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The government registration gateway was tedious Matt Morley (far left) and Jeremy Evans (far right), with collaborators Jay Baykara and Josh Balfour in Newspeak House. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Theres an infuriating gap in the coverage of this election. It lies between the idea that the internet has changed everything and any detail of what might have happened on the internet. This gap has been filled with a bit of noise about Facebook ads and echo-chamber Twitter feeds.

But, in fact, civic tech is a real thing, featuring real people, with real technical expertise, trying to hack around every democratic deficiency. They are trying to tackle everything from a sheer lack of easily accessible information to the shortcomings of the first-past-the-post system. They dont just exist. A lot of them exist in the same building: Newspeak House in east London. Its a community space for political technologists according to its founder, 32-year-old Ed Saperia. In practice, that means that it looks like a Silicon Valley startup exposed concrete, free-flowing nachos, a pool table.

Tom de Grunwald is working on a vote-swapping website, SwapMyVote, which is trying to hack the problem of first-past-the-post. Look, he explains, this isnt working at all. In 2015, 74.4% of votes were wasted [they werent cast for the eventual winners]. It causes so many problems, from voter apathy to the difficulty of setting up new parties. Even the fact that we never argued with Ukip properly because people took it for granted that they were just extremists who would never cut through. If they had been getting the seats that reflected their popularity, we would have been arguing with them for 10 or 15 years by now.

These civic tech entrepreneurs are not happy with the old-school duality that we know something is broken but accept it as completely normal. Everyone here is used to iterating very quickly. If the product isnt working, you change the product to make it work.

I first came here two weeks ago to interview a Bernie Sanders campaigner, thinking it was just a hot-desking space, and noticed a few things: phrases such as electoral data uttered with a rare enthusiasm, open-ended questions along the lines of what if we took the progressive alliance concept and applied it not just to voting, but to campaigning? Could we build an app for that?

Some people, in groups of twos and threes, were working on a political matchmaking website (you say what ideas or policies you agree with, and it matches you to a candidate). Others were campaigning for online voting; some just building a centralised list of candidates, something that, remarkably, the government doesnt do. Some were fighting education cuts, some were pushing voter registration, some were fighting fake news. There was a lot of cross-pollination, and a palpable sense of possibility.

On that first visit, I sidled over to Sym Roe from Democracy Club, who I had come across during the EU referendum, when he was building a polling-station-finder tool. Can you give me five minutes? he asks, with anxious courtesy. I think were just about to solve something. This, in the scheme of the 2017 election fly-on-the-walling, is not something I have heard anywhere else.

James Moulding, 24, is a political analyst at Crowdpac, the Steve Hilton/Paul Hilder cross-Atlantic project that crowdfunds for candidates and campaigns. Independently from that, he has cocreated an air-quality-monitoring startup and is working on how you would crowdsource a manifesto. The latter technique has been employed by Spanish anti-austerity party Podemos, but the example the techies all use is Taiwan, where the government does real-time consultation with its citizens using the pol.is platform. This, incidentally, was Ed Saperias driving motivation in setting up Newspeak; the realisation that all the parties right now are faking it. They are putting together platforms that they hope some people will support, rather than finding ways for their policies to be cocreated.

Mouldings core business today is a computer game modelled on the French socialist candidate Jean-Luc Mlenchons Fiscal Kombat, in which a French president shakes bankers until money comes out of them. Mouldings version, Corbyn Run, is better. A man runs past. Why is he sweating? I ask. Because hes a bureaucrat. Also, hes running. Corbyn catches him, shakes the money out of his pockets and then does the same to a few bankers. Its made by Labour party members, he says sternly, not the Labour party. This mix of activity some shallow, some profound, some fun, some not fun at all (there is nothing playful about creating mobile sensor networks to produce air quality data) is typical, though everything is marked by a sense of urgency.

Elections are not really mostly what we think about, here, Saperia says. The thing thats fascinated me, for as long as I can remember, is how humans can successfully interact at scale; in a way that we think is good and meaningful. If you wanted to have a conversation with 10,000 people, how could you do that? Wikipedia is a really good example of thousands of people creating something great, through communicating. Whereas Facebook is quite atomising; everyone sticks to their small groups.

In 2014, he was asked by the Green party for digital help with their membership surge. He had never previously been interested in party politics. Thats when I realised that this whole political ecosystem is not functioning very well. He made a diagram of civil society: one-third education, media, journalism and academia; one-third civil service, local authorities, government, parliament; and one-third unions, activists, party members, campaigners.

