The site is principally aimed at people who are newly motivated to get direcly involved in the anti-Brexit campaign but do not know how to do so.
It is intended to be accessed by typing a postcode (the first half is enough) into the query box. This box could be found either
In response to the query, this site gives
A would-be campaigner therefore only spends a few seconds visiting this website, because they are immediately put in touch with their local campaign groups.
There is also a map. However, we regard this as a gimmick, because it takes far longer for a visitor to find information using a map than it does to type a postcode into a form.
There are now 420 groups listed in the database for this site, compared to 180 on the People’s Vote site.
Moreover, the groups listed here have full contact details (email, website, Facebook, Twitter), if they are available. These are collected from and occasionally checked with their Facebook "about" pages.
The People’s Vote site, on the other hand, has very little information about the groups. In many cases it just gives a central email address instead of direct ones for the groups themselves.
Please note that a prototype of this website existed before the launch of the People’s Vote campaign in April 2018 and leading members of that campaign knew about it.
There are web forms for activists in local groups to create logins and add or update their groups’ details.
In order to contribute data via the forms, people have to provide a verified email address, but that is just to check the authenticity of the main data. Unlike the national sites, there will be no collection of "ordinary" people’s email addresses. Indeed, any other personal details are weeded out of the database.
These updates are applied directly to the live (MySQL) database from which the query results are generated. They are also saved separately in plain text and indexed by the identifier for the person who made the changes. Then if such changes turn out to be hostile or vandalism, they can be removed very easily. In fact the live database is generated from a master database that is in plain text and can be edited (by the managers of this site) by hand.
Web crawling means using a program to extract links from web pages and follow them, where more links are collected, and so on. This of course is how search engines such as Google obtain their information.
We have a program that regularly visits all of the sites that appear in our database, and some that are linked from them, collecting
Only public Facebook and other web pages are accessed, not those that require a login. We are only collecting information that its authors have clearly put there as a general advertisement.
The pages themselves are not saved after we have extracted the information that we want from them. Nor do we save the sources of the links, though of course we do remember who owns the contact details or events.
Using these links and contact details, we have actively expanded the IStopBrexit database and continue to do so. We plan to add the constituency offices of pro-EU political parties at a later date.
At the moment, event data are copied automatically every night from
Later we will investigate what software various groups have used for calendars (the one at Stratford for Europe is a good one) and fetch data from those too.
For this site to achieve its purpose (making it easy for people who are not yet involved in the movement to become active) it needs to be advertised widely on other pro-EU websites, including the national campaigns and newspapers.
There are certain key people who need to be contacted and persuaded to do this. For this we need the help of someone who is skilled at social media and organisational politics.
Amongst the contact details in the database are of course a lot of email addresses for local groups. We will use these to contact them, to ask local activists to check their groups’s details and those in surrounding areas and also put the link or web form on their websites.
Many groups have not published email addresses but do have Twitter or Facebook addresses. We need some help from someone who uses these to contact these groups, to ask them to correct and augment their details.
Then there should be a more general advertisement on social media.
This site was implemented by two competent programmers, on powerful hardware. By means of programming, we have collected a lot of data about campaign activitied across the country that could not have been obtained simply by asking for emails.
There are other things that could be done with the resources that we have:
See this separate page about mirroring and its applications.