rc3 hacc preroll music Herald: Welcome to the hackrf channel. Today under the title Patching Democracy. Today we're talking about the era of digitalization, as well as about the understanding of the enormous importance of digital tools in both private and public life, because we need it to reduce the world's complexity to an amount that we can actually handle. This is something that is very important, for example, in democracies. Especially when talking about decision making, like for example, the voting advice application that we have in Germany, the Wahl-o-mat is a very good example of making parties comparable to common people all over the place. But those machines are like those Wahl-o-mats are very expensive and thus they are only available for larger elections. And this is a problem that is actually handleable. This is what Till Sander does with his voting advice application that is called... wait a second with his open election compass and he actually was approached by the small city of Lüdenscheid to develop something that could actually do something that the Wahl-o-mat also does. And when he found out that this is actually something that needs to be provided also for smaller elections and that is actually affordable, he is actually a web designer, decided to do it in a bigger way. So he wanted to make it open source and thus created this platform that he now talks about in his lecture that we provide to you right now. You can also ask questions that will be answered in the following Q&A and on Twitter, as well as on the IRC. Under the hashtag rc3hacc and the channel rc3-hacc. Now enjoy the talk. Till Sanders: Welcome to Patching Democracy. This is a short introduction to applications like the German Wahl-o-mat and why we might not need to hack democracy. In this talk, I will demonstrate how we can improve elections and political education everywhere, thanks to free and open source software. Researchers of the Friedrich-Ebert- Foundation found that only a third of the population believes in a brighter future. Less than half of our society is satisfied with how our democracy works. In parts of Germany, this drops even further to about a third. Even worse, three out of four Germans feel like politicians don't care about their concerns. And lastly, many people even agree that it doesn't make a difference which parties form the government. Studies like these question the state our democracy is in. Is our democracy broken? Let's take a look at some other results of the same study. Only 1.3 % want an authoritative figure with extensive powers to make the law. With the rise of the extreme right this is a good thing. While 88% of us think that politicians make more promises than they can keep, the majority acknowledges that politicians do have a difficult job. And out of several problems, a great majority identified a lack of participation in elections as the biggest problem. Our democracy generally fails to make everyone happy and to be fair, that's somewhat the point. But while many people have issues with our democracy, they also seem to believe that it is still the way to go. Democracy is not broken. It is just our implementation of it that is experiencing technical difficulties. Hi, my name is Till, and I'm here to fix this. Not alone, of course, but I'm happy to be, you know, someone just doing what he knows best and I like all those numbers might suggest I'm not even a political scientist. I'm, in fact a designer and web developer. And as such what I enjoy most is the challenge of making complex concepts easily accessible, preferably with beautiful user interfaces. I'd like to first introduce you to the idea and short history of voting advice applications. We will then dig in a little deeper and establish important principles that make VAAs successful. There's also going to be a little hands on with the FOSS project I have developed in the last year. Once I've shown you the tools, I'll talk about how you can run your own election compass and what to consider when doing so. And off we go! Our story begins in the Netherlands. In 1989, the Dutch Citizenship Foundation, the documentation center of Dutch political parties and the faculty of Political Management of the University of Twente start a collaboration to develop the Stemwijzer. A booklet containing 60 statements found in the programs of political parties and a diskette. Well, it's 1989. The idea proves popular and evolves to the first Internet election compass for the Dutch parliamentary elections in 1998. Although the project can only attract 6500 voters, subsequent implementations in 2002 and 2003 attract about 2 million voters, which quickly become 5 million voters in 2006, which is about a third of the entire Dutch population. Success began spreading to other countries, the first election compass I myself ever came across was the German Wahl-o-mat, based on the StemWijzer itself, the Federal Agency for Civic Education, the BPB, released the first Wahl-o-mat in 2002. It's fair to say that the VAA concept is now well-established in Germany and other countries. Usage in Germany has increased to 33% of cast votes in 2017. Think about that for a moment. One in three voters has used the Wahl-o- mat at some point before going to the ballot. As software projects of the German government go, this might well be the most successful yet, doubly so if you consider the costs of some spectacular failures in the past. So what did the first voting advice applications actually look like? Let's