mySociety blog

There’s been a lot written recently about the cognitive surplus, a phrase coined by Clay Shirky to describe the amount of human energy that can be deployed to create things if only barriers are lowered and incentives sharpened.

mySociety has recently been fortunate enough to see a little of this phenomenon through the explosion of volunteering activity which grew up around our TheyWorkForYou video timestamping ‘game’. For those of you not familiar, we needed video clips of politician’s speaking matched with the text of their speeches, and in just a couple of months a gang of volunteers new and old have done almost all of the video in the archive. Other, much larger examples include reCAPTCHA and the ESP game

Reflecting on this, my friend Tom Lynn suggested that there was a gap in the market for a service that would draw together different crowdsourcing games, ensure that their usability standards and social benefit were high, and which then syndicate them out in little widgets, recaptcha style, to anyone who wanted to include one on a web page.

This is where Mozilla and Ubuntu come in. Anyone who uses Firefox knows what the home page is like, essentially the Google homepage with some Firefox branding. Ubuntu’s default browser homepage, post patch upgrade especially, is similarly minimalist and focussed on telling you what’s changed.

Therein lies the opportunity - using pieces of these default home pages (maintained by organisations that claim to have a social purpose, remember) for more good than simply repeatedly reminding users about the the brand of the product. Traditionally that would mean asking people to donate or become volunteers, but the new universe of ultra-easy crowdsourcing games are challenging that assumption.

Here’s a scenario. One time in ten when I load Firefox, the homepage contains a widget right under the search box that contains an almost entirely self explanatory task that contributed to the public good in some way. This could be spotting an object on a fragment of satellite photo after a disaster, typing in a word that’s difficult to OCR, timestamping a video clip, or adding tags to an image or a paragraph of text. The widgets would be syndicated from the central repository of Cognitive Surplus Foundation ‘games’, and would help groups like Mozilla and Ubuntu to show themselves to millions of tech-disinterested users to be the true 21st century social enterprises that they want to be.

The Office of Public Sector Information (snappy name, lads) has launched a simple new service where you can publicly lodge a request for some public sector data that you can’t get, but need for some reason. They’ll then act as your behind-the-scenes champions and attempt to lever it out of which ever bit of government is trying to keep hold of it for no good reason.

You can also read other people’s requests, which hopefully will help people realize how much good data there is out there, and leave comments suggesting further reasons why it might be a good idea to let it loose.

Full disclosure, this was my idea, as part of the Power of Information review, so I’m not neutral in wanting to see people get what they want through it.

Go, post!

One of the special pieces of magic in TheyWorkForYou is its email alerts, sending you mail whenever an MP says a word you care about in Parliament. Lots of sites these days have RSS, and lots have search, but surprisingly few offer search based email alerts. My Mum trades shares on the Internet, setting it to automatically buy and sell at threshold values. But she doesn’t have an RSS reader. So, it’s important to have email alerts.

So naturally, when we made WhatDoTheyKnow, search and search based email alerts were pretty high up the list, to help people find new, interesting Freedom of Information requests. To implement this, I started out using acts_as_solr, which is a Ruby on Rails plugin for Solr, which is a REST based layer on top of the search engine Lucene.

I found acts_as_solr all just that bit too complicated. Particularly, when a feature (such as spelling correction) was missing, there were too many layers and too much XML for me to work out how to fix it. And I had lots of nasty code to make indexing offline - something I needed, as I want to safely store emails when they arrive, but then do the risky indexing of PDFs and Word documents later.

The last straw was when I found that acts_as_solr didn’t have collapsing (analogous to GROUP BY in SQL). So I decided to bite the bullet and implement my own acts_as_xapian. Luckily there were already Xapian Ruby bindings, and also the fabulous Xapian email list to help me out, and it only took a day or two to write it and deploy it on the live site.

If you’re using Rails and need full text search, I recommend you have a look at acts_as_xapian. It’s easy to use, and has a diverse set of features. You can watch a video of me talking about WhatDoTheyKnow and acts_as_xapian at the London Ruby User Group, last Monday.

