mySociety blog » News

Angie Ahl has finally finished her epic migration of the much neglected mySociety.org site to a shiny new Wordpress install. Angie’s been pretty ill whilst doing this, and I’m way beyond hugely impressed by her determination and good cheer whilst getting this done.

Richard Pope has given the site a lick of paint too, and the rest of us have been busily using the CMS to update all the horribly out of date text that littered the old site.

There are many changes, but perhaps most useful for many of you will be the fact that the blog is now fully categorised - so if you want posts or feeds on just one site, or just on technical topics, or on everything, it’s all there for the taking.

Angie (by Tommy Martin)

Factoid of the day - the mySociety logo was designed by Matt Jones now of Dopplr fame, and the old site design was Jason Kitcat, now a Green party councillor. There’s online democracy for you.

Francis has been furiously adding new features to our Freedom of Information website WhatDoTheyKnow ever since it launched earlier this year. He’s just added one of the most important missing features, the ability to leave annotations or comments on FOI requests.

This is especially useful for providing plain English summaries of what information in a response was actually interesting, or to discuss refusals to supply information and what to do with them. To add one just go to a request page and scroll to the bottom, just like adding a comment on a blog post.

So, whether you’ve made a request in the past, or you’re just interested in helping out, get annotating.

The epic task of manually matching each of the 42,019 video clips of MPs was started way, way back, ooh, about 12 whole weeks ago. Two days ago the Number 1 rated volunteer timestamper in our league table, Abi Broom, completed the last clip in our database, bringing her personal tally to 8,543 clips.

Abi Broom, No1 timestamping league table champ

Last night we went out and met with Abi and Robert Whittakker, one of the other super-timestampers who had done over 2,000 himself.

As a result of their efforts, and those of hundreds of other volunteers, we have put all the video that we have of the House of Commons sitting over the last year online, next to the text of the debates. The many thousands of people per day who visit TheyWorkForYou can, as a direct consequence of this work, now see video of most of the debates for the last year. When people embed clips on their own sites, that’ll also be thanks in part to our volunteers.

Robert Whittaker, down in 5th place with a measly 2047 clips to his name

When Parliament starts again in the Autumn there’ll be another 300-400 clips a day to do, but we have a feeling the only problem doing them will be who gets to them first.

In the meantime, we’ll soon be working on another game-like toy to help create more data. Hint - it might have something to do with GroupsNearYou.

Over a thousand Ebbsfleet United supporters have used PledgeBank to raise enough money to buy a striker Michael Gash from Cambridge City.

This is an excellent example of why you should never pre-determine exactly how people are going to use your site!

We’re not actually running for president, but we are up against Mr Obama in this years Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics.

Can you spare us a vote, guv?

In March this year Ethan Zuckerman gave a talk at ETech called The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.

The summary of his theory is that web sites that successfully enable people to post nonsense like pics of their cats are the same systems that get used for activism.

The line that has motivated me to post, reflects something I’ve been noting for a while:

… She became an activist because she was forced to and she reached out for the tools she had access to - which hapened to be MSN spaces. MSN is heavily censored in China - it’s certainly not what we would have chosen for her. But you don’t get to choose the tools - activists use what’s at hand. It’s fine to build tools for activists, but even better to build tools for folks who don’t know they’re activists yet.

Then, as a sort of apology Ethan adds:

(In making this point, I should be very, very careful to point out that I have deep respect for tools that have been developed successfully for activist uses, tools like Martus or FrontlineSMS. My point is simply that there are huge numbers of web users who don’t yet think of themselves as activists who are likely to reach for the tools they have at hand, not to look specifically for tools designed for activists.)

I’m posting because I don’t think Ethan should be apologising, I think that those of us who run civic, democratic and activism websites should be thanking him for expressing a perhaps uncomfortable truth plainly. What Ethan’s pointing out is that for most people doing grass roots activism online means is using one of the megasites like Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, MSN or Hotmail to express your views to you friends and (hopefully) to more people. It’s bigger campaigns with higher starting capital that tend to use their own plaforms successfully, like Obama or Avaaz.

