Jeremy Evans

This has been a weird, at times absurd, election. But behind the scenes, civic tech volunteers are working day and night to improve the state of democracy in the UK. Really delighted to have been able to work with one of the best examples of civic tech: @voteforpolicies 1/8

If you still have yet to vote in NYC, my tool MyBallot.nyc has helped thousands of New Yorkers rank their top 5 mayoral candidates and see how they match on key issues. It takes about 5 minutes - people are even taking it while standing in line at the polls! 🗳️

My personal favourite new feature has been context boxes, which add non-partisan, well-sourced information about the background and feasibility of polices. Voters should know what they're voting for, and it's up to us in the civic tech community to make sure that happens. 6/8

VfP has a uniquely brilliant product supported by a phenomenal community, but with limited resources their feature wishlist has grown over the years. I'm proud to say that in 6 short weeks we've improved the tool SO much, shipping more updates than in the previous 6 years. 5/8

Our mission has always been to build a sustainable business supporting + amplifying the best expertise + ideas from that sector. Vfp choosing Embeddables as their tech partner is the biggest milestone so far in that journey, and I'm so proud to have joined them this election. 4/8

We started Embeddables from our experience building election tools at @nwspk as part of the fantastic UK civic tech community, seeing first-hand the challenges they face building + scaling democracy tools to compete with the VC-funded Silicon Valley tech giants. 3/8

Since its launch in 2010 (remember that election?), VfP is now the UK's top independent voter advice tool, showing millions of voters what policies (not vibes) the parties are actually offering. The secret sauce is you don't know which party is which until the very end 🕵️ 2/8

Just launched: possibly the UK's most important political document of 2024. Every election, the Election Tech Handbook is where folks in the civic tech community discover and collaborate on building the essential tools that power our democracy. I am a HUGE fan. Check it out!

Compelling description of how fundamental the exact choice of algorithm is to a social network, and how destructive it can be if tinkered with poorly. From @eugenewei

Turns out GPT-4 can compress text by a ridiculous amount. My theory is it’s recognising large chunks of text, having seen that exact chunk before in training data. And then it uses a small phrase as a unique reference back to the original chunk in the training data.

Vote. 🇺🇸 – at Queens, NY