TheyWorkForYou now finds whenever an old version of Hansard is referenced (which they do by date and column number, e.g. Official Report, 29 February 2008, column 1425) and turns the citation into a link to a search for the speeches in that column on that date. This only really became feasible when we moved server, upgraded Xapian, and added date and column number metadata (among others), allowing much more advanced and focussed searching - the advanced search form gives some ideas. Perhaps in future we’ll be able to add some crowd-sourcing game to match the reference to the exact speech, much like our video matching (nearly 80% of our archive done!). :)

Kudos to Google and Yahoo! for spotting this change within a couple of days, as they’re now so busy crawling everything for changes that they’re slowing the whole website down… ;-)

Meet up with the some of the friends of mySociety in Manchester for a social evening in the pub in Manchester.

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If you enter your postcode on TheyWorkForYou and it’s Scottish or Northern Irish, you’re now presented with your MSPs and MLAs as well as your MP, which makes sense given the site covers their Parliament and Assembly respectively. :-) You also get an extra tab in the navigation linking through to Your MSPs or MLAs. In order to do this, I needed a quick way of determining if a postcode was Northern Irish or Scottish. Northern Ireland was easy, as all postcodes there begin with BT. I assumed Scotland was also easy, which turned out to be true apart from the TD postcode area that straddled the border like a mail-sorting Niagara Falls. After some very dull investigation, I eventually worked out that e.g. most of TD15 is in England, but (amongst others) TD15 1X* is in Scotland, except for TD15 1XX which is apparently back in England. The final result was the postcode_is_scottish() function in postcode.inc, which (hopefully) correctly determines if a given postcode is Scottish or not - perhaps someone else will find it useful.

OpenTech on 5th July is an informal one-day conference about technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.

mySociety related sessions:

• mySociety session - more on time travel maps, and the launch of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, and a few other surprise announcements
• No2ID and Open Rights Group: State of the Nation
• Here’s the UK EFF
• Power to the People - One year one from the Power of Information Report
• …and much more

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Debate pages that have at least one timestamped speech (such as the previously mentioned last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions) have a video fixed to the bottom right hand corner (if your browser is recent enough) showing that debate. While playing the video, the currently playing speech is highlighted with a yellow background, and you can start watching from any timestamped speech by clicking the “Watch this” link by any such speech. So how does all that work?

I’m very proud of this feature, I wasn’t sure it would be possible, and it’s very exciting. :-)

Flash has an ExternalInterface API, where JavaScript can call functions in the Flash, and vice-versa. When the video player loads, it requests an XML list from the server of all speech GIDs and timestamps for the current debate (here’s the file for the above debate). So when someone clicks a “Watch this”, it calls a moveVideo function in main.mxml with the GID of the speech, which loops through all the speeches and moves to the correct point if possible.

The highlighting works the other way - as the video is playing, it checks to see which speech we’re currently in, and if there’s been a change, it calls the updateSpeech function in TheyWorkForYou’s JavaScript, which finds the right row in the HTML and changes the class in order to highlight it. Quite straightforward, really, but it does make following the debate very simple and highlights the linking between the video and the text, all done by our excellent volunteers (join in! :) ).

Talking of our busy timestampers, I’ve also been busy making improvements (and fixing bugs) to the timestamping interface to make things easier for them. As well as warnings when it looks like two people are timestamping the same debate at the same time, various invisible things have been changed, such as using other people’s timestamps to make the start point for future timestamps on the same day more accurate. I also added a totaliser, using the Google Chart API, for which you simply have to provide image size and percentage complete.

Approaching 45% of our entire archive of video timestamped, with the totaliser approaching the chartreuse :-)

Previous articles

1. The Flash player
2. Seeking
3. Highlighting the current speech

Our video is streamed via progressive HTTP, using lighttpd and mod_flv_streaming. This works by having keyframe metadata at the start of the FLV (Flash video) file (we add ours using yamdi as that doesn’t load the whole file into memory first), which maps times within the video to byte positions within the file. When someone drags the position slider, or presses a skip button, the player actually changes the source of the video to something like file.flv?start=<byte position> which starts a new download from that point in the video. This means you can seek to parts of the video not yet downloaded, which is definitely a required feature.

