Many people and groups are providing technology based services to help inform voters about the political system, about MPs and about candidates pre-election. Additionally others are looking at technology to support direct democracy.
Active Democracy Australia can see value in bringing these players together to share what is happening, to build synergies and to perhaps look at forming a community of practice in this field so we all can collaborate better.
To start this conversation, we are holding a series of webinars over the next few months to hear from people what they are doing, and to provide opportunities to ask questions and share ideas.
The first Zoom webinar was held on Wednesday 16th November at 6:30pm, Sydney time. The theme was how technology can be used to strengthen democracy, particularly in Australia.
Our guest speakers were Alex and Sean.
Alexander Breyer is a senior data scientist at Vox Pop Labs, creators of the popular Vote Compass website which is used at every federal election to help us decide who to vote for. At the last election in May 2022, more than 1.5 million Australians used Vote Compass.
Sean Johnson is the founder of Open Politics, a register of the private interests of our federal politicians. Sean explained how Open Politics is enabling greater public scrutiny of the registers and advocating reforms to enforce compliance with the rules.
If you missed it, you can watch the recording below.
During the webinar, we asked a few poll questions and collected some interesting answers:
| 1 | Are you aware of a democracy group in your electorate? | 47% Yes vs 53% No |
| 2 | Should there be one? | 100% Yes |
| 3 | How useful would working together and or sharing experience and expertise in this technology space be for strengthening democracy in Australia? | 9/10 |
| 4 | How useful did you find today’s webinar? | 9/10 |