A lot of these people dont know each other. I thought: what this space needs is some community building. These networks in Newspeak are very noticeable lots of the people have links in the electoral commission, or in the Government Digital Service (GDS), or have only just resigned from the civil service.

The election has sharpened everybodys focus. Jeremy Evans, 25, and Matt Morley, 22, usually run the fact-card startup explaain.com, but have given themselves full-time to GE2017.com. The site pushed voter registration with a tool for students, where they could check which constituency home or college their vote would make the most difference in. It came up with Vauxhall as a potential swing between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, something that didnt show up in any polling I had seen. Weve got an algorithm that takes in many factors, including betting odds. Where do you get those? We scrape data from actually, I cant tell you that.

Morley and Evans can tell me how many people landed on the registration page 100,000 and how many clicked on the link 72% but beyond sending the link, we have no idea. Only the GDS has that information, Evans says. The government gateway was tedious; [it] put people off [and] made them think they needed their national insurance number when they didnt.

Now the registration deadline has passed, GE2017 has moved on, with a quiz that matches you to a party, not unlike Crowdpacs matchmaker quiz. Fragmentation is one of the problems we wanted to solve. There were about six or seven who-should-I-vote-for? apps at the last election, all of them got between 100,000 and a million hits. We spoke to the Electoral Commission about having a state-sponsored app they have one in Germany. We wanted to make it semi-official, get everyone under one roof, build a really, really good one. Events overtook them, and there wasnt time. Once you have done your quiz, there are a couple of telling links: a link to a longer quiz; a link to SwapMyVote; a link to how to spoil your ballot. Most people think you can just draw a cock, but it wont be included in the official results unless you do a straight line through all the candidates. Even now, Matt and I arent completely clear on it. He thought you did a line through the page on the left, and I thought you did it through the candidates. Its amazing how difficult it is to find this information. Im still not clear on whether you can draw a line and then draw a cock.

Across the desk, Areeq Chowdhury, 24, is working single-handedly on WebRoots Democracy, which started as a campaign for online voting but has evolved into a thinktank covering the use of personal data, fake news, e-petitions, voter advice applications. His own evolution (not counting the one that brought him here, having studied economics and political science, through KMPG, into the civil service, which he quit a month ago) is interesting. It started as the glaring answer to how to get young people to vote, but it soon became clear that the main beneficiaries would be disabled people, those who were bedridden, or with very limited vision. The Royal National Institute of Blind People estimated that 1.4 million people struggled to vote in 2015. They do it with braille, but a lot of people dont read braille any more.

Newspeak runs fellowships, one of whom is Sophie Chesney, 26. She is studying for a PhD in computer science at Queen Mary and her field is natural language processing specifically, Im looking at the automatic detection of misleading headlines. It sounds like, if it came off, an algorithm for the discovery of fake news, but she chooses her words carefully and makes no outlandish claims. If the text is making an exaggerating claim, that may be linked to a negative sentiment. But Im not at the moment experimentally ready to show that.

Democracy Club has been running since 2009, set up by Sym Roe and Joe Mitchell. It is run on no money: Roe does six months contracting as a software engineer, then six months unpaid for Democracy Club. A lot of people here are doing really cool stuff, but were doing the boring bits: aggregation work, creating data that is open for everyone to use. He is doing a centralised list of candidates, and for the 2016 and 2017 local elections, we created a database of all 16,000 candidates, and all of that was open data. They have partnered with the Electoral Commission, and had support from Google and Twitter. The work does sound quite boring but incredibly good for amassing contacts. I was working in digital government, for the DWP and the Ministry of Justice. A lot of it is knowing the way the civil service works. Also, being a white, middle-class man who works as a software developer. That helps.

As we are speaking, something interrupts my vision from the left, and a man who looks like a Stone Roses fan is crouched on the floor, with his arms reaching up to Roes keyboard. This, it transpires later, is Michael Smethurst from the Parliamentary Digital Service. Along with Anya Somerville, a parliamentary librarian, and Ben Woodhams, who originally worked for Hansard and slid into change management, Smethurst is engaged in trying to make the parliamentary website more functional; they come into Newspeak House periodically. We cant really editorialise parliament, its not our job. There might be 500 statutory instruments of which two are of any interest. Its not our job to pick out those two. Yet any meaningful access to democracy requires that the citizen can navigate the terrain. These mini institutions whether Democracy Club or mySociety (which created the seamlessly influential TheyWorkForYou.com) collate, editorialise, create digital order for the public good. The more transparent and accessible democracy is, the more obvious it is which bits could be better. Its like sitting in on the meeting where they invented dentistry, or clean water: kind of obvious, kind of earth-shattering, kind of tedious, kind of magical.