A few months ago it really struck me when reading Clay Shirky’s much praised Here Comes Everybody that even as he told the stories of a number of different bits of online activism, not a single one used a dedicated campaigning platform. It was blogger, twitter and email all the way.

Just to make things clear, I’m not posting this to moan that people don’t use the right platforms: after all mySociety doesn’t build anything that competes directly with Twitter, say. However, I would like to encourage some discussion about what role there is for smaller dedicated activist-coder groups like mySociety in a world where the first step on a just-born activist’s fight will almost always be their own IM, email, blogging or social networking tools.

Right now I’m trying to work out what sorts of path we should pursue in a universe where most users will behave like this. I don’t think the answer is as simple as ‘build widgets and plugins for all these sites’ either, none of our widgets has ever been as well used as simply providing permalinks to bits of debate in TheyWorkForYou which people link to in volumes. I hope this post can provoke some thoughts about how we can best strike a symbiotic relationship with the big beasts, especially seeking analogies from other sectors.

At mySociety we’re always very lucky to meet and spend time with some extremely diverse and impressive people.

We thought it would be great to share a bit of that good fortune by holding some talks from some of our favourite thinkers, and to have an excuse to meet more people in the wider mySociety community face to face.

To that end, we’re holding four talks in London this autumn (location TBD but almost certainly a centralish pub). Each link below goes to an Upcoming page where you can sign up to let us keep track of numbers and how big a venue we need.

4/10/2007 - Stefan Magdalinski, net-political troublemaker extraordinaire

1/11/2007 - Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map

CANCELLED 29/11/2007 - Jason Kitcat, e-voting expert

12/12/2007 - Peter Wainman, IT-specialist solicitor and blogger

We look foward to seeing you there.

Just a quick post to keep those of of you interested in mySociety in the loop with our activities at the moment.

New Things You Can Use Now

1. Email or RSS alerts when people report problems in your ward or your council via FixMyStreet. Ideal for councillors, people on resident’s associations, or anyone just concerned about what’s breaking and being fixed in the area right near their home.

Have a go - it’s ace when the mail comes dropping in from just down your road.

2. The Queen on TheyWorkForYou

Is this the first monarch with her own RSS feed? Would anyone really care if she was?

New Projects Coming Up

We have three major projects under way at the moment, and unusually
only two of them involve us building websites.

1. The Freedom of Information Filer and Archive website is under construction. Aiming to make it easier to make freedom of information requests, and easier for people to find what other people have found out, this is being build mainly by Francis. We’re having lots of discussions about design and features right now, and if you have anything to contribute please either get in touch or leave your ideas on the wiki page.

2. Local Email Groups Near You - an attempt to record the location of hyper local email groups and local forums and websites and to share that information on lots of other sites. Why go blindly hunting for advice on a plumber if there’s already an email list that covers your street? This is going to be a rare international project for us, so if you’re outside the UK and interested in community Internet usage, please get in touch.

3. The 90 Day Project - mySociety’s first lobbying exercise, trying to encourage parliament to take some steps to improve the way it publishes information, and to improve the tools that MPs have to
handle mail from their constituents.

There’s lots and lots more too, but we can’t blow all our surprises in one go, can we?

Last night was the annual New Statesman New Media Awards, held in Westminster Abbey’s College Gardens. mySociety were finalists in two categories, Modernising Government and Contribution to Civic Society, with both Number 10 petitions and FixMyStreet nominated in both. Also, two other projects we host, PlanningAlerts and The Government Says, were both finalists in the Information & Openness category.

It was a lovely evening, seeing some people I haven’t seen for some time and meeting new people too. We ended up winning in both our categories - the Number 10 petitions site in Modernising Government, and FixMyStreet in Contribution to Civic Society, which is obviously fantastic for everyone involved. The judges were impressed at the open source nature of the petitions site, and the “deceptive simplicity” of FixMyStreet. This is now the third year in a row we’ve won the Civic Society award - TheyWorkForYou won in 2005, and WriteToThem in 2006, so we’re obviously doing something right. :)

It’s a shame that Chris could not be with us, but his mother did attend to see the projects he worked on recognised.

