Hung parliament: crowdsource anaylsts predict tough time for David Cameron

Accurate in their forecasts so far, Guardian crowd suggests Conservative leader will struggle to form a government

On the eve of polling day we set you an election results predictor quiz in which we asked you to guess how many seats each of the three main parties would win, and to predict who would form the next government and what this administration might look like. More than 3,400 of you took part, and your collective best guess, which we reported yesterday, turned out to be spot on. You accurately predicted that the Conservatives would win the most seats and highest vote share with Labour second on both measures, that we would have a hung parliament, and that we would not know until at least the weekend who would be the new prime minister.

So far, so good. So what does the wise Guardian crowd forecast will be the outcome of this weekend's coalition talks? The omens are not good for David Cameron's attempts to form a government with the support of the Liberal Democrats. Only 48% of you expected to see the Conservative leader eventually named prime minister, while slightly over half of you expected that the deal to emerge would be a Labour-Lib Dem one.

Having delved deeper into the results we can report that 19 of you accurately forecast the Tory tally of 306 seats. Discounting two very late and suspiciously accurate entries that appear to have been submitted after the election results were in, none of these also got the Labour and Lib Dem vote exactly right - along with the rest of us you tended to overestimate the Lib Dems' share at up to 119 votes (they ended up with 57). Overall, the most accurate prediction came from a user identifying themselves as ajho, who put Labour on 250 and the Lib Dems on 65. If the rest of ajho's predictions are equally accurate, then we should expect to end up with Cameron heading a minority government. Perhaps Cameron's offer to Nick Clegg yesterday was just too pusillanimous to cut the mustard.

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Amateur hour: Crowdsourcing the campaign

Rory Cellan-Jones | 12:25 UK time, Monday, 29 March 2010

Are the political parties now too impoverished - or just too bone idle - to do the basic work of research and campaigning by themselves? Or do they really believe in the wisdom of crowds? 
I ask because both Labour and the Conservatives appear to have caught the crowdsourcing bug.

Last week the Tories appealed to the internet for help in framing their response to the Budget, and now Labour wants web users to design its campaign posters. So how is that going?

Screengrab of Your Budget Response website"Going well", was the verdict of Conservative Party chairman Eric Pickles on its crowdsourcing effort - or at least that's what he was saying on Twitter just an hour or so after the Budget response site 
went live. I asked him how many responses had been received - and he replied:

"Hi Rory, I'm not in the office at the moment but the team tell me they're coming in thick and fast."

Now the Conservatives were always clear that this was not about creating yet another forum for debate about the Budget, but a way of unleashing a citizens' army of researchers who might spot the "devil in the detail" and hand over the ammunition to the hard-pressed Tory Treasury team.
 So, on Friday afternoon I inquired again of the Conservatives - what exactly had been delivered to George Osborne and his team that they had not spotted themselves?


A spokeswoman came back with a rather vague reply. Yes there
 had been "hundreds of really good comments", though they appeared to fall more into the category of opinion rather than fresh analysis. She could not give me any example of a detail spotted by the web crowd that had eluded the party's Treasury team, but promised that some of the comments would be published this week.

So it looks as though the "crowdsourcing" of online economic expertise has morphed into just another web forum.

And what of Labour's plan to save on its advertising budget by getting its supporters to design some posters? It's promising that next weekend digital poster boards in London and Manchester will carry a poster designed by one of its online supporters - "the first time a political party, certainly in the UK has done this."

Well I think the Liberal Democrats might contest that - they've had a campaign running for a while on their ACT social networking site, inviting activists to "design a poster promoting the core Lib Dem value of 'Fairness'". They already have a number of entries up on the site, and appear to be making their "crowdsourcing" more of a public affair than either the Conservatives or Labour.

Labour's press release about its poster competition quotes Robert Senior, the head of the party's own advertising agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, as saying,"The world of one-way communications is a bygone era. We prefer to invite our audiences to participate in the ideas and play an active part in this election."

