We won’t insist on being addressed this way, but you can now append ‘BAFTA and Emmy nominated’ to our name. We were very chuffed to be nominated for two television awards in the last month: the BAFTA for Digital Creativity in Television Craft, and the Emmy for best Digital Non-fiction Programme.
‘TV?’, you might be thinking, ‘I thought mySociety were all about digital stuff.’ Well, increasingly, of course, the lines are blurred. Television programmes come bundled with their own website, Twitter hashtag, or app. These days, TV is less about being a passive viewer, more about becoming part of an active, engaged conversation online.
Last year, we worked with Channel 4 and TV production company Tiger Aspect to create the app and the website tools that accompanied their programme about empty houses – The Great British Property Scandal. A repurposing of the software that underlies FixMyStreet, the app enabled viewers to report empty homes; the site petition amassed 119k signatures – so the audience certainly got involved.
We were, of course, delighted to have been recognised, along with C4 and Tiger Aspect. In the end, we didn’t need the space we’d hastily cleared on the mySociety mantelpiece, but as the BAFTA went to the incomparable Paralympics, we really can’t begrudge it.
And of course, if you’re a TV company looking for help with your digital tie-ins, we’re happy to help.
FixMyStreet.com has always tried to make it as simple as possible to report a street problem. When we built FixMyStreet for Councils, we wanted to simplify things for local authority employees too.
So, as well as offering the option to integrate with council back-end systems, we also put together this nifty dashboard (right – click to see full-size). It’s one of several extra features councils get when they purchase the FixMyStreet for Councils package.
What do councils need?
- At-a-glance statistics, for all kinds of reporting. Perhaps the local newspaper have asked how many potholes have been fixed this year, or internal staff need a report on which types of problem are most rapidly fixed.
The top half of the dashboard allows for this sort of analysis. The drop-down category list means you can filter the view to show one category of problem – say, fly tipping – or all of them. Results are shown across a variety of timeframes.
FixMyStreet for Councils allows councils to designate their own progress statuses, beyond our standard ‘fixed’ and ‘open’. So, in this case, the statuses include ‘in progress’, ‘planned’, ‘investigating’, etc. Each of these is shown separately.
- A realistic picture of how long it takes to deal with issues. The ‘average time to council marking as fixed’ is a great measure of just how much time it is taking to get reports resolved.
Perhaps just as important, though, is the ‘average time to first council state change’ – that could just mean the report has been acknowledged, or that its status has changed to ‘under investigation’ – but these are still valuable mileposts for keeping residents informed of progress.
- Quick access to problems, as they’re reported. At the foot of the dashboard, there are links to all problems reported within the council boundaries.
There’s an option to filter them by any of the statuses, as above.
- Access for multiple people, in different locations. The dashboard is web-based, so it can be accessed by any employee with internet access – or several at once.
- But at the same time, complete security. It’s password-protected, so it’s only accessible to those who have been granted access.
- A responsive provider. mySociety believe that the launch of new software is only the beginning of the story.
When people start using new products, they often do so in surprising ways. They often ask for features that would never have occurred to us, and indeed might never have previously occurred to them.
We will remain in active development, of the dashboard, and of FixMyStreet for Councils as a whole. We’ll be soliciting feedback, and listening to it very carefully.
The FixMyStreet for Councils dashboard is only available to councils as part of our FixMyStreet for Councils package – find out more here.
Mapumental can turn vast datasets into visual tools that everyone understands. Faced with highly complex, yet crucial data from the Fire Protection Association, we had a chance to really put our technology through its paces.
Just how quickly could fire engines reach a given postcode in case of a fire? It’s a question that’s pivotal to decisions made by both the emergency services and the insurance industry.
But previously, it has been a challenge to present the data simply, because it involves so many variables.
Every region has its own factors, each of which will impact on fire engine response time. The number of vehicles at each station, the hours during which the station is manned, and the response policy of each individual fire authority will all play a part – and that’s before you even consider how geography might affect things.
