Empowering Active Citizens: Political Engagement through Wikidata

[ UUID ] 9431c6ab-034b-4e88-894b-3921e803b564

[ Session Name ] Empowering Active Citizens: Political Engagement through Wikidata [ Primary Space ] Decentralisation [ Secondary Space ] Digital Inclusion

[ Submitter's Name ] Kelly Doyle [ Submitter's Affiliated Organisation ] mySociety

[ Other Facilitator 1's Name ] Mark Cridge [ Other Facilitator 1's GitHub ] @markcridge

[ Other Facilitator 2's Name ] Mark Longair [ Other Facilitator 2's GitHub ] @mhl

What will happen in your session?

We’ll begin with an introduction to mySociety, our Democratic Commons project, and our partnership with Facebook around crowdsourcing political data on Wikidata. Integral to our session will be a discussion about why political data matters, our approach to collecting data, and Wikidata as the future: how it’s powerful and why. The value of the Wikimedia community in capacity building will be highlighted. What this project can yield in civic participation and the research potential of an open and complete repository of political data will be presented. We’ll reinforce our belief and working principle that this project belongs to all and isn’t owned by any single stakeholder. We will urge participation and give an overview of what practical participation looks like.

What is the goal or outcome of your session?

Our goals include cultivating an understanding of the lack of free and open democratic political data that’s currently accessible and why Wikidata is the place this data should live. We especially want attendees to come away with knowledge about the power of Wikidata and the implications of political data on Wikidata when fully collected (e.g. for research, gender/racial studies, and for citizens to engage more deeply in local and national elections). Furthermore, we want to invite participants to join this collaborative and open effort and for participants to propose additional uses for this data. Our most important outcome is to share the project more widely and encourage participation in collecting political data in all democratic countries.

Time needed

60 mins