Thanks and congratulations to all the other winners and finalists.

We’ve renamed NeighbourhoodFix-It to FixMyStreet! Everything will continue to work the same, so get reporting those abandoned fridges and uncleaned up dog poo. Old links should redirect to the new domain.

Matthew explains why we did this in the FAQ:

Wasn’t this site called Neighbourhood Fix-It?

Yes, we changed the name mid June 2007. We decided Neighbourhood Fix-It was a bit of a mouthful, hard to spell, and hard to publicise (does the URL have a dash in it or not?). The domain FixMyStreet became available recently, and everyone liked the name.

Thanks to Tom Loosemore for telling us that the old name was just too cumbersome, and Matthew for reworking it (and improving the front page to boot!) in what felt like 3 seconds flat.

UK Citizens Online Democracy (UKCOD) is the charity that runs mySociety. Shockingly for an organisation that works on online projects, its own website has not been high on its priority list.

Thanks to the prodding and work of the mySociety developers and volunteers this embarrassing deficiency has now been rectified, and UKCOD is today proud to announce the launch of its own simple but hopefully informative website at http://www.ukcod.org.uk/. We aim to provide transparent and clear information on our organisation’s structure, its history, projects, finances, and the people involved.

We expect this to generate as many questions as it answers. Do please let us know if we’ve missed anything, or if there’s anything else you would like to know.

Bests,

James Cronin,
Chairman, UK Citizens Online Democracy

So MPs have voted to raise a bit of cash to explain to constituents what’s going on in Parliament. mySociety partly exists to suggest how such things can be done imaginatively and successfully, and we have had the following thought.

MPs must pool at least a little of the money they’re getting to build shared tools and services, if they’re going to have any chance of using this cash effectively. Single tools that cover whole populations are generally much more effective and much better value for money than 646 duplicate, incompatible, technically inferior attempts.

So our modest proposal is this. We want an MP to use PledgeBank to make the following pledge:

“I will pool £2000 of my £10,000 into a competition pot for tools that will help MPs help constituents understand what’s going on, but only if 100 MPs will do the same.”

If it succeeds, individuals, companies, charities - whoever - could vie for slices of cash to build the sort of 21st civic infrastructure that we deserve, and a panel of MPs and advisors could pick the winners. It could be quick, effective and outside the deadening hand of official parliamentary processes.

Neighbourhood Fix-It makes it as easy as possible for citizens across the UKBritain to report local problems like fly tipping, broken lights, graffiti etc, whilst opening the problems up to browsing and public discussion of solutions.

The problem tackled

Councils across the UK do an excellent job of fixing local problems when they’re reported by citizens. However, the model for handling the information is a system of doctor-patient style confidentiality. A citizen who makes a report normally knows about a problem, and so does the council, but there is no general public way of finding out what has been reported or fixed.

Given that the nature of public problems being reported is that they are public, this seems a strange situation.

Neighbourhood Fix-It opens up and democratises the process of discovering and reporting problems, so people can see what other reports have been filed locally using the site, and can leave extra feedback and comments on the problems if they see fit.

Early successes

In quiet beta test for a few weeks prior to launch, several hundred problems have already been reported across the UK. Fixes by councils so far include:

• Fixed paving slabs
• Redundant estate agent signs removed
• Filled pot holes
• Removed graffiti

Funding and Partnership

The project was funded with £10,000 of support from the Department of Constitutional Affairs Innovations Fund, and is a partnership with the Young Foundation’s Transforming Neighbourhoods Programme, a consortium of 15 local authorities, government departments and community organisations working together on practical ways to give more powers to neighbourhoods.

