mySociety blog

Image by Yi-tao 'Timo' Lee, used with thanks.

Just like the famous Yellow Pages ad, FixMyTransport is not only there for the nasty things in life.

Quite late in FixMyTransport’s development, we realised that praise is a form of feedback and that this channel ought to be open to our users, too – that’s why on every page for a stop or a route, you’ll see a stonking great button inviting you to ‘say something nice’ – here’s an example: a station manager giving the type of good service that gladdens the heart.

There’s also a little love for Pulborough station, nice words for Brighton’s well-informed station staff, an example of a very accommodating bus driver, and a comment that makes me want to take the 37 bus to Clapham Junction right now.

We haven’t really stressed this side of FixMyTransport, so we’re really glad to see people finding it for themselves and putting it to good use. If you encounter particularly excellent service on your next journey, and you want to spread the love too, just remember the big blue button. We’re sure the operators will be very glad to hear from you.

So. Yesterday we officially launched FixMyTransport, a site that has been in ‘quiet beta’ for a few weeks. Not such a big event, you might think – after all, the site has been open for public use; the only difference was that we were announcing it.

I think we’ve all been gratifyingly taken aback by just how much use the site has seen in the last 24 hours. Thanks to mentions in some of the mainstream press, but equally because of a veritable outpouring of tweets and retweets, word spread quickly. We experienced a 550% rise in visitor numbers (the servers took it in their stride, we are glad to say). Over the course of the day, the number of reports on the site doubled, with more than 70 totally new campaigns being created and many more problems being sent to operators. With each report came more tweets, more blog posts and more users signing up to campaigns.

We’re seeing the idea we worked on become a reality, and that’s both exciting and full of surprises. We knew what we would use such a site for, but we had no idea which issues would most motivate our users (at the latest reckoning, it’s poor air conditioning, delays, and, above all, a lack of decent information).

If you haven’t had a chance to see what FixMyTransport is all about yet, take a look at some of these examples:

• A passenger who has to travel west when she wants to go east
• What sounds like a complete no-brainer of a suggestion
• A sensible placatory move Virgin could extend to delayed passengers
• A call for longer commuter trains

Many of these examples see users (not just the operators, but ordinary people) who know a lot more than we do about public transport in this country weighing in with useful insights, which is fantastic.

Don’t forget you can search your local region for reports. If you find one you agree with, lending your support is as easy as clicking a single button, and then spreading the word with a tweet, a Facebook status or however you see fit.

Excuse the puns – they are hard to avoid – but we have the sense that we’re at the beginning of a very exciting journey here. And we’re sure we’re going to enjoy the ride. Thanks to everyone who’s come on board so far.

Everyone at mySociety is quite bubbling with excitement at the news that we’re today officially launching FixMyTransport.com , mySociety’s first new core charitable website since WhatDoTheyKnow launched in 2008. We’ve never before launched a site that took so much work to build, or that contained so much data.

What is it for?

FixMyTransport has two goals – one in your face, and the other more subtle.

The first goal, as the site’s name suggests, is to help people get common public transport problems resolved. We’re talking broken ticket machines, gates that should be open and stations without stair-free access. We’ll help by dramatically lowering the barrier to working out who’s responsible, and getting a problem report sent to them – a task that would have been impossible without the help of volunteers who gathered a huge number of operator email addresses for us. Consequently the service works everywhere in Great Britain, our database has over 300,000 stops and routes for train, tube, tram, bus, coach and ferry.

The second goal – the subtle one – is to see if it is possible to use the internet to coax non-activist, non-political people into their first taste of micro-activism. Whilst the site intentionally doesn’t contain any language about campaigning or democracy, we encourage and provide tools to facilitate the gathering of supporters, the emailing of local media, the posting of photos of problems, and the general application of pressure where it is needed. We also make problem reports and correspondence between operators and users public, which we have frequently seen create positive pressure when used on sister sites FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow.

Who made it?

FixMyTransport was largely built by one remarkable coder – Louise Crow, who started as a volunteer and who is now one of our longest serving core developers. She spent 18 months coding the site almost entirely by herself, wrestling with truly tortuous data problems and collaborating with Birmingham’s fantastic SuperCool design to make it look lovely (you should hire them, they’re great).  She also tolerated my ‘aspirational scattergun’ school of project management with remarkable good humour. She really is the king of transport coding.

