mySociety blog » archive for 2010

Making Parliament clearer; mySociety announces a new process for monitoring MP's votes. (Image: Monet)

mySociety is lucky enough to have a number of small donors who give us monthly donations, normally ranging from £5-£20 (if you like our work and want to support us, please do join them!). Today we’re announcing a change to TheyWorkForYou which is supported by these donations.

One of the most popular features on TheyWorkForYou is the vote analysis – the bit that tells you that your MP “voted strongly against introducing a smoking ban” and so on. These voting analyses cut through a massive wall of parliamentary opacity whilst still allowing visitors to examine the details first hand. Despite each analysis resulting in just a single line on TheyWorkForYou, each one is rather time-consuming to construct, and TheyWorkForYou has not updated them as much as our users deserve.

Thanks to our small donors we’ve now been able to commission two part time researchers, Marcus Fergusson and Stephen Young, to help add new vote analyses more regularly. We’re pleased to say that we’ve just rolled out the first new policies, covering issues relating to schools, inquests and the House of Lords. We aim to add a couple of new vote analyses a month for the foreseeable future.

We take the business of authoring analyses that are scrupulously fair and neutrally worded extremely seriously. To this end we have replaced our previously ad-hoc approach with a newly instituted process designed to ensure the maximum rigour and balance, and to ensure we focus on issues which MPs thought were important even if they were not so well covered by the media.

TheyWorkForYou’s analysis of MP’s voting positions relies on The Public Whip, a project run by Julian Todd which tracks which way MPs vote.

The new process for analysing MP’s positions works like this:

1. A list of votes in the current Parliament, ordered with the highest turnout at the top, is taken as a starting point. The turnout figure used is corrected to account for party abstentions.
2. mySociety’s researchers work down that list writing explanations in easy to read terms describing what the vote was about; they also identify other related votes on the same issue and research those too.
3. A “policy position on the issue” is then chosen against which MP’s votes are compared to determine to what extent they agree or disagree with it. Policy positions are written to be intelligible and interesting to a wide range of users and in such a way that votes to change the status quo are ultimately described on TheyWorkForYou MP pages as votes “for” that change.

We hope you find these analyses useful. Thanks to Richard Taylor for his divisions list and help with this post.

FixMyTransport probably wouldn't have helped Mr Robinson (who survived)

I must admit that I’m pretty happy to announce mySociety’s  plans to build our first major new non-comercial website since WhatDoTheyKnow.com launched in 2008. Late in 2010 we plan to launch FixMyTransport , a site focussed on connecting and empowering people who share transport problems of different kinds. The fantabulous Louise Crow will be lead developer.

Crucially, we at mySociety are under no illusions that it is an order of magnitude more difficult to get a new ticket machine in your station than it is to get your local council to fill a pothole (FixMyStreet surveys report 2371 problems fixed in the last month alone). The difficulty of achieving even minor changes to transport services and infrastructure is why we are simultaneously announcing our plan to build FixMyTransport on top of a major new back end system called Project Fosbury.

Project Fosbury is about helping people get over difficult obstacles.  It is a modular platform for breaking down a complicated civic task into pieces which can then be allocated to one or more people. So someone asking their council to change the timing on some traffic lights might be allocated the tasks of:

• Writing to their councillors
• Obtaining local policy on traffic light timings from the council
• Getting people to join a mini-campaign group
• Videoing the problem
• Sending a letter to a local newspaper

Each task will ultimately be carried out entirely within a joined up infrastructure, each module being built to mySociety’s habitually stringent rule that “it must be easy and satisfying to someone who’s never engaged politically before”. We will work to create incentive structures, peer pressure, and hopefully a sense of fun. There will be a single public home page for each mini campaign, showing recent activities on the site, as well as integrating with external social media.  We hope to repeat the FixMyStreet phenomena where some  ‘insoluble’ problems suddenly become soluble once they’re in the public domain.

Now for the credit where it is due. mySociety’s sysadmin Keith Garrett suggested FixMyTransport back in January 2008.

The actual mechanics of breaking the problem into pieces (the idea that became Project Fosbury) came from a wide discussion at our retreat, with excellent suggestions coming particularly from Richard Pope. But the more general idea that the Internet hasn’t yet produced a really good system for bringing people together to solve everyday problems (as opposed to chat, or win the US presidency) came from numerous Call for Proposals submissions, including ones from Mark W, Rob Shorrock, Peter Silverman, Mahmood Choudhury and more.

mySociety will be building this site using money donated by people like you, profits from commercial projects, and any specific funding we can raise around it. If you know of anyone or any organisation that you think might like to support FixMyTransport or Project Fosbury, please do get in touch.