Tom’s quote from the press release: “Neighbourhood Fix-It aims to change the act of reporting faults - turning it from a private one-to-one process into a public experience where residents can see if anyone else in the neighbourhood has already spotted and reported a problem, and to see how their council is acting on it. We hope the website will make the process of reporting faults more efficient, possibly reducing the number of individual reports that councils receive because people will be able to see that their neighbours have already made the call.”

It is with great sadness that I must report the death of Chris Lightfoot, mySociety’s first developer and a good friend to all of us. He was found by friends at his flat on February 11th. The main announcement can be read in this post on his blog.

Chris was perhaps the pre-eminent example so far of what polymath means in the Internet age. His contributions to the world are more than just a formidable legacy of computer code of the very highest quality, for mySociety and many others. They also include substantial contributions to applied statistics, geographic information systems, economics and a range of public policy issues from identity cards to speed cameras.

Everything Chris did in these fields combined an incredulity-inducing array of technical and analytical skills with a wickedly funny, savage turn of phrase. To understand what a remarkable intellectual outlier he was, simply sift through his blog and marvel at the quantity of primary research and original coding that went into it. Documenting and exploring his work would provide material for many years of research, and yet all this was accomplished by the age of 28.

Within mySociety he was involved right from the start through the development of WriteToThem, HearFromYourMP and PledgeBank, building some amazing underpinning geographic and political web services like Gaze, MaPit and DaDem. These components make all our sites work and make a raft other tools and sites possible in the future.

For the last three or four months he was working at another employer, Media Molecule four days a week, but still helped the full time staff with the petitions work. The last major thing he built for us was the system that serves up the maps for Neighbourhood Fix-It, a site which was only just soft launched before he died, but of which he was apparently fond for its WriteToThem-like habit of getting simple things done that mattered to normal people.

Building mySociety’s major sites involved mighty team efforts, something which can obscure even huge invididual talent. So perhaps the sort of work for which Chris will be be most remembered is his wonderfully individualistic, virtuoso forays into scholastic areas in which he had no formal training. He wandered into differing disciplines, made a mark, and wandered on again like a giant that had no idea he’d just trodden on a village. The political survey work he did both hugely illuminates our understanding of our own political world, whilst raising the question “how come none of the professional political analysts thought of this?” And his travel-time maps should make everyone in government wonder if they’re sitting on information which could be reused to such amazing, potentially life changing effect.

Chris’ intellect and appetite for knowledge was surpassed by only one aspect of his character: his integrity. If you’ve ever wondered why WriteToThem goes to such lengths to protect users’ data it is largely because of his rock solid belief in the dignity and social indispensibility of privacy. Chris was an energetic campaigner in this field, notably for No2ID, who have posted a tribute.

It doesn’t stretch the truth an inch to say that with his death the whole of the UK’s citizenry, not just his family, friends and colleagues, will be worse off. Rest in peace, Chris.

We’re delighted to announce that mySociety has been generously awarded $100,000 by Omidyar Network, a mission-based investment group committed to enabling individual self-empowerment. The purpose of the investment, our largest to date from a philanthropic source, is to spread the use of PledgeBank.com to a host of community and grassroots groups in the US.

Omidyar Network invested in PledgeBank because it encourages collective effort by enabling users to rally the support of others through their own commitment to take action.

From starting new organizations, to giving blood, to volunteering to mentor others, Pledgebank has enabled people to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Just this morning we were sent these pictures of a protest in Brazil that was organised using PledgeBank.

What has been missing to date, though, has been any resource to spread the use of the tool to traditionally offline groups. Whether these are schools, community groups, NGOs, churches or neighbourhood watch groups, many could benefit from PledgeBank, but few have had the opportunity to hear about it. Therefore, PledgeBank is looking to hire an outreach coordinator who will travel around the US meeting groups, listening to their goals, and explaining how PledgeBank can help them, for free.

mySociety will be recruiting the outreach coordinator in the New Year. If you’d like to get in touch, perhaps to pre-book an appointment to meet or talk with the outreach coordinator, or because you know someone who could do the job well, please drop us a line to team@mysociety.org.