Credit must also go to mySociety core dev Dave Whiteland, who made the Facebook integration work, despite not having an account himself!

Why is it dedicated to Angie Martin?

Angie Martin was a mySociety coder for an all-too-brief period before she succumbed to cancer at a devastatingly early age. We’re dedicating this site to her in remembrance of a great, self taught perl monger who should still be here.

We’ll be posting further blog posts about the development process, the data challenges, and the overall project philosophy. In the mean time, please keep arms and legs inside the carriage – FixMyTransport is just about to depart.

We had a complaint that FixMyStreet maps weren’t displaying on someone’s computer. We hadn’t had any other complaints, and we quickly narrowed it down to the fact that the person was on the internet using a tethered T-Mobile phone.

T-Mobile (and Orange, and quite possibly others) are injecting JavaScript and altering content served over their networks. Their reason for doing this, according to their websites (T-Mobile, Orange), is to compress images and video sent to your browser, so as to speed up your browsing. Seeing it in action, they also inline some CSS and JavaScript, though not all, and remove comments from external files.

However, their implementation breaks things. In this particular instance, the T-Mobile JavaScript comment stripper appears to be searching for “/*” and “*/” and removing everything inbetween. This might work in most cases; however in the jQuery library, we find a string containing “*/*”, and later down the file, another string containing “*/*”. T-Mobile remove everything between the things it thinks are comment markers, even though they’re actually contained within strings, causing the jQuery library to be invalid JavaScript and stopping anything using jQuery from running.

Their decision to inline lots of the CSS also seems a bit odd – sure, on a mobile this might be quicker, but even ignoring tethering nowadays plenty of mobiles have caches too and having the CSS download once and be cached would seem better than adding weight to every page download. But I’m sure they’ve studied their decision there, and it doesn’t make any difference to the actual browsing, as opposed to the comment removal.

To turn off this feature on your mobile phone or broadband, visit accelerator.t-mobile.co.uk or accelerator.orange.co.uk on your connection and pick the relevant option – if anyone knows of similar on other networks, do leave updates in the comments.

From a FixMyStreet point of view – whilst FixMyStreet functions just fine without JavaScript, I had made the (perhaps incorrect) decision to put the map inside a <noscript> element, to prevent a flash of map-oddity as the JavaScript map overlaid the non-JS one. However, this meant in this circumstance the map did not work, as JavaScript was enabled, but jQuery was unable to be loaded. I haven’t decided whether to change this behaviour yet; obviously it would help people in this situation as the map would still display and function as it does for all those without JavaScript, but for those with JavaScript it does look a bit jarring as the page loads. Any suggestions on a better approach welcome :)

Thanks everyone who’s turned up so far for a drink and a chat at our monthly pub meets. The next one is on Wednesday the 17th, again at the Counting House pub. You are invited!

If you’d like to tweet about the night, or put photos on Instagram or Flickr, you can use the hashtag #mysocial.

7.30, Wednesday 17th August at the Counting House
50 Cornhill
London
EC3V 3PD

Map here. The nearest Underground stations are Monument and Bank.

Back in November 2006 we launched Number 10’s petitions website. We were pretty proud of the usability-centred site we built – we can still lay a pretty good claim to it being one of the biggest democracy sites (measured in terms of people transacting) that the world’s ever seen.

Over 12 million signatures had been added to petitions by the time the site was switched off after the 2010 general election. We were particularly proud of developing a system that was highly load-tolerant: we once survived over 20,000 people signing within a single hour, all whilst running on a pair of cheap little servers. That performance on so little hardware was down to the raw brilliance represented by a coding team made up of Francis Irving, Matthew Somerville, and the late, great Chris Lightfoot.

We’re also pleased that the popularity of the site led to the irresistible rise of the belief that the public should be able to petition the government via the internet. So even though our site was mothballed, Parliament and DirectGov have taken over the idea, and the commitment has been upped a notch, from ‘we’ll send a reply’ to ‘we’ll talk about it’. To be clear, we are not, nor have ever been a community interested in replacing representative democracy with direct democracy, but anything that can squeeze any drop of change from Parliament is worth a small celebration.