The video is split up into programme chunks, according to BBC Parliament’s schedule, so each Oral Questions will (approximately) be its own video chunk, and the main debates will be a couple of chunks. By default, the video player will show a screengrab from the start of the video, as that’s all that’s available when it first loads (you have to load the start of the FLV file to fetch the keyframe metadata in order to move anywhere else :) ). I wanted the player to show a relevant screengrab before you hit Play, so came up with the slightly messy workaround of setting the volume to 0, seeking and playing the video for under a second in order to start it from the new point and show the video, then stopping it and resetting the volume. It works most of the time :-)

Some of our video chunks have jumps in them, due to problems in downloading the original WMV stream. The timestamping interface has a link for people to let us know of such problems, so that we can mark the relevant speeches as missing video and not have them be offered to future timestampers. One valiant volunteer, Tim, let us know about two such videos, but with the added oddity that if you let them play, they would happily carry on past their “end” point, but this made timestamping those speeches quite difficult.

I started investigating, firstly noting that both videos should have been 6 hours long, but were both listed as 1:20:24, which I thought was a bit of an odd coincidence. After reading the FLV file specification, it turned out that 32-bit millisecond timestamps in FLV are split into two - first the low 24 bits, then the high 8 bits. 2^24 = 16,777,216, which in milliseconds is 4 hours, 39 minutes, 37 seconds, which is pretty much exactly what the two videos’ durations were short by! All the timestamps in our FLV files were not setting the high byte, so after 4:39:37, they were wrapping round to 0 (and thus 6 hours became 1:20:24ish).

Our video processing consists of four major steps - the downloading script uses ffmpeg to convert each 75 minute chunk from WMV to MPEG; then nightly processing uses ffmpeg again to convert the right bits of these MPEG files to FLV, mencoder to join the relevant FLV files into one FLV chunk, then yamdi to add the metadata. My first try at a solution was to alter yamdi to increment the high byte itself, which fixed the duration display and let you seek to high times, but when you tried to go to e.g. 5 hours, the video started playing from the right point but the video thought it was playing from 20 minutes in. This would obviously confuse timestamping!

As the FLV files produced by ffmpeg were all under 75 minutes long, they couldn’t have the problem. It turned out we were running an old version of mencoder, and updating that and converting all our long video files fixed the problem. Phew :-)

Join us later today for my third short technical talk on TheyWorkForYou video, where I’ll explain how our Flash application talks to the HTML and vice-versa to enable the “Watch this” and highlighting of speeches.

1. The Flash player
2. Seeking
3. Highlighting the current speech

TheyWorkForYou video timestamping has been launched, over 40% of available speeches have already been timestamped, and (hopefully) all major bugs have been fixed, so I can now take a short breather and write this short series of more technical posts, looking at how the front end bits I wrote work and hang together.

Let’s start with the most obvious feature of video timestamping - the video player itself. :) mySociety is an open-source shop, so it was great to discover that (nearly all of) Adobe Flex is available under the Mozilla Public Licence. This meant I could simply download the compiler and libraries, write some code and compile it into a working SWF Flash file without any worries (and you can do the same!).

Writing a Flex program is split into three main areas - MXML that lays out your application, defines any web services you’re using and so on; CSS to define the style of the various components; and ActionScript to deal with things like events, or talking to the JavaScript in the parent HTML. My code is probably quite shoddy in a number of places - it’s my first application in Flex :-) - but it’s all available to view if you want to take a peek, and it’s obviously running on the live TheyWorkForYou site.

To put a video component in the player is no harder than including an <mx:VideoDisplay> element - set the source of that, and you have yourself a video player, no worrying about stream type, bandwidth detection, or anything else. :) You can then use a very useful feature called data binding to make lots of things trivial - for example, I simply set the value of a horizontal slider to be the current playing time of the video, and the slider is then automatically in the right place at all times. On the downside, VideoDisplay does appear to have a number of minor bugs (the most obvious one being where seeking can cause the video to become unresponsive and you have to refresh the page; it’s more than possible it’s a bug in my code, of course, but there are a couple of related bugs in Adobe’s bug tracker).

