for a few work projects, and since being published on GitHub as an open source project has been downloaded and used by a few other organisations as well.

So I can now reveal tweetyourMP.com

The data set has been updated – it now includes twitter accounts for 495 MPs
MP Email addresses and websites (where available)
Notable additions since the last update include Kate Hoey and Zac Goldsmith
the script is running on it’s own virtual host so it should be much faster.
The updated dataset is available as a google doc.
There’s now @tweet_your_MP on twitter which is an account which follows MPs who tweet
You can fork the project on GitHub

The next step of the project is to provide a widget version of the tweet your MP tool which can be added to blogs easily.

Also on the horizon is a completely hosted solution that makes use of the open source postcode to constituency database.

As always this is made possible by the very useful TheyWorkForYou.com API and the PHP-API interface script originally written by Ruben Arakelyan.

If you have any corrections to the data, please let me know.

A few facts and figures about UK parliamentarians

In total 86% of Labour, 78% of Liberal Democrats and 72% of Conservative MPs are on twitter.

For MPs not on twitter at several have parody accounts registered in their names, including Iain Duncan Smith who has over 26 thousand followers.

22 MPs don’t even have websites.