sophieehill/my-little-crony

A visualization of the connections between Tory politicians and companies being awarded government contracts during the pandemic.

My Little Crony

This repo contains the data and code for My Little Crony, a visualization of the links between Tory politicians and the companies being awarded government contracts during the pandemic.

Please feel free to contact me (sophie DOT eva DOT hill AT gmail DOT com) or submit a PR with any corrections, comments, or suggestions!

Data

The raw data is contained in two files: people.csv identifies individuals and organizations (i.e. the "nodes" of the network) and connections.csv identifies the links between individuals and organizations (i.e. the "edges" of the network).

Code

The script code.R adds some attributes to the data to aid visualization, like specifying the icon type, colour, size. The data files are then resaved as people.RData and connections.RData.

The script save_to_html.R takes the cleaned datasets (people.RData and connections.RData) and produces the visualization as a standalone HTML file called crony.html. This HTML file can be opened and viewed in any web browser.

Getting started with R

If you are new to R, here is a quick guide to getting started with this repo:

1. Install R
2. Install RStudio
3. Download a local copy of this repo (click on "Code" and then "Download ZIP")
4. Open the project (my-little-crony.Rproj) in RStudio
5. Install the required packages ("install.packages(packagename)")
6. Run the code!

Acknowledgements

This visualization relies on excellent investigative journalism by Byline Times, Open Democracy, The Citizens, and many others! The visualization itself relies on the awesome visNetwork R package.

my-little-crony's Issues

Collaboration with littlesis?

Hi Sophie!

I just tweeted you but then thought this might be a better place to share my thoughts.

Firstly, congrats - this is really great work! I think visualisations can be extremely potent in exposing cronyism and other corruption.

I was wondering if you were aware of https://littlesis.org/ ? It's an awesome project for crowd-sourcing data on and connections between powerful people and organizations in order to bring transparency and shine a light on murky areas. As you can see from their data summary, they have an enormous database already.

They also have an Oligrapher graphing tool which has some similarities with yours, although of course some differences too, e.g. it is designed to enable non-technical folk such as journalists curate and collaborate on their own visualisations (which are obviously small subsets of the huge littlesis database). I think Oligrapher also has some low-hanging fruit in terms of simple UI tweaks which could be made to vastly improve the usability, for example zooming with the mouse wheel just like My Little Crony already allows.

I have no affiliation with LittleSis, but I've been very impressed by all their technical and organisational achievements so far, and I think the more that people working in this area can combine efforts, the more powerful the whole movement can become.

By the way, very cool to come across another ex-Oxford maths graduate in this space ;-) Sadly I left academia a lot earlier than you, but I've been working with Free / Open Source software since I discovered it as an undergrad, and in the last few years have become quite involved in the UK political "hacktivism" scene (legal activities only!)

Dominic Cummings is now on Universal Credit.

The diagram is now incorrect, as Classic Dom is now unemployed.

Meller Group

Meller Group and Meller Designs should be formally linked, as holding company and subsidiary. David Meller is a former director of both (resigned 2013), but is only linked to the former at the moment.

more nodes

Allegra Stratton is communications director at number 10, whose opinions were alleged to be part of the reason that Lee Cain left (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-54913107)
Rishi Sunak is Chancellor of the Exchequer (head of HM Treasury)
Allegra Stratton was previously "Director of Strategic Communications, HM Treasury"
Allegra Stratton and Rishi Sunak are god-parents to each others kids (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegra_Stratton#Personal_life)
Allegra Stratton is married to James Forsyth
James Forsyth is political editor of The Spectator
Boris Johnson was editor of The Spectator from 1999 to 2005

README is misleading

You put "winning contracts" when the contracts are begin "given" to mates and relatives of tories. This should be stated as there is no tender process in action.

Add the website to the information box

Please fill in About->Website on the front page of the repository so that people can see what your project is as quick as possible! You can also add Topics in this section which helps visibility

Thanks for the amazing and necessary work :)