And by the way is it just a coincidence that this initiative was unveiled on the day that the Conservatives' ad agency, M&C Saatchi, launched their latest poster? Perhaps the advertising war between Labour and the Conservatives is also turning into a continuation of an ancient advertising industry feud.

But I wonder if Mr Senior is really convinced that online amateurs can do as good a job as his highly professional - and highly-paid - copywriters and artists?

Examples such as "mydavidcameron" have shown that the online community can be pretty inventive when it comes to disrupting the traditional campaign poster.

But we've yet to see the evidence that the amateurs can do as good a job as either professional political researchers or advertising executives. So expect plenty more "crowdsourcing" initiatives, but I think the parties will still be spending as much as they can afford on professional campaigning.
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The Tory crowdsourcing budget spectacular. Found anything yet?

As Alistair Darling sat down, a Tory project to crowdsource the scrutinising of the budget's small print went up. You can see it for yourself at yourbudgetresponse.co.uk.

There isn't a great deal to say yet. The design of the site reproduces each page of the budget with a box to the right that invites you to post your observations: "Did You find anything we should investigate further? Let us know below," it asks.

The format is similar to a cut-down version of our MPs' expenses crowdsourcing tool - the idea is the same (the ability to post comments on documents), though it lacks feedback mechanisms telling you, for example, how much of the budget has already been looked at.

Those submissions are not visible on the site (also true for the later versions of our MPs' expenses exercise). But if you have added one, seen anything or have views on the project, why not let us know below.
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Internet proving hard to control - the latest from political crowdsourcing

Do Labour and the Tories know what they are doing when they open their campaigns up to the public?

Is opening up your campaign to the internet a good idea? The Tory attempt to make #cashgordon one of the top trending hashtags on Twitter was probably more trouble than it was worth and – of course – Labour's PeoplePosters campaign to crowdsource an election poster has been taken up by people who don't like them that much either.
The excellent Beau Beau D'Or, who has been using Photoshop for satire since the last election, posted the following on his blog:

I can't think of much worse than the Conservatives getting into power. The mask will drop, pockets will be lined and despair will reign but just because I have a go at the Tories (frequently) does not make me a Labour voter [...]

PeoplePosters is a PR exercise for the faithful, maybe a PR campaign if Labour can get it into the MSM [mainstream media]. Ten digital posters over a few days is not an advertising campaign despite what the spin doctors and misguided/cynical tweeting MPs say. You are being treated like idiots.

Someone may well produce a great poster. Meanwhile Tories will be lapping up the mountains of bullshit (and producing their own) to discredit Labour, a potential own goal. They will also be given the opportunity for quick rebuttal having scanned all the entries.

He links to Chicken Yoghurt, again, not a Tory blog, which has a page of posters comparing Brown's record to Cameron's lack of substance ie "[Brown] Helped kill 600,000 Iraqis. Could he [Cameron]?"

I can't help wondering if Labour's adoption of the user-generated poster, which came of age with mydavidcameron.com, has fully acknowledged the sense of fun and mischief that anything like this really needs to get going. The page on the Labour party website inviting submissions features a head and shoulders shot of Philip Gould and a brief to "highlight Labour's pledge to protect frontline investment in key services". That reads more like a pitch to an ad agency than an attempt to speak the people who are most likely to take part.

On the other great political crowdsourcing exercise of the last week, the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones looks at how the Tory party's crowdsourced response to the budget fared.

A spokeswoman came back with a rather vague reply. Yes, there had been "hundreds of really good comments", though they appeared to fall more into the category of opinion rather than fresh analysis. She could not give me any example of a detail spotted by the web crowd that had eluded the party's Treasury team, but promised that some of the comments would be published this week.

So maybe this week we'll see.
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Tories swallow Web 2.0, spit out £1m crowdsource prize

The Tories are waving a £1m taxpayer-funded crowdsourcing prize under the noses of developers to produce a website that can "harness the wisdom" of voters to "resolve difficult policy challenges".

According to shadow culture secretary and ex-tech PR man Jeremy Hunt, the prize money would be paid for out of Cabinet Office coffers, assuming - that is - the Tories win next year's General Election.

