Goals

Promoting good governance helps us as citizens. As the collective of volunteers here have critical skills in the areas of data science including statistics, IT, visualization of information, and communication, we wish to make contribute to the variety of work that various organizations are undertaking related to elections. We feel that this is an area that deserves to be addressed and is not being addressed in sufficient depth.  In particular, we  were drawn to this area because of suspicion of  fraud and short-comings in voter registration.

In the longer-term, we hope that this example promotes the application of data science to support other needs of citizens and communities.  We also hope that a younger generation shall take this work forward.

Objectives

• Provide information to voters
  • Demystify the Electoral Process
  • Provide information on Election practices
  • Identify areas of concern
• Promote Fair Elections
  • focus on detecting fraud
  • support fairplay in the electoral system
  • support informed electoral reform
  • Communicate with groups that monitor elections
• Motivate Voter Registration and Voting
  • For marginal groups
  • For Displaced
  • For expatriate voters

Values / Work

• Analysis
  • Credible
  • Impartial
  • Sound
  • Focus on Questions of Importance that require Data Science
• Contributions
  • Voluntary
  • Do what we can
  • Learn by doing
• Informed by IT best practices
  • Build IT infrastructure
  • Data bases
  • Visual communication
• Long Term
  • Keep Credibility
  • Maintain Impartial Posture
  • Low Maintenance – After Elections
  • Build a network of contributors of Information and Communication Tech for Civic Life
  • Platform to reach marginalized groups
  • Platform to reach diaspora, expatriate workers and students overseas
• Crowd source work in the future
  • Take time to build team