take a look at the first Wahl-o-mat from nearly two decades ago. The Internet was quite different back in those days. Many user interface patterns were yet to be discovered or refined and users were less experienced. On a side note. Technically, this website from 18 years ago still runs perfectly fine in a modern day browser. Web technologies are amazing. Anyway, despite these slight difficulties and the Wahl-o-mat being a new concept, there are very few instructions. This is because the core concept was and still is incredibly simple. You are presented with a sequence of statements or a thesis. You can choose to approve or reject or remain neutral to a thesis. If you don't really understand the meaning or the issue behind it, you can also skip a thesis. After about 30 statements, you can choose categories that are more important to you, so they are counting double. The political parties or candidates answer the same theses. At the end your answers are compared to those of the parties showing you potential matches. Fast forward to today. The idea is about 30 years old now. In this time it spread not only to Germany but also to Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Switzerland and many other countries, continents even. The teams behind StemWijzer inspired most European countries and others around the world. Let's talk about VAAs in more depth. What are they actually good for? Why do people use them? How do their mechanisms work and does their popularity make them dangerous? So what do we actually want to achieve? What is the purpose of voting advice applications? Since their inception, the target group are actually young, even first-time voters. I guess the reasoning behind this is that the older people get the more experienced they are with the political landscape, or at least they should be. The term voting advice application suggests that the purpose is to advise users on who to vote for. Now, I must say, I've been struggling with this name. I find it counterintuitive because from what I've seen, this is actually not the purpose of these projects. And that's good because imagine for a second what this would mean. Many VAAs are designed and controlled by government agencies. So who would want to live in a democracy where the government gives you advice on who to vote for in the election? So although it's called a voting advice application, the Wahl-o-mat does not actually want to give you advice. It's even written there on the very first page, right above the start button. The Wahl-o- mat is not voting advice, but an offer of information about elections and politics. I found this disclaimer in every VAA I have come across so far. OK, so the purpose of VAAs is, despite their name, not to give voting advice. Good. Except, they kind of do, don't they? We don't give you any advice well, we do, but don't take our word for it. We've warned you not to take this as an advice. Now go ahead and get not-an-advice. Maybe it's just me, but I think this is quite german. VAAs have a positive impact on political education. This might be the main aspect, they have originally been designed for. VAAs want to have a positive impact on political education. As I understand it, this topic sadly needs more research. But with the research done so far, we can assume that this is indeed the case. It appears to be uncertain to what extent exactly, and this will also depend on the individual VAA. But there is a positive impact. VAAs do not improve the knowledge about political structures like how the ballot works, how the allotment of seats in parliament works, etc. But they can improve knowledge about the policy issues, what the upcoming election is about, what parties there are, and where the parties stand. VAAs also lead to discussions about these issues and parties which can also improve political knowledge in peer groups. So as far as we know today, this claim is true and it is an important benefit of election compasses or VAAs, because as research shows, most people in Germany are able to place parties on the spectrum of left and right correctly. But at the same time, many people are unable to place parties correctly when it comes to policy issues. So missing political knowledge and misinformation can actually lead to people voting against their own interests. VAAs promote electoral participation. What makes people vote? To answer this question, we can take a look at the reasons why some people don't. And one of the main reasons why some people don't vote is because they don't feel like their position is reflected by any of the existing parties. Our political system is complex and our political landscape, our parties and their programs doubly so. People that have a better understanding and more knowledge of the choices they have… are more likely to cast a vote. Just imagine you're helping a friend who has no clue about computers decide on a graphics card. They either get confused as hell very quickly or they be like, well, I don't know, do I even need one? My laptop runs fine and it doesn't have one. Can we get pizza now? You see, being able to make an informed decision can make a huge difference. And VAAs can help with that. And research tells us that VAA users can be 2% to 12% more likely to go to the ballot. The last important background topic I would like to touch on is the matching algorithm. These algorithms are still subject to debate and some are frequently criticized. I'll spare you the history, and instead will jump right in