What’s most pleasing, though, is that we’ve been able to take the open source code built for Number 10, improve and expand upon it to develop a hosted petitions service for local councils around the country, or the rest of the world. And this is where we found the most important lesson for us: local petitions can be awesome, and despite the much smaller numbers of signatories involved, we’ve been more widely and frequently impressed by local petitions and responses than at the more glamorous national level. We’re particular fans of Hounslow Borough Council who have given positive and detailed feedback on all sorts of genuine local issues, as well as working hard to let local residents know that the service exists.

Just recently we launched a site to make it really easy to find local council petition websites, because there are hundreds hidden away (we built some; most are supplied by other vendors). If we could see anything result from today’s huge explosion of interest in online petitions, it would be that people might start to look local, and explore what petitions in their community could mean.

If you’ve visited our parliamentary site TheyWorkForYou.com, you’ll have noticed that on each MP’s page there is a short summary of his or her voting record on various key issues.

These issues have always been carefully chosen to give a simple but neutral top-line view of each MP’s voting activity. Judging by Twitter, they’re a fairly popular part of the site, too.

There’s way, way more tedious complexity behind producing these little summaries than you might think, and due to a lack of appropriately skilled people in our team over the last year we had let our vote analyses get a bit behind the times. If you’re really interested you can read about why authoring these things in such a scrupulously balanced way is so time consuming here.

We’re posting today to tell you that we have recruited a pair of excellent new part-time voting analysts, David and Ambreen, and they have recently produced the first of a new generation of voting summaries.

The first shows how each MP has voted on increasing the rate of VAT, and second on the recent changes to university tuition fees. We have also increased the number of votes which feed into the EU integration policy to bring it more up to date.

To see this new data, just pop along to TheyWorkForYou’s home page, stick in your postcode, and check out your own MPs’ page. Then, if you want to be made aware as soon as we’ve published the next analyses, please follow our new TheyWorkForYou Twitter account.

Lastly, I just want to say thank you to the vote analysts Ambreen and David, to senior developer Matthew and to uber-volunteer Richard Taylor for kicking this vital part of TheyWorkForYou back into top gear.

Image by European Parliament.

Last month’s pubmeet was fun, but it was rather crowded, so we’re moving venues. This month, our chosen pub is the Counting House, which is cavernous as well as rather beautiful. Please do join us for a drink, to ask questions or suggest new ideas – or just for a chat.

If you’d like to tweet about the night, or put photos on Instagram or Flickr, you can use the hashtag #mysocial to make sure that others find ‘em.

7.30, Wednesday 20th July at the Counting House
50 Cornhill
London
EC3V 3PD

Map here. The nearest Underground stations are Monument and Bank.

This post explains how various aspects of the new FixMyStreet maps work, including how we supply our own OS StreetView tile server and how the maps work without JavaScript.

Progressive enhancement

During our work on FiksGataMi (the Norwegian version of FixMyStreet) with NUUG, we factored out the map code (for the Perlmongers among you, it’s now using Module::Pluggable to pick the required map) as FiksGataMi was going to be using OpenStreetMap, and we had plans to improve our own mapping too. Moving to OpenLayers rather than continuing to use our own slippy map JavaScript dating from 2006 was an obvious decision for FiksGataMi (and then FixMyStreet), but FixMyStreet maps have always been usable without JavaScript, utilising the ancient HTML technology of image maps to provide the same functionality, and we wanted to maintain that level of universality with OpenLayers. Thankfully, this isn’t hard to do – simply outputting the relevant tiles and pins as part of the HTML, allowing latitude/longitude/zoom to be passed as query parameters, and a bit of maths to convert image map tile clicks to the actual latitude/longitude selected. So if you’re on a slow connection, or for whatever reason don’t get the OpenLayers JavaScript in some way, the maps on FixMyStreet should still work fine. I’m not really aware of many people who use OpenLayers that do this (or indeed any JavaScript mapping API), and I hope to encourage more to do so by this example.