Dr. Jim Glockling is Technical Director at the Fire Protection Association and Head of the Risk Insight, Strategy and Control Authority (RISCAuthority), an organisation for the advancement of risk management within the fire and security sectors. Jim approached mySociety with this question: how could we map this crucial, yet complicated data in a way that could be understood by RISCAuthority members at a glance?
It was clearly a job for Mapumental. Our transit-time mapping software was originally built to visualise public transport journey times, but its beauty is that ‘layers’ of data can be swapped out, allowing it to be used for all kinds of purposes.
Read more about mySociety’s data visualisation services here.
Assessing a property or postcode
And here’s the result of our pilot project. The maps on the right answer the following questions (click each image to see it at full size):
How quickly could 4 fire engines get to AL10 0XR ?
How does that change if the severity of the fire just requires one fire engine?
A user inputs a postcode, and can assess exactly how quickly a fire could be tackled in that area. The different levels of severity are measured by how many response vehicles are required, and changes in this number are immediately reflected on the map.
Assessing the general area
Which areas can four fire engines get to within 9 minutes 30 seconds at midday on a Saturday?
It’s also possible to assess the region’s overall response capability, without inputting a postcode. The user sets severity levels (number of fire engines, or High Volume Pumping or Aerial Appliance (ladder) is needed), the time and day of the week.
Where can an aerial appliance get to within 15 minutes at 2am on a weekday?
The FPA tool immediately highlights the areas that are accessible within the chosen parameters, drawing on the underlying data of journey times and information such as vehicle numbers and hours of operation for each individual fire station in the region.
Simplicity itself
With RISCAuthority, we tested the concept using data from one fire authority – Hertfordshire. mySociety’s task was to create a usable, elegant web interface that was as simple as possible to use, while still giving insurers the key data they needed.
The project called on everything we knew about clean design, usability and data structures. A key part of what makes Mapumental’s data visualisation so intuitive are its sliders: this enables the user to quickly explore variables on a map.
A tool with purpose
Dr Glockling explains: “Whilst not necessarily used as a component of insurance pricing, this information helps insurers administer risk control and fire protection advice to their customers in the context of what the Fire and Rescue Services will be able to achieve on their behalf.”
The response time is just one factor that insurance surveyors will take into account when they are assessing a building. “Where response and arrival times are not coherent with protecting the viability of the business in the event of fire, additional forms of in-built protection and control might be recommended, such as the installation of sprinkler systems.”
“In the longer term it is hoped such information will impact beneficially on the annual cost of fire in the UK.”
Results
The pilot tool was well received by the FPA community, and the plan is now to work with RISCAuthority to roll it out to more fire authorities shortly, and then nationwide.
Dr Glockling explains the pilot study helped them to understand two factors:
-
Would they get buy-in from both insurers and Fire and Rescue services on the viability and usefulness of the project?
-
Was it possible to present such a massive amount of data in a format that was readily palatable to the intended audience?
He says, “Mapumental’s team displayed an immediate understanding of our requirement. Delivery was to time and the result has perfectly satisfied the de-risking ambition. The working relationships were very good throughout and we intend now to extend the pilot to full UK rollout.”
During this phase, we will be inputting still more detail to the data, including information on the types of fire engine available to each region, and the plotting of fire stations on the map.
The tool will be a valuable resource for the FPA and the insurance industry, and we really look forward to the roll-out later this year.
Mapumental specialises in visualising complex geographic data sets on intuitive, easy to use map tools. If you have a data visualisation project that will benefit from Mapumental, just get in touch. Or read more about mySociety’s data visualisation services here.
Photo by William Murphy (CC)
We’re starting the year with some really wonderful news: Google.org is granting us a fantastic $1.6m, to be spent over two years.
Clearly, this is a significant sum of money, which will really turbo-charge our efforts to build technologies to help groups like mySociety in countries around the world.
We will be using the money to provide developers with open source technologies to help them to more easily and quickly launch new civic apps and services. We will also be working with lots of other groups to promote greater knowledge and technology sharing amongst civil society groups of all kinds, especially in the accountability sector.
What’s the problem being tackled?