because, one, this topic deserves a talk of its own. And two, that talk should not be held by me. But I'll share with you what I know. The matching algorithm is responsible for calculating your result. After you answered all the theses, your answers are compared to those of the parties. The parties get more points the more you agree with them. Sounds simple? But how do you calculate this exactly? Say we have an agreement scale of 10 to -10. I reply to a different thesis with an agreement of 3. Party A is even more into this and goes for 9. Party B is not a fan of this thesis and answers with -3. How many points will Party A and B get for this thesis? There are two approaches to this. The first has been coined the proximity model, and as the term suggests, it focuses on the distance between two points. In this case, Party A and Party B are the same distance to my answer, so they will get the same amount of points. Seems logical at first, but is this really the best approach to this? I might not fully agree with Party A, but I am on the same side, whereas party B is on the other side. Wouldn't it be safe to assume that party A is a better match for me? Well, probably, yes. The idea is called the directional model. It awards more points if the voter and the party go in the same direction. In our scenario, party A will receive more points than party B because it is on the same side as I am. Following these models, one can easily create a matching algorithm. Why not all VAAs make their algorithm's public, there are a few well known ones. The first is the famous city block algorithm. It belongs to the proximity model and is still used by the Wahl-o-mat albeit with only three options, which has been criticized in the past. In this chart, you can see the users answer in the rows and the party's answer in the columns. In this area where they meet, you'll find the score for this thesis. For example, if I choose to strongly approve the thesis, I'm in the first row. If the party agrees with that we meet in the first cell and the party gets the maximum score of 1 for this thesis. If the party, however, rejects the thesis, 1st row, 4th column, it will only get a score of -5. You see, the city block algorithm strictly follows the proximity model: the closer user and party become, the higher the score. The classic example of the direction and what is the scalar algorithm, the direction or side is far more important here and a party cannot receive a positive score as long as it is on the other side of the user's opinion. Note also that this must mean that if either the user or the party choose a neutral position, the score will always be zero. So why both algorithms have their strengths, our goal is to find a model, thats prediction is as close as possible to what the user votes for in the end. And there's another group of algorithms that tend to yield better results. I'm talking about hybrid algorithms that try to combine the approaches of the proximity and directional model. As you can see, proximity as well as direction play a role in the scoring. Looking at the colors, you can see that this now looks a bit like the first algorithm, the city block algorithm, but the green line fades a little in the center. This is the influence of the scalar algorithm focusing on the direction. So which one is best? I'm afraid we don't know for sure. As always, data will tell. It also depends on your intentions and design choices. What we do know is that algorithms based on the proximity model tend to favor temperate parties, while those based on their directional model gently pushes users to the extreme ends. Considering this, hybrid algorithms should yield more balanced results. We must not forget, though, that at the end of the day they are still only models, so don't expect any of them to be incredibly accurate. The OpenElectionCompass is a free and open source software with a simple mission: making voting advice applications available to every election to support political education and democracy everywhere. Running your own election compass can be a costly endeavor. No more. With the OpenElectionCompass, we have a system that is free, transparent, user friendly and accessible. Unlike agencies who only run an election compass every few years, a project like this can focus on continuous improvement. But enough promises. Let's take a look at the features. The OpenElectionCompass was designed to be easy to use and accessible. The design is minimalistic, so users are not distracted. Unlike solutions like the Wahl-o-mat, it makes use of the available screen size with big theses and buttons. Clear color coding provides visual feedback, and as you can see, the navigation is not based on previous next buttons, but scrolling. This is quicker and far more intuitive, especially on mobile devices. To make this experience even smoother, a big, friendly green button helps guide the user through the entire process. Whenever it's time to move on, it just pops up ready to take you to the next step. The OpenElectionCompass is the first VAA software to pioneer this navigation concept. With great success, I might add. Everything you're seeing here is also screen reader and keyboard friendly. These things get easily overlooked. But as I said, being a continuous project, we can focus on important details like these. After we have finished with the thesis, we are guided to the selection of the parties. Notice that unlike most VAA's, there's no additional step here where we would be asked to