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Democracy? There's an app for that the tech upstarts trying to 'hack' British politics - The Guardian

Labour and the Green party have called for the legislation to be repealed, while the Lib Dems and the SNP have urged reform. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Charities have been forced to change their key messages to the public during the general election because of the chilling effect of the controversial Lobbying Act, a group of leading UK organisations has warned.

Democratic debate on some of the biggest issues in the election campaign has been stifled by the law, a group of more than 50 charities writes in a letter sent to the main party leaders.

Voices are being lost at this crucial time, and our democracy is poorer for it, they said. Their concerns echo those of many charities, particularly in the field of social care, which told the Guardian they were unable to raise vital concerns over, and experiences of, the impacts of current and future policies.

The Lobbying Act restricts what non-governmental organisations can say in the year before a general election. Billed as a brake on corporate lobbying as well as NGOs when it was brought in, its provisions have fallen harder on the non-profit sector, leading to an independent commission and the House of Lords recommending amendments.

In their letter sent on Monday, more than 50 UK charities called for the urgent reform of the controversial legislation, which they said was having a chilling effect on debates over policy ahead of Thursdays snap election. They warned that charities were weighed down by an unreasonable and unfair law which restricts our ability to contribute fully to a democratic society.

The charities come from across the spectrum, representing social care, health, poverty, environment, and vulnerable groups. They include household names such as the Sue Ryder nursing charity, AgeUK, Amnesty, the development charity Care, and Christian Aid.

Craig Bennett, chief executive of the Friends of the Earth charity network, which coordinated the letter along with the Bond group of more than 450 development charities, said: The problem with the Lobbying Act is that it seriously damages charities ability to do their job to work for the greater public good. Important civic voices that speak for the most marginalised are being lost. If the act is not reformed, democracy will suffer.

Tamsyn Barton, chief executive of Bond, added that smaller and poorer charities were among the worst affected as they could not afford legal advice and struggled with the amount of red-tape compliance that the act involves.

Several charities have had to reconsider key publicity and events for fear of falling foul of the act. For instance, Christian Aids annual fundraising week fell after the prime minister Theresa May called the snap election. The charity had to deal with thousands of local activists concerned that their leaflets and fundraising events might fall under the act, and spend time and effort logging every activity closely, because the act makes charities liable for their activities retrospectively.

Several charities said that as well as the provisions of the act, they were concerned that some organisations were censoring themselves, thereby damaging democratic debate.

Greenpeace recently became the first charity to be fined for refusing to be regulated under the law, in an act of civil disobedience.

Theresa Mays decision to call a snap general election caused particular consternation because it means all charities communications in the preceding year fall under the rules retrospectively. When the act was introduced under the coalition, charities were reassured by ministers that parliamentary elections would be on a five-year cycle, giving them time to formulate and publicise key messages ahead of the formal start of any election campaign.

A review by the Conservative peer Lord Hodgson found that the right balance had not been struck in the act as presently drafted, and a House of Lords committee found the rules threaten the vital advocacy role of charities.

Labour and the Green party have called for the legislation to be repealed, while the Liberal Democrats and the SNP have urged reform. Baroness Parminter, the Lib Dem peer, said the act was pernicious and was having a chilling effect on democratic debate.

Within the next few days, the UN special rapporteur will present what is expected to be a critical review of the act and its impact.

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'Chilling' Lobbying Act stifles democracy, charities tell party chiefs ... - The Guardian

This article first appeared on The Conversation.

Politics are in shambles across the world. Populism and political gambles are making headlines from London to Washington. Southern Africa is no exception. If its any comfort, this suggests that theres nothing genuinely typical about African versions of political populism. Nor are the flaws in democracy typically African.

This might put some events into wider perspective. But its nonetheless worrying to follow the current political turmoil in some southern Africa countries.

The regional hegemon, South Africa, is embroiled in domestic policy tensions of unprecedented proportions since it became a democracy. And the situation in the sub-region is not much better.

The state of opposition politics and democracy is in a shambles too. The fragile political climate and the mentality of most opposition politicians hardly offer meaningful alternatives. This is possibly an explanation but no excuse for the undemocratic practices permeating almost every one of the regions democracies.

Beyond multi-party systems with regular elections, they resemble very little of true democracies.

SOUTH AFRICAN HICCUPS

At the end of May the dimensions of state capture in South Africa were set out in a report published by an academic team.

