Quote:
Originally Posted by freeweed
Bigtime's answer was basically the epitome of circular reasoning: we want this data searchable and accessible, so that it's searchable and accessible. It seemed like he was being a bit tongue-in-cheek with his response
Your answer at least gives me an inkling as to *why* people are looking for that. I was curious, is all. I wasn't aware that election funding was a concern.
I'm also curious if this is something unique to Calgary, or to this particular election - in the past, has this sort of info been easily accessible and workable? Is this a new thing, or is there some hint of deliberate obfuscation of the information?
I do this sort of thing due to my own OCD nature all the time - as an example, I've been collating ski resort conditions data for years now (resorts don't tend to make this readily available, but that's more laziness than malice). So I certainly understand why someone would want data organized. I was mostly just curious as to what the specific interest in this particular data set is, and if it's somehow different than the other hundreds of elections we have each year in this country. Just seemed real specific, is all.
|
I'm not an expert, but I don't think that there has been deliberate obfuscation so much as the requirements for Calgary have always been fairly basic; a paper list of who donated and how much. Which is fine for the purposes of verifying no one is donating too much to a campaign, but it's not very useful for analysis. And crowdsourcing is the sort of thing that we've never been able to use in the past to make this data more available.
Calgary's documentation -- a website of PDFs -- is the same as
Edmonton's or
Vancouver's, for instance, while
Toronto has a searchable database. Additional analysis is not unique, either - the Vancouver Sun made a
database of campaign contributions from Vancouver's PDF records.
Other elections (especially at higher levels) have a higher standard of data available; for instance
here's Elections Canada's website where you can see reports summarized by candidate, by riding and so on.
I think that with the election in the fall, it makes sense for people to know who is contributing to which candidates, and to be able to do analyses
like this or
like this, for instance. The fact that political donations have emerged as a hot button issue is, I think, something of a coincidence; this project started before the video emerged. But it certainly illustrates the benefit of transparency in politics.