"This online platform will then be used by a future Conservative government to throw open the policy making process to the public, and harness the wisdom of the crowd so that the public can collaborate to improve government policy," he claimed.

Hunt said a Tory government would publish all UK.gov Green Papers on the platform, allowing everyone to wax lyrical online to help shape policy.

“Conservatives believe that the collective wisdom of the British people is much greater than that of a bunch of politicians or so-called experts," said Hunt. "And new technology now allows us to harness that wisdom like never before."
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“Crowdsourced” Politics? A New Polling and Survey Site, Qwanz.com, Gives Users Unique tool to Influence Decisions

With Qwanz.com, a radically new type of site has launched—one that enables users to have their voices heard on issues that matter to them, not just individually, but much more powerfully as a group. Those opinions are then automatically forwarded on to the decision makers whether they are elected officials, government agencies, companies, or journalists.

New York, NY (PRWEB) December 21, 2009 -- With Qwanz.com, a radically new type of site has launched—one that enables users to have their voices heard on issues that matter to them, not just individually, but much more powerfully as a group. Those opinions are then automatically forwarded on to the decision makers whether they are elected officials, government agencies, companies, or journalists.

Strength is in the numbers; a single voice is far less powerful than a thousand voices expressing the same opinion together. That combined strength is what provides users with the power to influence the decision making process.

Qwanz is intended to negate the public‘s feeling of being disconnected from the decision making process and powerless to affect it. It aims to change the one-way communication between Governments, media, corporations, and the individual.

Rather than talk about “crowdsourcing”, Qwanz actually enables it.

Qwanz provides the tools that allow anyone to easily set up their own opinion poll, without an editorial gatekeeper, and thus, determine the public’s opinions as a whole, on any subject.
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Crowdpowernow.org - Pioneering Crowd Sourcing Site Enables Vast Public Review of Health Care Reform Bill (HR 3200)

As debate continues to rage on healthcare reform in response to HR 3200, America's Affordable Health Choices Act, a new document crowdsourcing site, HealthcareForUS.org, is launching a unique opportunity for every voter to shape the debate on healthcare reform. HealthCareForUS' approach is to harness the power of millions of citizens (“the crowd”) to generate a summary of the bill and provide their opinions about specific sections of the legislation. Lawmakers will benefit by having the bill summarized and by having data to understand their constituents' concerns and desired actions.
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myidea.co.in crowdsourcing Indian views for change

My Idea: an initiative to change Indian politics, indian Society, views on Indian economy, entertainment & sports. Do you have an idea that can change India ...
myidea.co.in

What's the perfect beer for racial reconciliation at the Whitehouse?

President Obama said he invited Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley to the White House for a beer, presumably to have a laugh about this racial and/or class flare-up about wrongful arrest and hissyfittedness in Cambridge. The more important question than whether this will result in some racial breakthrough, for beer connoisseurs at least, is: What Kind of Beer Will They Drink?...Leave your beer suggestions in the comments, and let’s see if we can’t crowdsource a diplomatic coup.
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Oink oink! Crowdsourcing government earmark requests

A new project hopes to use volunteer labor to compile a list of all Congressionally requested "earmarks" into a central database. Get ready to slice, dice, sort, and map earmark requests online. "People are desperate for fruitcake these days," says The Cato Institute's Jim Harper when explaining why he's giving one away as a prize in his crowdsourced earmark-exposure contest. Behind the fruitcake lies a serious purpose: crowdsource the compilation of all federal legislators' "earmark" requests, those specific funding requests to dole out money directly to (hopefully) deserving entities in the legislator's home district. To Learn More Click Here Oink Oink

Crowdsourcing victims of the Iran Elections...

The UK's Guardian newspaper is looking for assistance from the public in identifying victims of the arrests and violence in response to protests about the elections. I hadn't seen anything on DK about this yet, and this seems like a useful way to contribute. There are so many forgotten and unnamed heroes and heroines in the various and ongoing struggles for personal freedom and genuine democracy. To Learn More Click Here