It shows how deeply the personalised systematic plundering of state assets is entrenched. Additional explosive evidence was presented only days later through thousands of leaked e-mails. Dubbed the Gupta Leaks, they document a mafia-like network among Zuma-loyalists and the Indian Gupta family.

The evidence points to massive influence, if not control, over political appointments, the hijacking of higher public administration and embezzlement of enormous proportions.

Some 65% of South Africans want Zuma to resign. An all-time low approval rating of 20% makes him less popular among the electorate than even US President Donald Trump. Despite this combined with growing demands from within the party that he steps down the ANC still backs its president.

But divisions within the party are deepening, with some in its leadership demanding an investigation into the Gupta patronage network.

For his part, Zuma is focused on pulling strings to secure Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma as his successor as president of the party. The other front-runner candidate is Deputy President Cyril Ramaphosa.

Zumas assumption appears to be that, once in office, his former wife would not endorse any legal prosecution of the father of her children.

But the countrys official opposition party, Democratic Alliance (DA), isnt reaping the benefits of the ANCs blunders. It has its own problems, which are constraining the gains it might otherwise be making from the ANCs mess.

The party is divided over what to do about its former leader and Premier of the Western Cape province, Helen Zille following a tweet in which she defended the legacy of colonialism. The comment whipped up a storm of protest and for weeks the party had been at pains on how to deal with the scandal.

DA leader Mmusi Maimane finally announced that Zille had been suspended from the party and that a disciplinary hearing would decide what further political consequences she might face. But a resilient Zille immediately challenged the decision.

Whatever the outcome, the DAs image is damaged. Its aspirations to be the countrys new majority party has been dealt a major blow.

REGIONAL WOES

In Angola, 74-year-old Jose Eduardo dos Santos, who has been in office since 1979, has decided to select a successor. The scenario will secure that the family oiligarchy will remain in control of politics and the countrys economy, while the governing Peoples Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) uses the state apparatus to ruthlessly suppress any meaningful social protests.

In contrast Robert Mugabe reigning in Zimbabwe since independence in 1980 - shows no intention of retiring. He was nominated again as the Zimbabwe African Nation Union/Patriotic Fronts (Zanu/PF) candidate for the 2018 presidential elections. But everyone is anxiously following the partys internal power struggles over the ailing autocrats replacement. Fears are that the vacuum created by his departure might create a worse situation.

While the regimes constant violation of human rights is as in Angola geared towards preventing any form of meaningful opposition, there are concerns that the unresolved succession might add another violent dimension to local politics.

Zambias democracy also looks sad. The countrys main opposition leader Hakainde Hichilema of the United Party for National Development (UPND) is on trial for high treason. Hichilema has been embroiled in a personal feud with President Edgar Lungu of the governing Patriotic Front (PF) for years. He was arrested in early April after obstructing the presidents motor cavalcade. The charge of high treason is based on the accusation that he wilfully put President Lungus life in danger.

The trial is feeding growing concerns over an increasingly autocratic regime. The once praised democracy, which allowed for several relatively peaceful transfers of political power since the turn of the century, is now in decline.

Lesotho is also in a mess. It provides a timely reminder that competing parties seeking to obtain political control over governments are by no means a guarantee for better governance. Aptly described as a Groundhog Day election, citizens in the crisis-ridden country went to the polls for the third time since 2012 with no new alternatives or options.

Their limited choice is between two former prime ministers aged 77 (Tom Thabane) and 72 (Pakalitha Mosisili). The likely election result is another fragile coalition government provided the military accepts the result.

Meanwhile, the biggest challenge for relative political stability in the region might still be in the making: President Joseph Kabila, whose second term in office in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) ended in December 2016, is still hanging on with the promise that hell vacate the post by end of this year.

Despite a constitutional two-term limit, his plans remain a matter of speculation. In a recent interview, he was characteristically evasive. He refused to give a straight answer on whether hes still considering another term and flatly denied that he had promised anything, including elections.

Kabilas extended stay in office threatens to exacerbate an already explosive and violent situation, with potentially devastating consequences.

His continued reign would not only provoke further bloodshed at home. Any spill-over will challenge the Southern African Development Communitys willingness and ability to find solutions to regional conflicts in the interests of relative stability. A stability which is at best fragile and indicative of the crisis of policy in most of the regional bodys member states.

Henning Melber is extraordinary professor, Department of Political Sciences, University of Pretoria.