As well as the buttons, sliders and the video itself, the current MXML contains two fades (one to fade in the hover controls, one to fade them out), one time formatter (to format the display of the running time and duration), and three web services (to submit a timestamp result, delete a mistaken timestamp, and fetch an array of all existing timestamps for the current debate). These are all called from various places within the ActionScript when certain events happen (e.g. the Now button or the Oops button is clicked).

Compiling is a simple matter of running mxmlc on the mxml file, and out pops a SWF file. It’s all straightforward, although a bit awkward at first working again with a strongly-typed, compiled language after a long time with less strict ones :-) The documentation is good, but it can be hard to find - googling for [flex3 VideoDisplay] and the like has been quite common over the past few weeks.

Tomorrow I will talk about moving around within the videos and some bugs thrown up there, and then how the front end communicates with the video in order to highlight the currently playing speech - for example, have a look at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

1. The Flash player
2. Seeking
3. Highlighting the current speech

Wow! The video timestamping site on TheyWorkForYou has been live for just under ten days, but you’ve already managed to timestamp almost 14,000 clips - that’s almost 40% of our entire video archive!

Thank you for all the good work - and especially to our top timestampers. David Jones, Alex Hazell and Lee Maguire are currently the top three in the overall rankings, but there are five more people who have timestamped more than 500 clips, another seventeen people who have done 100 clips or more, and more than 100 people who’ve done anything from 1 to 100 clips. And of course, there’s also a fair few anonymous people who haven’t yet registered, so their individual contributions to the “anonymous” total of 3349 clips are not recorded on the league tables. Remember, we’ll be handing out prizes to the top timestampers, so get registered before you timestamp your next video!

We’re starting to collect a list of notable clips that we can use to compile a “best of parliament” video gallery - if you would like to nominate a particular speech, please leave a comment below or send an email to team@theyworkforyou.com - just tell us the name of the MP speaking, and the URL of the page where this speech appears on theyworkforyou.com. We’ll put the best of them together and publish a list later this summer.

We’re very excited to announce that our Parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou.com now includes video of debates in the House of Commons - but we need your help to match up each speech with the video footage.

It’s really easy to help out. We’ve built a really simple, rather addictive system that lets anyone with a few spare minutes match up a randomly-selected speech from Hansard against the correct snippet of video. You just listen out for a certain speech, and when you hear it you hit the big red ‘now’ button. Your clip will then immediately go live on TheyWorkForYou next to the relevent speech, improving the site for everyone. Yay!

You can start matching up speeches with video snippets right away, but if you take 30 seconds to register a username then we’ll log every speech that you match up and recognise your contribution on our “top timestampers” league table. We’ll send out mySociety hoodies to the top timestampers - they’re reserved exclusively for our volunteers as a badge of honour.

We think that this really easy approach to crowd-sourcing data about online video could come in useful in many different situations - not just for politics - and we hope that it gets used all over the place. It might even be a world first, we’re not sure. If you’d like us to create something similar for your local legislature, sports team, Am Dram group or anything else that can be audio or video recorded then please get in touch. We’d also really appreciate your feedback on the current beta system - please send your email to team@mysociety.org.

Note to MPs, researchers, office staff, campaigners and bloggers - we know that you want to concentrate on matching up the speeches of a particular MP, or of a particular debate. If this sounds like you, please send an email to team@mysociety.org with what you want, and we’ll help you do it.

Background

This project was initially commissioned and funded by the BBC, who asked mySociety to create a searchable, online video archive of debates based on footage from BBC Parliament. We were thrilled to help out, because we think that it will enhance the public understanding of - and respect for - the work of Parliament. The initial goal of this project was to use the BBC’s captions to help chop up the video into different speeches. Tom Loosemore arranged for access to the BBC’s internal captions data, Etienne Pollard was commissioned to build an open source recording/transcoding/web-serving system (and then donated some of his wages back to pay for enough hard drive space for the video!), Stef Magdalinski donated a network storage array to hold the disks. However, after lots of hard work trying to get our computers to automatically slice up the video into chunks according to the BBC’s captions we concluded that this on its own wasn’t sufficiently accurate to reliably match up every speech in Hansard with the appropriate snippet in our video footage.