Currently, it can take a great deal of work to launch even relatively simple sites or apps with civic purposes, because the sector is not rich with mature, sector-specific tools and technologies. This high barrier to getting started has a bad effect on the range and strength of popular, impactful civic sites and apps online, globally.
Working with international partners we plan to develop some common, open source components that will reduce the effort required to launch new services in a broad range of areas: including accountability, legal, environmental, political, and more.
mySociety will work with local partners in various targeted regions to help those partners make the greatest possible benefit from using these new, common, collaboratively-developed open source components. And we’ll be working to help them contribute back, both in terms of shared code and shared knowledge.
The project will also develop new approaches to bringing together the global civic-technology community, so that it can collaborate more easily on new projects.
We’re really excited to see where this project will take us next – and we are very grateful to Google.org for the increased opportunities their funding brings us.
Photo by KayVee INC (CC)
What’s on your Christmas wishlist? If ‘a meaningful job’ is high on the list, then we’ve got important news for you. We’re looking for talented, passionate and diversely skilled people to join our team.
In 2013, we’ll be pushing out internationally, improving our core UK sites and doing more commercial business. And we need some more lovely, dilligent people to help us.
All the details are on our jobs page. There’s plenty of time to get your application in, so why not give it some thought over the mince pies?
Not quite for you? Then please tell your nicest friends!
Photo by Minivan Ninja (CC)
Summer may seem like a long time ago, but despite the cold outside, we’ve been looking back over our participation in Google’s Summer of Code project. It’s almost enough to warm us up!
This post is an attempt to record the process from our point of view. We hope it will be useful for other organisations considering participating next year, and for students who want to know more about how the scheme works.
What is Google Summer of Code?
It’s a programme sponsored by Google’s philanthropic arm, giving students the chance to experience real-life coding on open source software.
The scheme is open to students all over the world, who are then paired up with open source organisations like us. The students gain paid work experience and mentoring; the organisations gain willing workers and some fresh new perspectives; the world gains some more open source code to use or develop further.
Everyone’s a winner, basically.
The beginnings
2012 was our first year on the programme: once we had been accepted on the scheme, we were given two student slots – the maximum allowed for a first-time organisation.
Given mySociety’s wide suite of codebases, there were several projects that could have benefited. We listed all our ideas, and let people apply for the ones they found appealing.
Goodness, there were a lot of applicants! It was very heartening to discover that there is such an enthusiastic community of young coders all around the world – even if it did take us a long time to sift through them all and make our choices.
You might remember our post back in May, when we announced that we’d made our choices. We were delighted to get working with Dominik from Germany and Chetan from India.
The project
As things turned out, our students ended up working on a project that wasn’t even on our original list: PopIt, our super-easy ‘people and positions’ software.
That’s because once we spoke to our chosen students, we realised they had the skills that could really help us forge ahead with this project – and once we discussed it with them, they were keen. So PopIt it was.
Logistics
Germany and India are a bit of a commute away, but fortunately development work can be managed remotely. We know this particularly well at mySociety: our core team work from home and are scattered across the UK.
The only difference here was the 6+ hour time difference between us and India: it was important to be rigorous about checking in at times when Chetan would be awake!
We communicated via IRC (instant chat), email, and occasionally Skype, and it all worked well.
Edmund, the team member chosen to be mentor, broke the required tasks down into big pieces so that the students would have realistic work units of several days each.
What was achieved
PopIt is primarily a tool for helping people create and run parliamentary monitoring websites (like TheyWorkForYou) with minimal coding knowledge/effort, though we anticipate that it will have many other uses too.
Our students spent the first half of the summer learning and improving the PopIt codebase. Once they were confident in it, they created their own sites using PopIt as a datasource to test the API, and, hopefully, create a valuable reference resource for the community.
Dominik added a migration tool to PopIt, which lets you upload data as a CSV. This means that you can start a site with a database of names, positions and dates at its heart – within seconds.
His test site was a professors’ database (the code is here and the site is here). Dom also wrote some helpful posts on the dev blog like this one.
Chetan created an image proxy that lets us serve images in a smart way that makes sense for APIs. His test site was for Indian representatives (here’s the code, and the site is here).