When a bit of government forwards or attaches emails using Outlook, they get sent using a special, strange Microsoft email format. Up until now, WhatDoTheyKnow couldn’t decode it. You’d just see a weird attachment on the response to your Freedom of Information request, and probably not be able to do anything with it.

Peter Collingbourne got fed up with this, and luckily for us, he can code too. He forked our source code repository, and made a nice patch in his own copy of it.

He then told us about it, and I merged his changes into the main WhatDoTheyKnow code, tested them out on my laptop, then made them live. It all work perfectly first time. Peter even added the new dependency on vpim to WhatDoTheyKnow conf/packages.

Now if you go to an Outlook attachment on WhatDoTheyKnow,
such as this one you’ll just see the files, and be able to download them, and view them as HTML as normal. They’ll also get indexed by the search (although I need to do a rebuild for that for it to work with old requests).

Thanks Peter!

If you want to have a go making an improvement to a mySociety site, you can get the code for most of them from our github repositories. For some sites, there’s an INSTALL.txt file explaining how to get a development environment set up. Let us know if you do anything – even incremental improvements to installation instructions are really useful. And new, useful, features like Peter’s are even more so.

Members of the team running mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com also campaign for improvements to freedom of information law.

Volunteer John Cross has been drawing his MP’s attention to a major loophole in the UK’s Freedom of Information Act which means that a company wholly owned by one local authority is subject to the act but a company owned by two local authorities is not. John’s MP, Peter Bottomley, has been convinced that this anomaly in the law does not make sense and has submitted an Early Day Motion calling for the loophole to be closed. The EDM also highlights the fact that currently a company owned 95% or even 99.5% by a single public authority is not subject to the provisions of the act, as only companies owned 100% by a single authority are currently covered.

The text of the motion states:

“That this House notes that section 6 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with certain exceptions makes companies wholly owned by the Crown or by a single public authority subject to the Act; further notes that a company wholly owned by two or more public authorities or 95 per cent. owned by a single public authority will be outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act 2000; and calls for the closure of this loophole and for companies owned 90 per cent. or more by any number of public authorities to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.”

The motion is currently open for other MPs to sign-up to and show their support. If you would like to help increase the number of public bodies that are covered by Freedom of Information legislation please consider writing to your MP, asking them to add their name to the current signatories.

There are many situations where public authorities working together or even setting up jointly owned companies is commendable. Such arrangements can lead to savings though economies of scale and avoid duplication; we may see more such companies set up as a response to economic pressures. What is problematic though is the loss of accountability which currently occurs when public bodies come together and set up these companies without requiring them to follow the highest standards of openness, transparency and accountability.

Examples of Companies Which Would Be Made Subject to FOI if the Loophole was Closed:

• Connexions Nottinghamshire Limited – provides support services to young people and is jointly owned by Nottingham City Council and Nottinghamshire County Council.
• Coventry and Solihull Waste Disposal Company – owned two thirds by Coventry City Council and one third by Solihull MBC
• G-Mex Limited – Through its ownership of Destination Manchester Ltd and investment in Modesole Ltd, Manchester City Council has a 95% shareholding in G-Mex Limited
• Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) – this company is the official agency for the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative information about higher education.
• Manchester Airport PLC – the Manchester Airport Group is owned by the ten local authorities of Greater Manchester
• The Russell Group – is owned by, and represents 20 of the UK’s largest universities, the company’s aims as set out in documents filed on incorporation included “to influence and make representations to stakeholders and legislators”

Many housing associations, purchasing consortia, representative bodies and urban development companies are among the organisations which would be required to operate in a more transparent manner should this loophole be closed.

The Hansard Society have just published a report entitled MPs Online: Connecting with Constituents. I’m only going to talk about one part, the part that mentions the mySociety project WriteToThem in a section on MPs’ use of email.

We’re surprised and disappointed to see our methodology for collecting data on how well MPs respond to constituency mail being called “unreliable”, especially from a paper that makes a number of simple mistakes of its own in just a few lines on one page.

