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How to add new politicians to Wikidata

Adding political data to Wikidata can be a daunting process for those who are new to the whole concept — and yet having this data in place is a massive help to anyone wanting to run a digital parliamentary project like our own TheyWorkForYou.

As part of our ongoing EveryPolitician project, we've been helping to lower the barriers.

And because it's always easiest to learn by watching someone else, Georgie and Alex have made a series of videos that take you through the process step by step. See them all in a playlist here.

Your questions answered

Some questions appear in our User Support inbox again and again.

It seemed like a good idea to create some in-depth responses — then we can we can link to them whenever those issues come up:

• Are representatives legally obliged to reply to a message from a constituent? You might be surprised by the answer.
• And what can you do if you don't receive a response from your representative? Quite a bit, as it happens.

Democracy at TICTeC

The full schedule is now online for TICTeC, the Impacts of Civic Technology conference — and there's plenty to explore if you have a special interest in democracy and campaigning.

Presentations from activists, NGOs, researchers and even politicians will explore topics such as voter information campaigns, citizen consultations, promise trackers and much, much more. That's all on top of our inspiring keynote speakers Alessandra Orofino of Nossas, Brazil's citizen-empowering movement; and James Anderson from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Make sure you don't miss out: book your ticket now.

And finally...

• Know what you're doing with Perl? Fancy occasional work with mySociety? Look no further.
• Our Research store now contains work from other people which refers to mySociety services. Here's more about that.
• We enjoyed meeting MOST, a parliamentary and electoral monitoring organisation from North Macedonia. It was great to swap notes and discover that there are many similarities in the challenges we face in our respective projects.

What we're reading

• This Twitter thread should sort out your democracy reading list for the next few months.
• Theresa May's clarity is on the rise, it seems.
• The New York Times shows how to graphically depict paths to a political position.
• Talking of graphics, this interested us a lot, and not least because of our own recent design tweaks on TheyWorkForYou.

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