Neither site is being maintained now, which just confirms that it is harder to run a site than to start it. This is not a failing, though. The creation of these sites, along with Chetan and Dom’s feedback, helped us understand where improvements needed to be made. In the course of one summer, PopIt became much more mature.
Looking back on the Summer of Code
Edmund attended a follow-up ‘mentors’ summit’ at the Googleplex in California – he found it very helpful to compare notes with other organisations and find out what had worked best for them all, and he made some good contacts too.
Assuming we get the chance again, would we participate in 2013? Our experience was very positive, but as yet we are undecided, purely because of the fluid nature of our workflow: we don’t yet know whether time and resources will permit.
Obviously, we have enjoyed great benefits from the scheme, but that has depended on quite a bit of input from our side, and we need to be sure that we can ensure that happens again.
Edmund has compiled a list of advice, from the practical (ask students to treat the placement like a full-time job; test coding skills before acceptance) to the desirable (a weekly blog post from participants; make sure you over-estimate the time you’ll spend mentoring). If you’re thinking of participating next year, he’d be happy to pass on his tips for ensuring that you, and your assigned students, get the best out of the Google Summer of Code. Just drop him a line.
We hope friends, supporters and indeed anyone who fancies it will join us for a festive drink at the Prince Edward pub in London’s Notting Hill.
When? 7.30pm onwards, Tuesday 11th December.
Where? 73, Prince’s Square, W2 4NY. Google Map
Who? Everyone’s welcome.
Why? Come and chat about any of our projects, becoming a volunteer, new ideas you have – or just enjoy a drink.
You can add your name, and see who else is planning on coming, on our Lanyrd page.
Image (CC): Kake Pugh
Summary
mySociety is looking to recruit new trustees to help us, as we transition from being a small digital non-profit into a mature international social enterprise.
If you are interested in helping to guide one of the earliest ‘digitally native’ charities through to its next stage of growth, this may be an opportunity of interest to you.
Our mission is to discover how technology can (or cannot) help make people more powerful. As a team and a community we are driven by a desire to build tools that help people exert a little control over the world around them – especially people who have never tried to do so, and who don’t think they would succeed if they tried.
If that is a goal that motivates you in the way it motivates our staff and volunteers, we should have a conversation.
What is a trustee?
Trustees oversee charities to ensure that they are well-run, solvent, operating within the law, and making the right strategic decisions. These are unpaid roles with an ultimate legal responsibility for the charity. To understand more about what being a trustee means legally, please see this introduction from the charities commission.
mySociety is the public brand of the registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy: the positions we are advertising for today are trustees of that charity.
As a UKCOD trustee, you will advise on the organisation’s priorities, help with the approval of budgets and staffing, and assess legal matters. In concrete terms, that means attending meetings in London every three months, and dealing with the associated emails and documents – a commitment of about six hours per month.
History
Between 2003 and the present day, mySociety has built and grown a series of British democratic and civic websites and apps, including FixMyStreet.com, WhatDoTheyKnow.com, WriteToThem.com and TheyWorkForYou.com.
In the last two years our organisation has experienced a great deal of growth, with our staff tripling in number (to nearly 20) and our objectives becoming ever more international. This is largely due to major investments by groups like the Omidyar Network and the Open Society Foundation, as well as an increase in our commercial software and consultancy services, which generate about half our revenues.
Future Challenges
We have numerous challenges to face as we approach our 10th birthday, in late 2013.
- How do we balance the need to maintain and improve the quality of UK services, whilst working increasingly in other countries?
- How do we ensure that the people trying to build copies of the services we run in other countries succeed in adapting them to very different environments?
- How do we become a successful, substantial social enterprise that can drive quality improvement and higher ethical standards across the entire government IT sector?
- How do we do all this whilst ensuring that the high standards of talent – and niceness – of the people within our organisation do not slip?
What we’re looking for in trustees
mySociety is still small enough that it often needs very practical support from the trustees, such as opinions on legal matters. This means we need trustees equally comfortable with big questions and small ones.