• On page 5, they state that WriteToThem has been “tracking responsiveness to emails via their website for three years”. Most importantly for the theme of the report, we don’t just send emails – we send faxes to a number of MPs (and other representatives) who do not accept or want messages via email.
• The figures given for survey responses in the table are backwards; 2007 and 2005′s figures should be interchanged – how could we get more survey responses than messages (again, not necessarily emails) sent? :-)
• They claim there is “no quantification of the response categories provided” – the raw data used to automatically generate these categories is given in the adjacent column (“very high” simply means a response percentage of 80% or more, for example; our code is all open source).
• We exclude MPs with very small sample sizes, and take a range of steps to make sure the data is not abused.
• We have four years of statistics now, not three; our stats for 2008 were published nearly six months ago.

The Hansard Society, to the best of my knowledge, never got in touch with us to request any clarification or ask about our data or methodology, which we would have been more than happy to supply.

mySociety Ltd, the commercial arm of the the charitable project that built TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and the 10 Downing Street e-petitions site is seeking a web developer to work onsite with a commercial project with a corporate partner in London, UK.

Skills

• World-class skills in one or more of PHP, Perl
• Substantial expertise in open source operating systems, databases, and version control
• Experience of working in corporate environments.
• Project management skills, included detailed record keeping of phased technology developments
• Java experience also desirable

Personal qualities

• Laziness, Impatience, Hubris
• Fascination with understanding how complex systems work, and satisfaction at mastering them quickly
• Self-starter, with the ability to manage your own work.
• ‘Completer-finisher’ personality, with track record of delivering projects to deadline
• Team player with strong communication skills

Benefits and Salary

• Salary £38k+
• Office in London.

Submissions by 11th January 2010. Candidates must be able to start work by 1st  February 2010. Please send your application or any questions to tom@mysociety.org including the tag msjob2 in the subject line.

In my last blog post, I explained the new service TheyWorkForYou offers to show you what constituency you will be in at the next general election. Now I’m going to show you why you shouldn’t use anything else.

The defintions of the boundaries for the forthcoming constituencies in England were originally published in The Parliamentary Constituencies (England) Order 2007 (SI 2007/1681), based on ward boundaries as they were on 12th April 2005. However, due to some local government changes since that date, The Parliamentary Constituencies (England) (Amendment) Order 2009 (SI 2009/698) was published changing the boundaries for four constituencies – Daventry, South Northamptonshire, Wells, and Somerton & Frome – to be based on the new council wards as they were on 3rd May 2007.

The forthcoming constituencies in Northern Ireland were defined in The Parliamentary Constituencies (Northern Ireland) Order 2008 (SI 2008/1486). In this, Derryaghy ward was split between two constituencies – Belfast West is given “that part of Derryaghy ward lying to the north of the Derryaghy and Lagmore townland boundary.”

All of which means that other sites that try to tell you what constituency you will be in at the election invariably get it wrong.

Both Labour and the Conservatives say that BA6 8NJ is in Wells at the next election, when it will be in Somerton & Frome. Both say that NN12 8NF will be in Daventry, when it will be in South Northamptonshire. I assume that both sites are using boundary data predating the Amendment Order from March 2009. The Conservatives also say that BT17 0XD will be in Lagan Valley when it will be in Belfast West; Labour simply say “Northern Ireland” for any Northern Irish postcode you provide.

The Liberal Democrats site currently returns no results for any postcode, which I assume is a bug :)

The /current/ boundary between Belfast West and Lagan Valley. (Image produced from the Ordnance Survey electionmap service. Image reproduced with permission of Ordnance Survey and Land and Property Services)

The official election-maps.co.uk service (from where TheyWorkForYou gets its boundary maps) returns the correct results for BA6 8NJ and NN12 8NF, but doesn’t have future boundaries for Northern Ireland. It’s not clear that it doesn’t, as searching for Lagan Valley with “future boundaries” selected returns a result, but that result is the current boundary. This can be seen from the picture on the right – as is clear from the quote I gave above, everything within Derryaghy ward north of the Lagmore/Derryaghy boundary will be in Belfast West at the next election. Plus the site doesn’t work without JavaScript.

TheyWorkForYou’s “constituency at the next election” service gives BA6 8NJ in Somerton & Frome, NN12 8NF in South Northamptonshire, and BT17 0XD in Belfast West. There is enough confusion with the changes to boundaries for everywhere except Scotland, that it is somewhat frustrating to have it compounded by sites giving incorrect information. The lack of any official service also doesn’t help.