Some super news just in. mySociety has been awarded funding by the JRSST Charitable Trust to build our Freedom of Information Filer and Archive(FOIFA), the winner of our 2006 call for proposals. This means that we will be able to start work relatively early in the New Year.

At £24,500 this is our largest ever donation from a philanthropic source of any kind. We’re very grateful to the good people at the various Rowntree trusts involved in supporting us in this way. Not only will it enable us to start relatively swiftly on the FOIFA project, but it also represents a mark of confidence in mySociety by a major player in the UK foundation world. Thank you to the JRSST, and thank you again to the developers and volunteers who have made mySociety a project worth trusting :).

Today is the first anniversary of the launch of HearFromYourMP.com. Whilst a bit lower profile than some of our other sites, being driven mainly by email, HearFromYourMP has had a very pleasing first year. Not only have over 25,000 people signed up across the UK, but perhaps more remarkably 84 MPs have used the service to talk with (not to) their constituents. That’s about one in five MPs asked making use within the first year, which we guess must be amongst the fastest adoptions of a new communications tool ever by parliamentarians.

The most important thing to remember about HearFromYourMP, though, is that it is designed to be there for the long haul, gently engaging with that 44% of WriteToThem users who have never written to a politician before and coaxing them into a slow but personal relationship with their representatives. And as a final thought, I note that the Liberal Democrats had 72,721 members in 2004: I wonder how long it will take this little birthday site to get there?

I’m very pleased to announce that the petitions system we’ve built for 10 Downing Street has gone live today.

I’m very grateful for the hard and often inspired work put into this by Chris Lightfoot and Matthew Somerville, as well as the civil servants who have helped to build a petitions system which I believe is in a real class of its own.

The most notable features are:

1. Petitions are accepted and published, regardless of the political slant of the petition. However, if they break the Ts&Cs (a petition that doesn’t actually ask for any action, for example) then they are put on a special rejected petitions page: they don’t just vanish. We think this transparency feature is probably unique.

2. The site is being launched in beta, and will change over time. This might seem too commonplace to note for many of you, but it reflects a willingness to see a public IT service evolve in response to users, not simply fulfil a contract agreed in advance. mySociety exists partly to spread good practice in the public sector, and we think this is a nice example of that in action.

3. The code, including Chris’s amazing high-load optimised engine, is all open source.

Any questions? Come into our chat channel at www.irc.mysociety.org or mail us at team@mysociety.org.

We’re holding an event in Portcullis House, Parliament tomorrow evening, Tuesday 7th November, to discuss the issue of TheyWorkForYou.com influencing the behaviour of MPs.

We’ve just been moved to a slightly larger room than planned, so we’re no longer sold out. If you’d like to come, please email us at team@mysociety.org so we can put your name on the guest list and give you proper instructions.

mySociety is pleased to announce the winner of our 2006 call for proposals, plus our thoughts on the best runners up, and various other lessons.

Winner

Our winner, and the next major site we are planning to build is the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive; a searchable, readable, googlable user-created archive of FOI requests and their responses. Think of a combined TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.com for FOI requests and their responses, and you’ll have our vision.

This idea was actually submitted twice, once by Phil Rodgers and once by Francis Irving (a mySociety coder).

We believe the idea is especially powerful in a form extended somewhat beyond that submitted. We think that the best way to build a top quality archive is to simultaniously build the best possible “File an FOI request” tool, and then publish both the requests and the responses made through it in the archive. From the private desire to easily file FOI requests we hope that we can generate the public benefit of an easy to use archive.

We asked our community of users and friends to list their top three projects, and the FOIFA was named more often than any other single project as the winner: 9 out of a total of 22 people who left a comment expressing their preferences. The core team, core volunteers and trustees agreed with the users, and so we have a winner.

