For the 2019 European Election a coalition of NGOs guided by Tech To The People and Transparency International EU and formed by ILGA, Democracy International, Disability Forum, Change Finance, Eurodad, EPSU, Wateraid, has decided to create EP2019, a common platform which will contain names, emails, twitter accounts, and political affiliation of all the candidates in the 2019 European Elections. EP2019, founding its basis on a project done successfully by ten NGOs in 2014, relies on CiviCRM, an open source CRM.
These ten NGOs have developed pledges ahead of the elections to sustain their specific area of interest and intercept candidates’ engagement on these subjects. The database allows to have candidates’ contact details to ask them directly to endorse their pledges.
How does the coalition proceed ?
Since MEPs are elected according to national law and candidates’ selection procedures tend to differ from country to country, in some Member States the official candidate lists will only be available at the beginning of May, not leaving much time for NGOs to engage with candidates. The coalition has divided the work among its members, and each organisation is responsible for collecting information on candidates’ contact details in few Member States. All the data are progressively added to the shared database.
Each coalition member can then use these information to contact directly the candidates and ask whether they want to support their own pledge. The organizations involved are not developing a joint manifesto, they are only joining forces to collected data, to do the “back-office” work, but then each organization will use these information to do their own campaign.
Furthermore, EP2019 contains a form enabling the candidates to sign, a validation work-flow for the signatories, an illustrative example is included below
And afterwards?
After the European elections, the coalition will update the database to flag which candidates have been elected. It will provide a complete and final list of the elected Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) including all information as it is published on the official European Parliament website and note if the candidates in fact signed the pledges. In addition, a final visualization of the result, including a filter option to only see the elected candidates will be added.