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What I did at the election in 2015

Oh, I must write this down before I forget. Here’s a round-up of the things I did in and around the general and local elections in May 2015.

BBC Election Hackday – 27 April
My work colleague Paul Bradshaw put on a fantastic event for journalists (students, BBC, press, hyperlocals) aimed to producing some data-driven stories with an election theme. I found myself on a team focusing on women and the election.

My modest output for the day, with help from Sofia Casotto (she also produced an infographic of the data), was to pull together data on the number of female general election candidates in Birmingham constituencies from 1979 to the present day.

Pre-election hyperlocal stuff
bournvillevillage.comI’m struggling to find time to keep my hyperlocal site bournvillevillage.com ticking over with sufficient content so I was grateful to Francis Clarke who lives locally when he suggested writing an account of the general election husting for Selly Oak constituency and also profiled some of the candidates. Nice to have David Higgerson give a nod to this work in his election round-up.

Francis’s articles are here: bournvillevillage.com/author/clarke-francisggmail-com/

Election days – 7 and 8 May 2015
As with 2010, I got to attend the general election count on the evening of 7 May (thanks to Birmingham City Council for the invite to myself and other hyperlocals) and in addition this year I went to the local election count on the afternoon of 8 May.

I produced some audio:

listen to ‘18 yr old Luke Holland talks about his local election campaign’ on audioBoom

listen to ‘Mark Rogers, returning officer Birmingham on how the #BrumVotes15 count is going’ on audioBoom

listen to ‘Tim Huxtable – Conservative winner in Bournville ward’ on audioBoom

I also found myself acting as a kind of roving reporter for the student radio station that was on air throughout the night.

listen to ‘Dave Harte talks live from the ICC count about John Hemming conceding’ on audioBoom

I wrote a couple of results blog posts:
bournvillevillage.com/news/huxtable-re-elected-in-bournville-local-elections-2015/
bournvillevillage.com/news/labour-hold-selly-oak-general-election/

I did some live streaming:
I wanted to experiment with Twitter’s live streaming service, Persicope. I had some fun with this although the streams don’t archive so I can’t show you the results (and I didn’t save the video locally to my phone). I streamed the incoming boxes on the Thursday, some results at the general count and placed my phone on a tripod for the locals count and let it stream all the results.

Overall the election was fun and I got to hang out with some brilliant students from Birmingham City University (running a fantastic news and results service on the birminghameastside.com blog) and also Pauline from newsinbrum.com who knows everyone on the local political scene and was great company across both counts.