A website that was developed at a Best for Britain and Tech for UK hackathon in July is going viral https://www.myeu.uk/. The app lets anyone find out how much the EU has funded local projects in their area. The page is currently receiving 1,500 views a minute.
Best for Britain is using the tool to show people the value of funding for the EU for their communities, and allows people to write to their MP to demand a final say on the deal. To use the tool you type in your postcode and see what the EU has supported in your area.
Last night nearly 2,500 people a minute were using it. At 1,500 views a minute, that is the volume required to make someone who makes YouTube content a millionaire in advertising.
Commenting, Best for Britain chief Eloise Todd said:
"The EU invests around £5 billion a year in the UK and with myEU.uk every community can see how they benefit from this money. This support means more jobs and greater prosperity in places up and down the UK. People across the country need to know they have the right to the deal we currently have - we must be able to compare the deal we currently have to the deal the Government comes back with, because any kind of Brexit would leave us worse off, and a soft Brexit deal would leave us with no say at all over the majority of laws that govern our trade. Technology can help us and we'll be running these hackathons over the coming months."
"We hope that people will use the app and contact their MP to make sure the people and not politicians have the final say on whether we leave the EU."
App designer Hope Thomas added:
"The number and range of things the EU has funded around Europe really surprised us when we started to look at it, so we wanted to share it with other people. The reaction to the site has shown us how many people are affected by the work the EU has been doing."
Ends
Notes to Editors - The website uses the following datasets:
European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) 2014-2020. ESIF includes money from the European Social Fund (ESF), European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD). We got this data from separate datasets for: England, from Gov.uk (Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.) Scotland, from Gov.scot (Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.) Wales from Gov.wales (Welsh Governement © Crown copyright 2018 licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Northern Ireland from Department for the Economy NI (Department for the Economy © Crown copyright 2018 licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.).
All funding direct from the EU budget centrally administered by the Commission from 2017 and 2016 from the Financial Transparency system (c) European Union, 1995-2018
Creative Europe funding 2014-2020, which is the EU's programme for support for cultural and audiovisual funding. (c) European Union, 1995-2018
Projects funded by the European Union under the seventh framework programme for research and technological development (FP7) from 2007 to 2013 and Horizon 2020 from 2014 to 2020 from the EU Open data portal. (c) European Union, 1995-2018
Common Agricultural Policy Funding data from the Detail Data Portal for 2015 and 2014 and from DEFRA for 2016 and 2017 (both licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.)
Postcode data from FreeMapTools . Postcode data contains Ordnance Survey data © Crown copyright and database right 2017, contains Royal Mail data © Royal Mail copyright and database right 2017 and contains National Statistics data © Crown copyright and database right 2017
Global Research Identifier Database (GRID) from Digital Science, shared under the Creative Commons Public Domain 1.0 International licence .
This app came out of our last hackahton and we are running our next one this weekend 15 September 2018. Details at https://join.techforuk.com/