Adversity, however, is a great source of innovation. Matthew Somerville, working on a spec first sketched out by Tom Steinberg customised the flash interface substantially so that users could watch video and help add correct timestamps. Now that’s built, what remains is for you to do your part! What’s more, once we get a significant number of speeches timestamped we can start providing web feeds and APIs for MPs to embed video footage directly on their own websites, and video of your MP’s most recent speeches on their MP page on TheyWorkForYou.

There are some conflicting views about whether this all online video of Parliament is a good idea - for instance, this video snippet (created using the new system) shows that the Deputy Leader isn’t so keen on the idea of Parliamentary footage appearing on sites like YouTube. Or perhaps she’s just been misunderstood - now you can judge for yourself what she was saying, based on her appearance and intonation. On the other hand, the BBC seem to understand the benefit of putting video content online (and they’re a fully paid up member of ParBol, the Parliamentary Broadcasting group), and Parliament themselves have an alternative set of online video streams. Unfortunately the official Parliamentary video service can’t be integrated with Hansard, is only available in Windows Media format, only has enough storage to keep the most recent 28 days of footage in archive, and doesn’t even attempt to break up the video into individual speeches apparently you can search for speeches after all, although this capability isn’t actively advertised. It perhaps goes without saying that mySociety considers it an important public service for citizens to be able to find footage of their MPs doing their work, and we will resist attempts to deny this service to citizens.

One final thing - we’re currently trying to persuade the clerks in Parliament to tweak their internal processes a bit, and make it easier for people to see how laws are made. It’s called the Free Our Bills campaign, and we need as many people as possible to join the campaign, so that we can bring law-making into the 21st century. Please sign up now!

Update 1.40PM
There are already over 1000 timestamps, and we’ve not even gone for any media coverage yet. Well done all!

Update 11.00AM on Thursday 5 June 2008
6769 speeches have now been timestamped, which is exactly 20% of the current total of 33838 speeches. Thanks for all your efforts, and keep up the good work!

We’re busy as bees, lots of things happening, increasingly many of which are commercial, and we can’t talk about until they’re released.

Commercial? But you’re a charity! Yes - but just as Oxfam have a trading subsidiary company which runs the second hand clothes shops, we have a trading subsidiary company that sells services relating to the websites that we make (structural details here).

Everything from other small charities to large media companies are buying our services - which range from customised versions of FixMyStreet, through to strategic consulatancy. If you’ve got something that you think we might be able to help with, email Karl. He’s easier to talk to than us geeks.

Meanwhile we’re cracking on with our free services for the public, which are increasingly funded by this commercial work.

TheyWorkForYou recently launched a Scottish version, thanks to volunteer Mark Longair, and Matthew. More goodies in store as the Free Our Bills campaign unfolds. We’ve started a sprint to get a photo for every MP’s page. If you work for or are an MP or have copyright of a photo of one that we’re missing, then email it to us.

WhatDoTheyKnow is getting lots of polishing - the new site design that Tommy has been working on is nearly ready. Today I just turned on lots of new email alerts and RSS feeds, so you can get emailed, for example, when a new request is filed to a particular public body, or when a request is successful.

Our super ace volunteers have been busy adding public authorties to the site, and we now have 1153 in total. We’re getting a steady trickle of good requests (pretty graph) coming in. Blogs such as Blind man’s buff and confirm or deny are sorting the wheat from the chaff. Do blog about and link to any interesting requests that you see!

