Five minutes with Carl Cullinane on the Democratic Dashboard: “There’s a big difference between open data and accessible data.”

Sierra Williams caught up with Carl Cullinane, the project lead behind the Democratic Dashboard, a voter information resource making constituency data open and accessible in the run-up to the UK’s General Election. Because of the variety of data sources used, it was a huge job to harmonise the structure and formatting of the datasets to make them compatible. The Democratic Dashboard is fundamentally citizen-focused, but aims to provide enough depth and complexity to keep researchers and ‘election junkies’ interested.