select some theses that are more important to us. This is another way OpenElectionCompass is improving and speeding up the process. We are removing the cognitive overhead of going through all these theses again. Instead, you can mark the thesis as important, right while you're answering. Usability wise, this makes a lot more sense. But back to the parties. We simply select the parties we would like to compare. Again, keyboard and screen reader friendly, and proceed to the results. Here we have the classic percentage based result view. With most VAAs, this is pretty much it. Usually you can go into the thesis one by one and see the statements of the parties, but I believe this is the most important part and should not be hidden away. Showing these statements should be the default. So I made it the default, when we scroll further, we can read the answers of all selected parties in an easy, color coded, chat like format. And that's it. A simple to use, accessible, beautiful state of the art and free voting advice application. Now comes my favorite part. How do you get all this content, theses, the parties, the statements into the OpenElectionCompass? Well, of course, by using a big JSON configuration file, that's hardly exciting, but you know what, JSON is simple, but for a non-programmer, this is a pretty daunting task. And even for programmers working with big JSON files to manage content in multiple languages is not something particularly fun. Especially if it involves countless emails back and forth to incorporate small changes. So guess what? There's a tool for that. Now everyone can read and write the JSON configuration files using a friendly visual editor called the configuration editor. It makes adding parties, thesis, and statements a breeze. Simply fill in the forms and download your ready to go configuration file. It even supports adding every content in multiple languages and handles images for you. There is 100% feature parity between the configuration files and the editor. And while this is only the first step in making the creation of VAAs more accessible, it is a big step up from any other tool. And there's more. Let me introduce some of the smaller features that make the OpenElectionCompass special. I really want to make this technology accessible for everyone, so I took the time to create a single file deployment solution that would fit the software, your content and images, all in a single HTML file. Is that the most performant solution? No, but let's be reasonable. It's perfectly fine for a small town – Definitions: Theses must be short and precise. Sometimes this makes it difficult for users to understand them because of words or abbreviations they might not know. To help with this, you can easily provide small helpers – Solid navigation: As we have seen, the one page design approach comes with lots of benefits. To make sure no one gets annoyed by too much scrolling around, an intelligent menu is always right at hand. That and the big green button helps getting around and no time at all. Multilingual: The OpenElectionCompass has been multilingual since the very beginning, and not just the interface, no. You can easily provide theses and answers, everything in multiple languages, even though this is not a big issue in Germany, I was thinking about countries like Switzerland where this can be essentially really – Kiosk mode: You can set up a terminal in a public place and put your election compass in kiosk mode, this mode will ask users nicely to reset the application once they are done or will do so automatically after a period of inactivity. Algorithms: The OpenElectionCompass has a flexible matching implementation that allows it to support different answer styles and algorithms. Because we don't know what might be the best fit for you. Privacy first statistics: The OpenElectionCompass now comes with an integrated tool to collect statistics in a privacy first design. Users can opt in to submit their answers anonymously for research. They can also help to improve the quality of the data set by answering more questions regarding their age, gender, education and more. I know that this is a difficult topic, so I am taking extra care to get this right. We certainly don't want to become a privacy nightmare. We want to help people support science in the most privacy caring way possible. By now, you probably want to get started building your own election compass. Next up, DIY. There are a number of principles when creating a VAA, written down in the Lausanne declaration. If you want to run your own election compass, I encourage you to read it. It's not even long. Let's go over the most important points quickly. In order to contribute sustainably to the good functioning of democracy, VAAs should be open, transparent, impartial and methodologically sound. This is important because if you're not transparent, there's a good chance that some people or even parties try to deny your legitimacy or impartiality. You should really follow the approach: We have nothing to fear because we have nothing to hide. A VAA should be freely accessible to all citizens. This is fairly obvious, but anyway, make sure that your VAA does not require any form of payment. This could be the paywall of a media outlet you've partnered with for a promotion. But this could also be less obvious, a mandatory collection of statistics. And lastly, keep in mind that there are probably more people with disabilities that you might be aware of. The OpenElectionCompass