Zooming

We investigated many different maps, and as I wrote in my previous blog post, we decided upon a combination of OS StreetView and Bing Maps’ OS layer as the best solution for the site. The specific OpenLayers code for this (which you can see in map-bing-ol.js is not complicated (as long as you don’t leave in superfluous commas breaking the site in IE6!) – overriding the getURL function and returning appropriate tile URLs based upon the zoom level. OpenLayers 2.11 (due out soon) will make using Bing tiles even easier, with its own seamless handling of them, as opposed to my slight bodge with regard to attribution (I’m displaying all the relevant copyright statements, rather than just the one for the appropriate location and zoom level which the new OpenLayers will do for you). I also had to tweak bits of the OpenLayers map initialisation so that I could restrict the zoom levels of the reporting map, something which again I believe is made easier in 2.11.

OpenStreetMap

Having pluggable maps makes it easy to change them if necessary – and it also means that for those who wish to use it, we can provide an OpenStreetMap version of FixMyStreet. This works by noticing the hostname and overriding the map class being asked for; everything necessary to the map handling is contained within the module, so the rest of the site can just carry on without realising anything is different.

OS StreetView tile server

Things started to get a bit tricky when it came to being ready for production. In development, I had been using http://os.openstreetmap.org/ (a service hosted on OpenStreetMap’s development server) as my StreetView tile server, but I did not feel that I could use it for the live site – OpenStreetMap rightly make no reliability claims for it, it has a few rendering issues, and we would probably be having quite a bit of traffic which was not really fair to pass on to the service. I wanted my own version that I had control over, but then had a sinking feeling that I’d have to wait a month for something to process all the OS TIFF files (each one a 5km square) into millions and millions of PNG tiles. But after many diversions and dead ends, and with thanks to a variety of helpful web pages and people (Andrew Larcombe’s guide to his similar install was helpful), I came up with the following working on-demand set-up, with no pre-seeding necessary, which I’m documenting in case it might be useful to someone else.

Requests come in to our tile server at tilma.mysociety.org, in standard OSM/Google tile URL format (e.g. http://tilma.mysociety.org/sv/16/32422/21504.png. Apache passes them on to TileCache, which is set up to cache as GoogleDisk (ie. in the same format as the URLs) and to pass on queries as WMS internally to MapServer using this layer:

[sv]
type=WMS
url=path/to/mapserv.fcgi?map=os.map&
layers=streetview
tms_type=google
spherical_mercator=true

MapServer is set up with a Shapefile (generated by gdaltindex) pointing at the OS source TIFF and TFW files, meaning it can map tile requests to the relevant bits of the TIFF files quickly and return the correct tile (view MapServer’s configuration – our tileserver is so old, this is still in CVS). The OUTPUTFORMAT section at the top is to make sure the tiles returned are anti-aliased (at one point, I thought I had a choice between waiting for tiles to be prerendered anti-aliased, or going live with working but jaggedy tiles – thankfully I persevered until it all worked :) ).

Other benefits of OpenLayers

As you drag the map around, you want the pins to update – the original OpenLayers code I wrote used the Markers layer to display the pins, which has the benefit of being simple, but doesn’t fit in with the more advanced OpenLayers concepts. Once this was switched to a Vector layer, it now has access to the BBOX strategy, which just needs a URL that can take in a bounding box and return the relevant data. I created a subclass of OpenLayers.Format.JSON, so that the server can return data for the left hand text columns, as well as the relevant pins for the map itself.

Lastly, using OpenLayers made adding KML overlays for wards trivial and made those pages of the site much nicer. The code for displaying an area from MaPit is as follows:

    if ( fixmystreet.area ) {
        var area = new OpenLayers.Layer.Vector("KML", {
            strategies: [ new OpenLayers.Strategy.Fixed() ],
            protocol: new OpenLayers.Protocol.HTTP({
                url: "/mapit/area/" + fixmystreet.area + ".kml?simplify_tolerance=0.0001",
                format: new OpenLayers.Format.KML()
            })
        });
        fixmystreet.map.addLayer(area);
        area.events.register('loadend', null, function(a,b,c) {
            var bounds = area.getDataExtent();
            if (bounds) { fixmystreet.map.zoomToExtent( bounds ); }
        });
    }

Note that also shows a new feature of MaPit – being able to ask for a simplified KML file, which will be smaller and quicker (though of course less accurate) than the full boundary.