Logistics

mySociety will start building the system in early 2007. We will try to fund it in two ways. First, we will approach donors, most probably foundations, to see if they are interested in supporting it. Secondly, we will see if we can set aside some surplus from contract work, such as branded versions of the other sites. And lastly, we’ll work with any volunteers who are willing to dig in.

Our initial estimate is that the site will take 120 full time developer days to design, build and launch to beta, for a total cost of about £25,000 including servers, management time, gathering of contact details, buying of sweets, motivational calendars and so on. The cost of running it thereafter are hard to gauge at this point, and will depend on usage patterns and the final spec we settle on.

In the run up to building and launching it we’ll gladly talk to anyone who wants to be involved, including public sector agencies who we hope might use this system to publish responses to requests made via other channels.

Runner Ups

In no particular order, these are some of the other ideas that had some legs. We’re putting them here to suggest to the world that there might be something well worth exploring here.

1. A to B travel, by Murray, is a sort of collaborative journey planner, where people share information on journeys that they’ve made. Unfortunately, too much of this site is already done by the big and expensively run government site Transportdirect.info , but it has nice ideas that are worth someone doing. In particular the idea of local knowledge and general comments on different journeys is an excellent, and Seat61.com shows that there is some considerable appetite for journeys explained in a human form. Often I don’t want the fastest journey from A to B, I might want the best view, or the most pleasant form of transport, or the one that can be broken somewhere notable.

We’ve also come up with a feature that this site could add. It is the idea of registering to express an interest not in a specific journey, but in a general journey: “I go from Manchester to London a few times a year, and I might want to share a car in future”.

2. Get Out! by Mary Reid. This proposal was about building a site that would contain a user build database of places to go in the UK that would contain something nice and easy to do if you had an hour or two to spare and wanted to get out of the house.

We’ve felt for a while that there is a great problem with knowledge of local activities being hopelessly fractured across the UK Internet, spread across a million different sites and so worth much less than the sum of its parts. A site that could become a reference place to store interesting things to see, and a reference place to find them could be excellent indeed. Maybe a rebuild and extension of our little back o’ the envelope site YourHistoryHere.com?

3. Write To Your Newspaper by Francis Irving (again)

This proposal was about a site that makes it much easier to write to local newspapers. It is undoubtedly a good thing, but it simply didn’t beat the FOI archive because we felt the demand and public benefit just wasn’t as great as for FOIFA. One of mySociety’s volunteers has actually already written some code in this area, and we certainly think it should go further.

4. TheyWantToWorkForYou by Seb Bacon - a site where people could find out prospective politicians rather than current ones was voted for by a few people. We think it would be a good idea for such a system to exist, but the scale problem is enormous. With 20,000 current councillors, just imagine how many candidates there are at each election, and the massive problem of trying to get them to give structured views. What is missing here really is a strong motivation for candidates to go to a certain site and enter info themselves - it just doesn’t exist, and probably couldn’t without the major backing of someone like a big newspaper,or the BBC. NB, we also feel strongly that such a site would have to be permanent, and not just run at elections.

Lessons Learned from Running the Call

Just some thoughts about the process, really here for anyone else who might be planning to run a call like this and who stumbles across us via Google.

1. First time round, in 2003, the call for proposals got 250+ proposals, wheras this time it had more like 100, even though mySociety has moved from completely unknown to somewhat better known. Clearly despite BBC and Guardian coverage, we did something not as well this time. This might simply have not been hammering every list and person we could with personally crafted emails, or it could have just been blind chance.

2. We should have determined and published the judging process before the call for proposals was put out. Nobody seems to have been especially upset by our drawn out and ill-planned selection process, but it would have meant we would have made our decision much more quickly.

3. We should have set a timetable for all parts of the process.

4. We should have made some sort of web based voting gadget to engage people slightly more with the deciding process (despite knowing that online voting is mostly bunk, of course).

5. We could have made a shortlist and then asked the authors to do more work in polishing up their ideas.

If you’ve any further questions about the call for proposals, or the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive get in touch with us at team@mysociety.org