helps you with that as it provides decent screen reader support and generally follows accessibility guidelines. But you should also apply these design principles for any other content you might create around your VAA. A VAA should aim at the inclusion of as many parties or candidates that are on the ballot as possible. The criteria for the exclusion of parties and candidates should be publicly available and justified, and also parties and candidates should not be excluded from the tour for ideological reasons. I think this might be the most obvious rule, but also the most important. We want to help voters make informed choices. So we need as many parties to participate as possible. This might at times be a little difficult when parties don't want to partake. But more on that later. VAAs should be designed in a simple and intuitively understandable manner. OpenElectionCompass, this is the reason why the design of the OpenElectionCompass is not fancy at all, a bit boring even. Because I genuinely believe that it's how it's supposed to be. Many designers observe that web interfaces are starting to look alike too much. And there's some truth to that. But this is mainly because we have established a number of patterns that just work and are well known to users. So with OpenElectionCompass, I'm in fact building upon that. If you want an interface that is usable by as many people as possible. Boring is better than fancy. This is not art. This is design. The Lausanne declaration holds ourselves to a high standard, but as the original authors stated, it is meant as a starting point for discussion. There are a few points I would like to add. VAAs should collect user data only on an unobtrusive opt in basis, you might want to collect user data such as visitor statistics, answers and polls. There are good reasons to do so, but it's only ever happened with a clear opt in solution, preferably near the end of the election compass. A project like this should not appear greedy. VAAs should collect user data for science, not for profit. The collected data should be made publicly available. If you collect statistics in your VAA, do it for science. Let political scientists handle the methodology and interpretation, not some newspaper. And after the election is done, make the data you collected and if possible, your research available for free. VAAs should collect user data in a way that is not possible, that it is not possible to trace political opinions back to an individual. If you do collect statistics, make it impossible to connect answers to a name. Not only for everyone else, but for yourself. If you want to collect contact information for further research, save it separately from the user's answers. Users trust the VAA, so be trustworthy. OK, so where to begin? I prepared instructions how to run your own election compass consisting of 10 phases. Phase number one: Preparing. Organization, planning and communication are paramount. Before you do anything else, make sure you're all on the same page. Do you really want to run an election compass? Who is going to manage everything? This person doesn't have to, and in fact shouldn't do everything alone. But it is very beneficial to have a single person feeling responsible that everyone else completes their assignments on time. Write down your own timeline, get a tool to organize your team like Kanban board or a To-do-app. Phase number two: your team. You should never run a VAA all on your own, not just because it's an awful lot of work and responsibility and requires an extensive skill set, but because it is nearly impossible to do it in a legitimate way. You want to support the democratic process, so get a team of experts, advisers and supporters working together. Start with a list of people. This might include political scientists for advice and possibly in charge of the theses, the marketing specialists managing your marketing channels, social media, email, etc. A web developer with technical skills to get the election Compass online. A media designer, enthusiastic citizens, people with good connections to the administration, newspapers and other institutions. Someone with great language skills for wording and spelling. Think of people that might fit into these positions and contact them. Organize the kickoff meeting for your entire team to present your project. The plan, the structure, the timeline. Establish your organization tools and communication channel, get everyone to work, gather to-dos and assign them and set deadlines. Phase number three: The parties. It is important to get the parties on board. Normally, one party alone has no choice but to participate. You wouldn't want to be the only party missing. But if multiple parties aren't interested, you have a serious problem. You should not run an election compass with some parties missing. One or two small parties might be tolerable. You can simply ask for a gathering and give them a rough idea of what you are planning. At this point, it can be very helpful to belong to a reputable institution whose invitation cannot easily be refused. Most of the time, parties should welcome your idea, but be prepared for some persuading anyways. Phase number four: Preparing the workshop. The theses for your election compass obviously cannot be written all by yourself. They need to represent the society as a whole. The choice of theses decides over the quality of your election compass, you need to get this right. Your theses need to cover the most important matters