After first and second part of Opening up 2018 Tunisian Municipal Elections Data, we reached the elections day ! For the first time a collaboration between Cahier de la Liberte / Data4Tunisia.org – Targa Consult – and OpenGovTN, we started working together to crowdsource elections results ! Work started with a spreadsheet shared by Cahier de la Liberte, we added a Dashboard, few functions, then share it with the community ! Targa created a map which was update according to the data entry progress, we started seeing a mosaic of the new political landscape :
Most of the work have been improvised, nothing prepared in advanced, and we had to use a geojson file converted to csv which include municipalities names with population values, which we needed to calculate the number of seats in each council according to the elections law. We noticed that population values are not totally accurate, but we had no other choice. We received lots of comments about wrong seats, we fixed what we can fix until getting official values.
Official population values and seats are available in the official decree 1033-2017, badly formatted, and municipalities names does not overlap. I convert it to CSV format then use it to correct previous values !
We received data from hundreds of contributors, and in less than 48 hours we were able to collect and verify elections results even before the elections authority release final results !
After finalizing results, we locked sheets for edition and we kept document open for reading and commenting. We keep receiving comments until now to fix issues here and there, if there is any.
All this work is available online in a google spreadsheet, and while we hit many times quotas limits of Google services, we were able to automate the whole process of seats calculation and validation.
I want to thank all the dream team behind this job : Mohamed Adnène Trojette, Nabil Majoul, Zeineb Kilani, Firas Abid, and of course all the anonymous contributors who made this experience possible !
#OpenData is not a comfort we are asking for, but a necessity for our new democracy!
Thank you !