mySociety blog » News

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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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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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!

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.

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.

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!

Some of the work we do at mySociety these days is policy related, and happens behind the scenes. I’m conscious that we haven’t been blogging here like we did in the early days, and that is partly because advice and consultancy often have to be confidential.

Two speeches, both of which mention TheyWorkForYou, were recently given by senior members of the UK’s two main opposing parties. They’re both worth reading, and will set you thinking about how much further mySociety’s work can be taken.

First a recent speech by Tom Watson MP, a Cabinet Office Minister on “Transformational Government”. He talks about the massive change we are living through, in terms of how IT can and will improve Government.

Less than a decade ago, people were just recipients of information, they got what they were given when they were given it. Today, the most successful websites are those that bring together content created by the people who use them (Tom Watson)

Second a speech by David Cameron, Leader of the Opposition, which talks a lot about open knowledge. Can local government be transformed by better information? TheyWorkForYou for local councils?

We will require local authorities to publish this information - about the services they provide, council meetings and how councillors vote - online and in a standardised format. (David Cameron)

Say hello to GroupsNearYou.com

The Short Geeky Explanation

GroupsNearYou.com is an entirely user generated API-queryable database of the location and nature of local online communities, irrespective of the platform they are hosted on. A piece of the programmable web, in short, with local community building focus. Check this lovely example of how easily the syndicated community information can be layered onto a map, for example.

The Business Problem it Solves

Do you run a site that tells people stuff about their local area? Do you suspect that there might be quite a lot of internet enabled community activity going on in local areas that you’d like to tell your users about? Use our feeds.

The Social Problem It Solves:

There’s a proven real world social value to people belonging to very local email lists and other forms of local online community. However there is no eBay or Craiglist or other market dominant player in the local online community world, instead there’s a myriad of google groups, yahoo groups, Facebook & other YASN groups, extremely old school CCed email lists, online forums and so on. As a consequence of not having one big simple place to go to find and join local groups (many of which are not even on the web for Google to find) far fewer people ever find out about and join their local online groups. GroupsNearYou.com is about getting more people to join groups, groups that are not hosted by us, and (hopefully) mainly discovering them via uses of our syndicated info on sites that aren’t run by us. It’s a piece of pure internet infrastructure, with a positive social bent.

Who did it?

Astonishingly, the project was almost entirely built by a volunteer, Richard Pope assisted in design by another brilliant volunteer Denise Wilton. Their only reward is a highly sought after mySociety Hoodie, plus the love and gratitude of all our users.

Richard has been an amazingly dedicated volunteer for mySociety and on his own projects for over two years, and deserves the reputation he is rapidly gaining as one of the world’s truly great civic minded web innovators. The project was funded by the UK’s Government’s Ministry of Justice who have been trying to run experiments of different kinds in the realm of electronic democracy. Their money will go to help improve and grow the site, rather than building it, which is a very interesting funding model in its own right. The several hundred groups already in the system are mainly added by users of WriteToThem.com

Next steps

Almost all the groups listed in the database are in the UK at the moment, and they’re all from users of our other sites. We’re interested in working with anyone who runs sites that might want to either take information out of it, or put information into it (Hello email list/social network providers!)

Anyway, it’s dead simple really, just a little brick in the internet wall, albeit one that I hope will help a few more people meet their neighbours and improve their communities.

There’s a lot left to do, but Francis Irving’s brilliant new mySociety Freedom of Information site is now live. You can file requests to central government departments (most of the them), and browse what other people have been requesting (already fascinating). It doesn’t have a name yet, nor any slick design, nor half the features we want it to have, but it works and it gets things done.

And dammit, people, that’s what mySociety’s all about. Can we explain it any better?

Google have launched a new UK politics site at google.co.uk/politics. mySociety were delighted to be asked to build a TheyWorkForYou widget for this site. There’s no doubt that this sort of modular re-purposing of our information is going to happen a lot more in the future, and it’s great to start out with the best of possible partners.

You may remember that back in 2006 mySociety published some maps showing how long it took to commute places via public transport.

We’ve just made some more which have some lovely new features we reckon you’ll probably like a lot.

If you’d like to see more maps like this in your area, please ask your local transport authority to get in touch with us, or nudge these people :)

PS As always, Francis Irving remains a genius.

Some lovely new volunteers have been working their socks off to add the Scottish Parliament to TheyWorkForYou. Yay!

Unfortunately, the server that TheyWorkForYou sits on is almost full, so we can’t launch their hard work. Boo!

TheyWorkForYou isn’t an externally funded project, and we need funding from other sources to keep it growing and improving. So if the season has filled you with generosity of spirit, why not drop us a few pennies to pay for some upgrades? Any extra beyond what we need will go into the general pot to keep mySociety running and the developers from starving.

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.”