for the next legislature. They need to be objective and impartial. The wording of the thesis has to be simple enough to be understood and to the point. Take this task seriously, it's the most important and the most difficult. To achieve theses of good quality you should run a workshop with a sample of your audience. Gather a group of young, probably first time voters, but if you like, you can also gather voters of all ages. Make sure the group is representable for your audience. No gender, race or religion should be excluded obviously. Set a date and find a large enough room with a projector, send out invitations and gather replies. Your groups should have about 20 to 30 members. Get the political programs of all participating parties with the help of your experts, gather topics of political interest from the programs and newspapers, and sort them into categories like social environment, work, traffic, infrastructure, energy, economy, finance, tax, security. You get the gist. This is your workshop material. Now plan the workshop. Help your group of voters discover the topics and create the theses. What methods are you going to use? Teachers can be very helpful here. What materials will you need? Whiteboards, pens, paper, etc. Phase number five: The theses. Use the topics and information you gathered to conduct your workshop. With your team and your group of voters. In this workshop, you will create a number of theses. Most election compasses gather around 50 to even 100 theses for whole countries at this stage. It will take you a few hours at least. Take care of your guests with, you know, pauses, lunch, snacks and coffee. Collect all theses in a list, and don't forget to work on the wording. Now, regarding the theses, there are some simple rules and some more advanced rules. The simpler ones are these: Can the thesis be easily understood by everyone? Are there words that not everyone will know? The OpenElectionCompass can provide hints on those, for those. Might the wording be biased? Does the wording match your style? Is this a good length? You know, these kind of simple rules. Now, for the more advanced rules. It can be quite hard to follow these, but you should at least try or maybe get some help with these. Advanced rule number one: Theses should not be about ideological values, but actual political policies. The first statement is completely vague. Voters cannot get any political knowledge from this because ideologically they most likely already know where the parties are standing. What's even worse, voters can interpret this thesis very differently. So be concrete. Number two: Theses should not be double barreled. It is very easy to accidentally merge two theses. And that makes them hard to answer. Every thesis should be about one policy and not mix two or more policies. In this example. Voters might be OK with soft but not hard drugs. So how are they supposed to answer the first statement? Focus your theses. Number three: Theses should avoid quantifications. At first, this thesis looks fine, it's clear and short, but what if you don't think there should be more surveillance cameras? If I reject this statement, what does it mean? It could mean that I'm OK with the numbers of cameras or it could mean that I'm completely against them. It's not clear, and this makes it hard to match partisan voters. It's often difficult to avoid quantification, but sometimes it can help to get down to the real issue. And in case of my hometown, this was that some people don't feel safe in public places at night. Now it's more of a boolean question, so try to go for these. And number four: Theses should avoid qualifications as well. This is a bit like the third rule, only this time we don't merge related theses but add more depth to a thesis by adding an example. This was taken from the Wahl-o-mat of 2002 and while it was meant to just be an example, it makes it more difficult both for the voters as well as the matching algorithm. Voters might support gay marriages, but draw a line when it comes to adoption. So what do they choose? In this case, it might be helpful to be more specific or even split this into two separate theses. This brings us to phase number six: The positions. Now it's time to let the parties answer and positions themselves. First, decide on the algorithm you want to calculate the matches with. This will also determine how many possible answers there will be. Send the theses to every party. You'll want to use an online form or similar, as the task of collecting all answers can get very tedious. Make also sure to collect the logos in appropriate quality and give the parties two to three weeks to answer, depending on your timeline. In the meantime, prepare to publish the election compass. Contact media outlets and tell them about your story. Contact the administration and ask them if they're willing to put up a link on their website. Contact schools, teachers, youth organizations and sport clubs and ask them if they are willing to share some graphics and a link with their followers once you're done. Phase number seven: Evaluating the answers. You know, I have a lot of theses and even more answers. The next step is to select the most important theses. You can do this in another workshop or on your team. Go through every thesis and decide whether it should become part of the election compass. Ask yourselves, is this thesis controversial enough? Is it helpful in telling the parties apart? At this stage, around 25 to 40 theses remain. Too