We are interested in acquiring trustees from a range of different occupational backgrounds. If you have skills in any of the disciplines listed below, you could really help us.
- Marketing
- Campaigning and community organising
- International development
- Human resources
- Legal
- Governance structures
- Digital product development
- Finance
- Local Government
- Advertising
- Quality assurance
We also welcome applications from mySociety volunteers, whether past or present.
Timelines
We will be happy to meet people and arrange phonecalls for no-commitment discussions up to 21st December 2012. Please contact abi@mysociety.org if you would like to book in a conversation with someone who could tell you a bit more about the role.
If you would actually like to apply, please send a CV and covering letter, explaining why becoming a trustee is of interest, to abi@mysociety.org by 5th January 2012 latest.
We will conduct interviews on Monday and Tuesday 21st and 22nd January – we can arrange them in the evenings if that is necessary.
We will notify applicants of our appointment decisions on Monday 28th January.
Today sees the official launch of FixMyStreet’s open source codebase as a proper tool that we hope people will want to deploy in cities and countries around the world. It is based on FixMyStreet.com which we believe is the most usable, most mature street problem reporting tool in the world, but which is only available to British users.
We’re shouting about this launch a bit because we need your help to make the service ever better. First, we need feedback from programmers about whether we’ve got the install process right – whether it’s as easy and clear as we want it to be. And for non-coders who want to get involved, we want to ask for help with the process of translating the site’s text into different languages.
Over the years there have been many copies of FixMyStreet set up in many countries, often using the site’s original name, but always written by developers from scratch. We’re delighted to have inspired people, but all too often the people trying to build copies have stumbled as they realise just how hard it is to build a tool like this with the polish that users expect. We think that people everywhere would be better off if they could have a local FixMyStreet that was really usable, and really connected to the right people.
So we’re very happy to be able to open up a codebase that has been extensively modified in the last year, to help users around the world manage easy, successful deployments. Steps we have taken include:
- Putting the translation text into Transifex, so that non-technical translators can get started whenever they feel like it
- Developing Amazon Machine Images so people who want to tinker can get started in the minimum possible time
- Rewriting the entire codebase in order to make it a less confusing installation
- Building a global version of our MapIt political boundaries web service, so you can get going without having to wrestle administrative data out of your government before you get started.
Plus with the help of the wonderful OpenStreetMap, you can get maps without licensing hassles too.
Calling it version 1.0 is our way of saying two things. First, that the tool still has a lot of evolution left to do, and a long way to go before it is as good as we want it to become. But more ambitiously, calling it 1.0 is also our way of saying that it’s no longer just a codebase dumped into Github. It’s a real open source project, which we plan to support, and which we hope will make a real difference in the lives of ordinary people. Check it out.
We want to give a big shout out to Bytemark, the York-based hosting company who are generously sponsoring a large portion of our server space requirements. Thanks guys: as a result, mySociety sites will be more robust and more responsive than ever before.
Why is this gesture such a huge help to us? Well, to start with, our sites keep getting bigger! Yes, our websites are transactional, but most are also archives – so for example you can summon up FixMyStreet reports dating back to the site’s launch in 2007.
Of course, FixMyStreet grows each day, as more reports are submitted. So does WhatDoTheyKnow, and FixMyTransport. As for TheyWorkForYou, well, MPs keep on talking, and we keep on archiving their words.
Second, it’s incredibly important for us to have hosting from a provider who will quickly and competently respond to our requests. Bytemark have been brilliant on this front during the migration phase.
Our sites should be fast – whether you’re looking at archived content or submitting a new report. You, as a user, should never have to think about the capacity of our servers, or their load tolerance. The pages you want to view should simply be there.
The move over to higher capacity servers should help with all of these aims. Bytemark has two separate data centres, and our sites are now split across them.
If you’ve been enjoying a smooth ride on our sites just recently, you might want to thank Bytemark – although of course, the strongest sign of good hosting is that you’ll never notice a thing.
Thank you to everyone at Bytemark – your generosity is really important to us.
Image (CC): Karl-Ludwig G. Poggeman