Last week, FixMyStreet gained a number of new features that we hope you will find useful.

Stroud on FixMyStreet

Birmingham on FixMyStreet

Firstly, we’ve thrown away our old maps and replaced them with new, shiny, zoomable maps. This should make it easier for people to find and report problems, especially in sparser locations. We’re using the OS StreetView layer (hosted internally) when zoomed in, reverting to Bing Maps’ Ordnance Survey layer when zoomed out, as we felt this provided the best combination for reporting problems. In urban areas, you can still see individual houses, whilst in more rural areas the map with footpaths and other such features is probably of more use. FixMyStreet tries to guess initially which map would be most appropriate based upon population density, meaning a search for Stroud looks a bit different from that for Birmingham.

FixMyStreet with OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap fans, don’t worry – as part of our mapping technology upgrade, you can now use osm.fixmystreet.com to access your favourite mapping instead.

Secondly, we now have user accounts. We’ve rolled these out alongside our current system of email confirmation, and it’s up to you which you use when reporting a problem or leaving an update. This means that those who come to the site one time only to report a pothole can continue to do so quickly, but have the option of an account if they want. Having an account means you no longer have to confirm reports and updates by email, and you have access to a page listing all the reports you’ve made through FixMyStreet, and showing these reports on a (obviously new and shiny) summary map.

Adur District Council reports

Other improvements include a much nicer All Reports section, so you can see all reports to Adur District Council on a map, paginated and with the boundary of the council marked – and individual wards of councils now each have their own pages too.

I’ll follow up this post with another, more technical, look at the maps and how they work, for anyone who’s interested :)

Local petitions can be highly effective, and we think that making them easier to create is in the public interest. Many councils have petitions facilities buried deep within their websites,  most often, very deeply. In fact it brings to mind Douglas Adams’ quote about important council documents being “on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’”.

Our most recent mini-project is an attempt to make it as easy as possible to find your local council’s e-petitioning site, if they have one. PetitionYourCouncil.com (you’ll notice we stuck to our tried and tested format for site names, there) is a way of finding every council e-petitioning website we know about.

Our original motivation for building the site was that we, along with other suppliers, have supplied online e-petitioning sites to numerous councils ourselves – it’s one of the ways in which we fund our charitable activities. Having delivered these sites, we later noticed that many of them are left under-used and in some cases, not used at all: only because people don’t know about them. We hate to think of councils spending money on a splendid resource that could be improving democratic processes for their citizens – and those citizens never knowing that they exist. In particular, we owe Dave Briggs thanks for pushing us into action with this blog post.

And yes, in case you’re wondering, PetitionYourCouncil links to every council petitions site, not just the ones we made.

The site was built by mySociety developer Edmund von der Burg using Django, jQuery, Google maps and Mapit, and like most mySociety projects, it’s open source. There’s a bit more detail on the About page. Please do try it out, and let us know what you think.

Delayed trains by Glenn Scott, used under the Creative Commons licence, with thanks.

It’s been a while since we updated you on the progress of our next major project, FixMyTransport, but we’re still working hard behind the scenes. As you may recall, FixMyTransport will deal with public transport problems – delayed trains, vandalised stations, overcrowded buses, you name it. It’ll put problems in the public arena, while also reporting them directly to the relevant transport operator. Read more about the project here.

We will shortly be arriving at our final destination

Things are going to get exciting very soon. As launch date approaches, we’ll be starting a closed beta (mid July), rapidly followed by a full open public beta launch (end of July). During the closed beta we want to get as much feedback as possible from future users of the site, as well as pressure groups, transport operators, and anyone else who has anything valuable to contribute.

If you would like to be invited to beta test, and weren’t one of our alpha testers, please email us on team@fixmytransport.com. Alpha testers will, of course, be invited to test again.

