Project Seldon

This project is my main focus outside of work and family these days. I started on the idea when I had a few months off in between leaving qintel and joining vic. The problem we’re trying to solve is pretty simple; while there’s a ton of great open source political and societal data out there, very little of it is easily accessible to folks who aren’t technical. And, even for those who are technical, it’s painful to aggregate and clean it enough such that it can be made presentable and intuitive.

So at least to start, we’re a data aggregator with free features like exports and (soon) embeds that we hope will prove useful to educators, journalists and anyone else in the space. Long term though, we hope to provide crowd-sourcing functionality that allows our community to easily fill in gaps or even submit larger blocks of data.

why politics?

My extended family have always been political junkies. It bored me as a kid, but somewhere after college I started to get genuinely curious about government.

What interests me more than any particular leader, party or issue is the architecture of government — its structure, and how leaders interface with their constituents. Like a lot of people, much of what I’ve observed feels clunky.

However there are some aspects of government that, even after more research and understanding still feel pretty silly to me…

Bills are often gigantic, in an attempt to fix too many problems at once.
There’s an insane amount of money flying around between campaigns and lobbying.
We rarely talk about the cause and effect, hyper-focusing on our current problems but less so on the trail of decisions that got us to those places.

intersection with software

I think software can help with some of this. Imagine a place where citizens could see how their country is actually doing — across time, and against other countries — and where every big decision came with a clear read on what constituents think, short of direct democracy.

The technology to build such a platform certainly exists. In fact, the tech industry is solving much harder problems like artificial intelligence, biometrics and mugs that keep your coffee warm forever. As noted above, much of the needed data is also out there but hasn’t been tapped in more meaningful ways yet. What’s not there can either be crowdsourced or — ideally — exposed by the government in question.

so why not build it?

So I started building it. There’s still a lot of work to do, but you can already…

Now that we have some key parts of the foundation laid, we’re shifting our focus to building out the community and adding features, like embeds, that empower users more and more with each new block of data that’s added. If you have ideas please submit them here or email me at greg.venech@gmail.com if that’s easier for you.