Crowdsourcing the election.

Just like the Euros last year, I had planned to put together a post outlining the social media being used by the candidates in the soon-to-be-announced General Election.

But then I looked at the numbers involved.

At the last one, in 2005, there were over 100 candidates put forward in the 18 Northern Ireland constituencies.

To collect the same data as I had for the Euros, including links to twitter, blogs, flickr and youtube  would have meant nearly 500 separate searches for information…and this posed a problem.

You see, I’m very lazy by nature,  so crowdsourcing all this information suddenly seemed like a fantastic idea.

I’ve created a Google Docs form here. You can fill in all the relevant information on the candidate of your choice. If you can fill in all the details that’s brilliant, but don’t worry about leaving fields blank. Someone can add that when the info becomes available.

Then hopefully as the election draws closer we’ll have a decent directory of candidates who are using social media. I haven’t quite figured out how to display this yet – maybe in the form of an interactive map or a wiki. Any and all suggestions are welcome.

Also, if you think I should add extra fields to the form, post your suggestion in the comment section below.

As Sammy Wilson would say – get cracking!

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