Other things in the works are a much needed revamp of www.mysociety.org, some interesting things on GroupsNearYou, and no doubt squillions of other things. I’ll let Matthew post up anything I’ve missed :)

Last week at the SustainIT eWell-Being Awards, we picked up an award for FixMyStreet. The judges said it was “[a]n excellent example of an independent website which empowers the general public in their dealings with their local council. It is a relatively simple application, yet highly effective and replicable.” One example the accompanying Independent supplement mentioned was “a community in Great Yarmouth which joined forces through FixMyStreet to clear their local unused railway track. The site made possible a dialogue between community members and the council’s community development worker, who organised a “clear up” day where locals could get involved with rectifying the situation, with tools, insurance and even a barbeque provided.” It’s great to see that sort of thing happening on the site, and also great to be recognised in this way.

In a spirit of celebration (though more to celebrate the endorsements the campaign has received), TheyWorkForYou now covers the Scottish Parliament - see the TheyWorkForYou news for more information.

The latest “Giving Carnival” question is being organized this month by Peter Deitz, the brains behind Social Actions.

Peter’s question: “Is person-to-person fundraising dead, or just getting started?�?”

I’ll give my brief answer. Person-to-person fundraising is either dead or slowly dying, but that could be good news. Let me explain.

We’ve all probably had some experience with person-to-person fundraising — me, I sold Girl Scout Cookies. Now, I wasn’t selling Girl Scout cookies because I deeply cared about raising money for the organization or because I was interested in sharing the story of the Girl Scouts with those whose doorbells I rang. I was in it for the badges and stuffed unicorns that I could win by selling the most boxes of cookies. Person-to-person fundraising has reached a point, I think, at which there is such commodification of an organization’s story that there is little meaning left in the actual transaction…just stuffed unicorns.

Person-to-person action, however, is a different story — and I think that’s where there is tremendous potential. Take, for instance, what’s happening on PledgeBank. Individuals create a pledge to do “something,” but must make asks of their social network (friends, family, co-workers, etc.) in order to make that “something” happen. Rather than operating via a “transactional” outlook, it’s actually necessary to tell the story of why this “something” is important. There are few drive-by fundraisers on the site — you have to interact with folks and let them know why they should sign up to this social contract with you in order to meet your pledge’s target number of signers.

Similarly, I recently chatted with David Stoker, who’s working with Ashoka’s Citizen Base Initiative. They’re addressing the problem of superficial interactions by encouraging organizations to rally a fan base of individuals who support them…much like a sports team. The analogy is lost when you start imagining people painting their faces on behalf of the Red Cross, but the idea of organizations looking to their network for more than just a donation is certainly compelling.

Don’t get me wrong — I still buy and love Girl Scout cookies. But if I had to place bets on where the future of online organizing lies, it’s on peer-to-peer action that requires interaction, that illuminates an individual’s values, and that is part of a meaningful narrative arc. Thin Mint, anyone?

We’re going to be adding lots of features and major design improvements to our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow.com in the next few weeks. One thing we want to add is little explanatory videos helping describe how to make the best request possible.

Today we’re launching the hastily named WhatDoTheyKnow Video Challenge. We want you to make short videos (max 2 mins) in which you explain in a clear and friendly way how to file successful FOI requests. We’re not expecting Hollywood production values, just a friendly face and a good explanation would do fine. If you can do funny, splendid.

Instructions:
1. Record your vid
2. Upload to your video hosting venue of choice
3. Post the link as a comment to this post

We’ll send out a coveted mySociety hoodie to anyone who makes anything we’d seriously consider using (unless bazillions of people enter, of course - do you want to bankrupt us?). We don’t sell our coveted mySociety hoodies, they’re only for people who’ve done something useful for mySociety so they’ll mark you out as a pillar of the community the first time you walk down the street.

New statistics, made by Francis, for your interest and elucidation. They’ll make their way onto TheyWorkForYou shortly.

I’ve had the good fortune to talk with a few folks over the past several days who have echoed many of the things that we’ve been learning at PledgeBank over the past several months and years, and I thought I’d share…

First, I chatted yesterday with Jason Dick, who blogs at A Small Change. The blog focuses on nonprofit fundraising, and in our conversation we chatted about the tendency of nonprofits to be more than a bit behind the curve when it comes to adoption of new ideas/technologies…but that’s old news. We also chatted about the organizations that have decided to take a bit of a chance on online fundraising, and that have done some incredible things. We’ve seen the same thing happen at PledgeBank — a small organization (or a not-yet-formed organization) trusts its supporters enough to put some modicum of responsibility in their hands, and gets a tremendous response.

