A guest post from Johnny Ryan who together with Joe Curtin is working on a way of monitoring and rating the political parties committment to politcal reform in the General Election and the new governments progress in implementing them.

Joe and I came up with a two stage idea. First, why not rate and then compare political parties’ commitment to political reform in a simple, independent way? So Joe drew together the leading political science academics in the country to work up a systematic way of scoring each party’s manifesto. Second, after the election we need a way to monitor the next government’s implementation of its reform commitments, so I am reaching out to the open data community in Ireland to make this happen.

The idea is simple: it’s a Political Reform Scorecard. Each party’s manifesto will be scorecarded by the academic panel within two days of its release. Then once all the manifestos are out our site www.reformcard.com will let people compare their scores.

Joe’s background is in climate change. He travels around and tracks governments’ implementation of climate change targets across their entire economies. My background is in the Internet. My recent book ‘A history of the Internet and the digital future‘ examines online politics and what I call “network governance”. This project is an opportunity for us to join forces. Together with the academic experts who are largely drawn from the group at politicalreform.ie, we are tapping into a volunteer community of web devs, data visualisers, and designers to make this happen — and we are looking for more people to join our team.

(Other guest posts from people working on initiatives to rate or montior parties policies on anything during the campaign are welcome – SB)