Yahoo! Minna no Seiji

» see seiji.yahoo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

It opened in February 2006 at seiji.yahoo.co.jp and the premise was close to the one every civic-tech project since has restated. Every sitting member of the House of Representatives and the House of Councillors got a page. You could search by name, by post, by chamber, by constituency, by party. Under each legislator and each bill before the Diet there was a rating, which users supplied, and those ratings could themselves be rated by other users.

What makes it worth a grave is that Yahoo Japan was not the one running it. The operator was Dot.JP, a nonprofit built around university students with a stated goal of raising the voting rate among young people, and Yahoo was the backer and the front door. So the biggest portal in the country was handing its politics section to an outside NPO for fourteen years, and the NPO's day job was placing students in internships with legislators and local governments.

The end came as an item in a list. On 29 November 2019 Yahoo published its standard notice of apps and services being retired by the end of March 2020, and Minna no Seiji was in it, alongside an Android file manager, a QR code reader, a phone security app and a memory optimizer. The site closed on 31 March 2020. Election coverage moved to Yahoo! News, where it now appears only during national elections and only for a limited window each time.

~ the case file ~

~ the paid rating button ~

The detail that dates it hardest is who was allowed to post a rating. Reading the file on your representative was open to anybody. Submitting an evaluation of that representative required membership of Yahoo! Premium or Yahoo! BB, meaning you had to be paying Yahoo for something else before the site would accept your opinion of a politician.

The intent was obviously anti-abuse, and in 2006 a paid account was the cheapest identity check anyone had. The effect is that a public accountability tool quietly sorted the electorate into people whose judgment counted and people who could only read, and the sorting criterion was a broadband contract.

~ who was running it ~

Dot.JP was not neutral in the way a wire service is neutral, and it never claimed to be. It ran a Diet member internship program that put young people inside the offices of legislators and local governments, and a number of its alumni went on to win seats themselves. The published tally of where they landed is lopsided in a way that says a lot about which parties were courting student volunteers in the 2000s: several from the Democratic Party, one from the Social Democratic Party, more than a dozen as independents, and not one from the Liberal Democratic Party, which governed Japan for almost the whole period the site was live.

~ the closing notice ~

Nothing in the 2019 announcement suggested the site had failed. It read like an inventory being tidied, and the same notice killed Yahoo! Blog two weeks later and RouteLab the following spring. Fourteen years of user ratings on Japanese legislators went with it, and the successor arrangement is a Yahoo! News special that appears when a national election is called and comes down when it is over. The permanent file on every member of the Diet does not have an owner anymore.

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