I also chatted yesterday with Peter Dietz of Social Actions and the impressive lot behind the Social Actions Mashup (selected as a finalist in the NetSquared competition, btw). There was great conversation about the value in aggregating information, what the nonprofit sector can gain from the syndication of social actions, and how we can all work together to create more ways for more people to do more good. Really.

Finally, I had the pleasure of reconnecting with an old friend, Susannah Cowden, who is now working with Be the Change. As an organization that’s still forming and growing, there’s significant pressure to both be different and be innovative — I hear the same struggle from a lot of organizations in the U.S. While there are many folks who have every intention of trusting their supporters to act on their behalf and equipping them with the tools to do so, there are very few who actually do it.

I wanted to capture these conversations because these themes are not at all unique. We all know that nonprofits move slowly when it comes to technology. We all know that those willing to take a chance are, more often than not, rewarded. And we all know that there’s a delicate balance between controlling your organization’s message (especially if your tax status is 501(c)3 in the U.S.) and empowering your organization’s members.

What I think these conversations illuminated for me is the need for someone to cut through all of these lessons and to find ways to make real stuff happen, with real impact. That’s what mySociety is about: giving people “simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.” And (I hope) that’s what PledgeBank enables. Holler (heather at pledgebank dot com) if you’re interested in working together to create a larger platform for collective community action.

mySociety has never run a campaign before today. And we’re not sure anyone’s ever run a campaign featuring a charismatic duck-billed platypus escaping from under the closing jaws of a Parliamentary portcullis.

Update 15.34 25/03/2008
Conservative Party leader David Cameron has just endorsed the campaign in this video.

Update 17.14 25/03/2008
Now kind words from techy Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone.

Update 11.38 1/04/2008
We’ve just recieved this fantastic endorsement from Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats:

“Parliament belongs to the people. It’s time to open it up so people can find out what’s going on. mySociety has done a brilliant job in recent years in doing that - and it’s time to take this project to the next level and get information about the laws Parliament passes into the public domain.

“It takes a new MP months to figure out how the tortuous bills procedures work - so how we expect the voters to know what’s going on, I have no idea. The changes MySociety are calling for are vital so that every MP is fully accountable for the decisions they take on behalf of their constituents.

“I fully support the Free our Bills campaign, and will do all I can in Parliament to win this battle.”

Thanks Nick!

Well, I doubt that this will end the mashup trend going on out in the interwebs, but I thought folks might be interested in seeing this…

NetSquared (based in the U.S.) has launched their newest summer contest, the N2Y3 (that’s NetSquared Year Three) Mashup Challenge. You can see the 100+ projects that have been submitted here. One of mySociety’s projects, PledgeBank, is featured in one of the submissions: Social Actions. OK, the name isn’t super-sexy. But the idea is. Peter Deitz is developing a way to lead any given user (an individual or an organization) through the process of selecting a social action platform. Do you want to raise money? Do you need to integrate with a specific CRM? Do you need an online donation processing tool? Do you need a widget for your site? This mashup with combine 29+ (the list keeps growing) “action” tools (including PledgeBank) in that wizard, helping the average Joe or Jane figure out which tool would work best for them.

Of course, in order to move forward in the competition for mentoring and money, Peter needs your vote. To vote for this mashup (and at least four more — NetSquared is smarter than to just let everyone vote for one), just create a free account on the site and add at least five projects to your ballot. There are some really cool ones out there, so browse around a bit. The polls opened on Monday at 8am PST, and they will be closing on Friday at 5pm PST. The 20 mashup proposals with the most votes will attend the annual NetSquared Conference in San Jose, May 27 & 28, 2008. During the conference, the mashup creators will have a chance to pitch their projects to funders, foundations, and fellow nonprofit tech professionals.

As they say in Chicago, vote early and vote often!