few, and the results lose accuracy. Too many, and it would take too long for the voters to process them. Phase number eight: Time for a test. By now you should have everything you need. Let's run a test, feed your theses, answers and logos to the configuration editor to create the configuration file. Try it out, give it to your team and the people that participated in the workshops. Gather their feedback, make small adjustments until everything is ready for the big day. Phase number nine: Going public. About 2 to 3 weeks before the election, you should publish your election compass. Tell your web developer in advance, and when the election compass is online, tell everyone. And lastly, Phase number 10: Observe. Everything is up and running? Good. The only thing left to do now is get your election compass into as many hands as possible. Be available for questions and feedback from the public, and then wait for the election. Don't forget to vote yourselves. And when the election is over, archive the election compass. You can delete it, of course, but if you can, just keep it online. It can still be a valuable resource of transparency. If you collected any data for research, make sure to share it with the word. And lastly, please give back to the OpenElectionCompass, give feedback, write about it or improve our funding. And here we are, nearly done. Undoubtedly, there are many issues with democracy. Its implementations are incredibly complex and nothing that comes out of it is ever perfect. It can be frustratingly slow, inefficient, intransparent and even counterproductive. But it's also the only form of government that the majority so far managed to agree upon. And it's also the only form of government that is evolving continuously. We are right to criticize the system when it appears to be moving in the wrong direction. But we should not be tempted to hack our democracy. Hacking the system would mean bending it to our will. We don't want that and we don't need to. We don't need to hack a system that has the inherent ability to change. We can, however, try and fix the flaws, and I believe voting advice applications are a way to start doing this. A way of patching democracy. Thank you. Herald: Thank you so much Till Sanders not only for your lecture, but also for the development of this very useful tool, obviously. We still have some questions that our community posed on our social media platforms. And I would start with the first one: Who would be moderating the content in such apps? Like would it be peer moderated? Would it be state election agency or would it be something like what kind of moderation would there be? Till: That's a very important question, actually. Um, so in Germany with the Wahl- o-mat that's made by by the BPB, a government agency. And they develop it in a workshop like the one that I describe in the talk together with young first time voters. Because that's their target group. But apart from that, they obviously have, you know, political scientists, people who've been doing this for two decades now. And if you want to do it yourself, you won't have access to these kind of resources. So that can be a problem. And so far it worked well. We did this in in Münster, Cologne, Bielefeld, and Siegen. We had a team of political scientists who did this. So they had all the expertize. And yeah, there's no perfect answer for this. Um, not anyone, not everybody has these resources. Just try to do it as good as you can and maybe get some contacts who can help you. And we must not forget it's only for political education, not for actual voting advice. So it will never be perfect. But to a certain degree that's OK. Herald: But there is a question that is kind of subsequently to the previous one: This person is wondering, how do you or how do we make sure that the data is not corrupted? Like that it's not abused for political promotion, for example, or something like this. Like they refer to a big removing of Twitter of 20K fake accounts that did political propaganda in kinds of millions of tweets. And those were from a couple of countries, which was discovered in April 2020. So how could one prevent this in a way, or is it like the same that you already stated concerning the first question? Till: Yeah, well that's also a problem. It hasn't proven to be a problem so far. So as far as I know, there has been no case where this happened, but it could obviously happen. And since my tool and a few other tools are open source, there's no way we can stop this. But actually, that's the case for any projects out there, not only in this field, so many open source projects can be abused. Lets look at curl, I think the developer of curl is not allowed to enter the United States, because they think he is a hacker. The only thing we can really do is educate people about this topic in general and also improve education on VAAs themselves. So don't take them too serious and maybe take which ones are not honest. Herald: Yeah, this is actually a question that bothers or bugs the users a lot because another question is like: How could we ensure that there is no bias in the questions which actually connects to the previous questions as well. But they were wondering, for example, if the questions, the topic are not evenly distributed, which, yeah, actually tends to lead to some kind of bias in the questions. But like, this is the same problem, like with open source material, obviously, isn't it? Till: Yeah, yeah. That's a problem. So in Münster this