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[OPINION] Democracy is looking sickly across southern Africa - Eyewitness News

This year, therell be four pivotal elections across the continentnamely, in Kenya, Rwanda, Angola (all in August) , and Liberia (October). These general and presidential elections could reshape not only the political institutions in these nations but are also likely to have an impact on peace and security, governance, development and economic growth.

The fear of ethnic-induced violence in Kenya, the angst around the succession plan in Rwanda, the end of the worlds longest running presidencies in Angola, and the task of replacing Africas first female president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia will all be significant milestones, indicative of where Africas electoral politics goes from here.

In late May, president Paul Kagame gave his strongest hint yet that he could step down after the upcoming August elections. Elected in 2003 with more than 95% of the vote, Kagame has in the past promised to leave office, especially if he didnt build national institutions that would allow him to preside over a peaceful transfer of power. But that will be a step easier said than done.

Some Rwandans assert a third term would allow Kagame to consolidate the socioeconomic and technological progress the country has achieved under his leadership. Others argue that Kagame and his party, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), have used the memory of the genocide to limit competitive politics and undermine dissent. In fact, other observers have warned that keeping Kagame in office could produce violence in the future, and could push rivals to extricate him.

Edward Paice, the director of the Africa Research Institute, says the situation will become clearer closer to the 2024 elections. A Putin-Medvedev-style shuffle was speculated, Paice says, but nothing was put into effectshowing that even if he stands down, Kagame will still remain a central figure in [Rwandan] politics.

As a regional economic powerhouse, transport hub with a relatively open democracy, Kenyas elections attract attention well beyond its borders. In its 2013 election, more than 23,000 local and international observers monitored the Kenyan election.

The 2017 Kenyan presidential elections will be another two-horse race between Raila Odinga and the incumbent Uhuru Kenyatta. Since the bloody aftermath of the 2007 elections, Kenya has adopted a progressive constitution that devolved the system of power and mandated the distribution of resources to counties. But the biggest challenge facing the country, observers say, is the weakness of key institutions like the electoral commission. The Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission was only sworn in Januarya breach of recommendations that outlined commissioners be in office two years in advance. Polls also show that the Kenyan public doesnt trust the Supreme Court to handle an election petition if the results are contested by either party.

Murithi Mutiga, senior Horn of Africa analyst with the International Crisis Group, says that this means the potential for a contested outcome resulting in inter-communal conflict or violent street protests remain high.

On Saturday (June 3), thousands of Angolans protested in the streets of the capital Luanda to demand free and fair elections. After 38 years in power, president Jose Eduardo dos Santos will step down, with defense minister Joo Lourenco emerging as the chosen successor.

The election is set to mark a significant turn for the oil-rich nation, which has been ruled by one party since independence in 1975. Since he ascended to the presidency, dos Santos has been accused of crushing dissent, appointed his daughterAfricas richest womanto lead the state oil company, and his son to head the nations $5 billion sovereign wealth fund.

But Lourenco is set to inherit a country struggling with low oil prices, rising inflation rates, and increasing poverty. And those expecting radical change might be disappointed. Power in the country will remain in the hands of the military because Lourenco is a general, Nuno Dala, an opposition activist, said.

Africas oldest republic heads to the polls in October to elect a leader to succeed president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. So far, 11 candidates have registered including Alexander Cummings, a former Coca-Cola executive; vice president Joseph Boakai; and former football star George Weah. All the candidates say they want to deal with poverty and unemployment, tackle widespread health problems including Ebola risk, and improve infrastructural development.

The race also features one woman, an ex-model who wants to be the countrys second female president. MacDella Cooper is running on a five-point platform that hopes to provide free education for all, universal health care, electricity in every home, decentralizing governance, and dealing with land ownership.

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Kenya, Rwanda, Angola, and Liberia elections could show where ... - Quartz

Divisive discourse. Trumps tweets. Fake news.

The 2016 Election revealed the surprising ways the internet can shape Americans political views. Voters were exposed to strategically placed misinformation, propaganda posts composed by automated programs and an increased volume on hate speech and hostile political rhetoric.

Stanford law professor Nate Persily has written about this phenomenon in a journal article called Can Democracy Survive The Internet?

If what we saw in 2016 was just the beginning, what can we expect the next national election to be like? With all the political noise the internet is generating, can true democracy still be heard?

GUESTS

Nate Persily, James B. McClatchy professor of law, Stanford University

Zeynep Tufekci, Author, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest; associate professor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills School of Information and Library Science; faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center

Wael Ghonim, Internet activist

Aaron Sharockman, Executive director, Politifact

For more, visit http://the1a.org.

2017 WAMU 88.5 American University Radio.

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