year, there was another election compass based on the OpenElectionCompass, and it was from the BUND-Jugend. So they focused on environmental issues and it was a completely separate project and it wasn't even the first time they were doing this. In the past they did it with like flyers and stuff. And I guess that election compass probably was biased because it was part of their campaign, you could say. I mean, they're not a party but still. And I think what's most important is that it's transparent. Who is doing this election compass. So in Lüdenscheid it was a general youth organization not affiliated with any parties, funded by the government. And I think that's a different stand really to do that. On the other hand, the project in Münster wasn't that. It was biased, yes. But that doesn't make it a bad project. Just people have to be aware of that. And I hope we can tackle all these problems in the future with something that's more like a platform as a service. Maybe we can build an institution around this that can govern all these projects and moderate them a little bit. But maybe that's just a daydream. I don't know. (chuckles) Herald: OK, but another question that popped up that I find quite interesting as well is: Why VAAs can successfully approximate a given user's political stand in comparison to the party's answers to the thesis. I thought... like the user thought a lot about another issue. The missing knowledge on a theses' actually context, like they were wondering if you have an idea how to solve that with a similar technology driven tool or something like that, actually. Till: Yeah, that's a question I've had for a while. When I first did the Wahl-o-mat, that question popped up for me as well. Because there were some questions I didn't know anything about. And the idea is that you just skip those questions and they completely, they are not counted. That's how they deal with it. But I always thought, why don't they tell me more about it, so I can make an informed choice? So far, I haven't managed to find the definite answer to this, but now I believe they don't do it on purpose. So they do it on purpose, but they don't do it, you know? I think the risk would be too high to influence users, because when the Election Compass itself tells you everything you need to know about this topic, they decide what's true, what information they give you about this topic. And I think it's incredibly difficult to be really objective when creating such content. So I guess that's the reason why they don't do it. And I think it's a good reason, actually. So people should get information somewhere else, multiple sources. Herald: So you would not lobby for some kind of option that you could, you know, expand like you are a open source project, for example, to cover that one as well? Till: No, I don't think so. Actually, if you scroll down all the way, you can see the party's answers. And I did it on purpose that you can... it's more like a chat. So they can actually discuss that in a way and you can read their answers and then decide what, who you believe. Herald: Yeah. All right. And you are actually doing this by yourself, you founded this a year ago, some bit prior because you saw the problems that were there. But how could one join the party? Like how could one help out? How could somebody work with you on this project? Till: Yeah, well so I have lots of ideas how you could improve this project. And so far I'm managing fine to do it on my own in my free time. And I don't intend to do it full time. It's a good side project, but someday I think more people should get involved. And there are several ways to do so. So the project is based on Vue.js and everyone who is familiar with that can easily join. There are small and big todos that could be done, and many ideas will require a server side application. So that's something I've been working on in the past few weeks. So that's also something that could attract contributions. Herald: OK, and another question I have left would be: Will the slides be available somewhere like do you have your presentation somewhere online? So people who are interested, who love the design and content, like the user who posed this question could still grab it somehow? Till: Thanks, first. Yeah surely, the project already has a website and many things in the presentation are also on the website. But everything, I will add them in the next days, I think. And as far for the slides, I can, I will upload them somewhere unless I don't know you do that. Um, I don't know. You have like this hack media site where you, where you post some videos. Herald: So we are allowed to put them online for you. Till: Yeah sure. They will definitely be available somewhere. Herald: OK. Amazing. Is there something left for you to say to that. You just want to get off your heart? Till: Well, I really enjoyed doing this and I myself learned a lot about VAAs in the process, that was nice. And I'm just happy that so many people listened to me. Herald: Thank you very much for being here. For your presentation, for your work, of course. And for being here, for joining us. We will go ahead on this channel with air filters. It starts at 8 p.m., of course, and it will be some sort of an instruction how to build your own air filters that actually get your air clean and virus free by using your 3D printer. For now, we say thank you very much and say: See you next time. postroll music Subtitles created by c3subtitles.de in the year 2021. Join, and help us!