Mind the (data) gaps

We got extremely useful feedback from our alpha testers, and a wealth of crowdsourced data from our community. Thanks to their efforts we now have contact details for the operators of about 50% of the routes in the UK. However, this leaves a lot of operators where we don’t know how to get in touch.

We really need your help to get them! If you can spare a few minutes, visit our spreadsheet and see if you can fill in any of the missing details.

The more contact details we can get hold of, the better experience FixMyTransport will offer to our users. As well as publishing passengers’ reports on the site, FixMyTransport sends them directly to the operators too, helping to get the issue fixed.

So, we especially need the email addresses for operators’ customer services departments. Finding these may be as simple as visiting the operators’ websites, or it may require a bit of sleuth-work on your part.  If advanced Googling gets you nowhere, we’ve found that simply phoning head office can get results.

Incidentally, the main operators are near the top of the sheet – those are the ones that will benefit the most users, although obviously the nearer completion we get, the better.

You’ll notice that the spreadsheet now includes a non-obligatory column for your name: this is to offer a small incentive. If you want to, tag your entries and at the end we’ll be offering goodies to the top contributors. Depending on your preference, this might be one of our highly sought-after mySociety hooded tops (they’re snuggly!), or a chance to become more involved in the project.

Those who helped in the first iteration, please note that although this sheet looks different, your details have been retained and indeed have been extremely useful as we build the site. Also -  if  you have already been a major contributor during our previous rounds of testing and data collecting, please holler so that we can give you proper credit.

Hold tight, please

Not long now… we hope you’re as excited as we are.

Transparent screen, by Kathy McLeod, used under the Creative Commons licence, with thanks.

At mySociety we like transparency – it’s baked into most of our projects.

TheyWorkForYou attempts to make it easier to find out what your MP has been doing in Parliament. WhatDoTheyKnow tries to make it easier to find out what’s going on inside other public bodies. FixMyStreet and the upcoming FixMyTransport also use transparency to help get problems resolved.

We think transparency is a good thing for many reasons, but one of its rarely mentioned virtues is how valuable transparency can be for the people within the organisations which are transparent.

Transparency can be useful because it means people outside an organisation can make critical, constructive suggestions about how you can improve, and it lowers the odds that people in one part of your own organisation will be ignorant of the activities of people in other parts.

Research

To that end we commissioned Tobias Escher of the Oxford Internet Institute to conduct detailed analysis into two of our major websites – TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

We were not highly prescriptive in our instructions, and we certainly didn’t ask Tobias to ‘discover’ pre-determined findings. All we did was ask Tobias to find out who was coming to the sites, what they were doing, and whether or not the sites could be considered to be succeeding.  We didn’t do it for a PR stunt:  we did it so we could learn from our mistakes, and so that we could share those learnings with others who might benefit.

His detailed, quantitative analysis holds the sites up to mySociety’s own stated aims, for the first time. And we’ve published both documents, in full, below.

Swings and Roundabouts

It was great to discover that we have, indeed, attained some of our goals by running these sites. For example, one of the reasons we set up TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem was to make representatives accessible to people who were newcomers to the democratic process. It was therefore heartening to read that 60% of visitors to TheyWorkForYou had never previously looked up who represents them, and two in five users of WriteToThem have never before contacted one of their political representatives.

But, as you would expect with any properly neutral evaluation, it’s not all good news. Our sites aim to reach a wide range of people, but compared to the average  British internet user, WriteToThem users are twice as likely to have a higher degree and a higher income. It also seems that users are disproportionately male, white, and over 35. These figures and many more are available within these highly readable papers – Tobias did a terrific job in gathering and analysing a huge amount of data, and then making it easy to understand.

Stories

These reports are rich with data, from how visitor numbers boomed during the MPs’ expenses scandal to which MPs most people sign up to receive alerts about. You can also read how a budget airline almost brought a site to its knees in 2007; what part Joanna Lumley plays in our history; and how many visits to TheyWorkForYou actually come from within Parliament itself.

TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem have inspired many people around the world to set up similar (and not so similar) sites inspired by the vision of using the Internet to lower barriers to democracy. However, until now we’ve never seen a really clear-eyed assessment of what seems to work, and what doesn’t.

If you’re at all interested in using the Internet to engage people with democratic systems, Tobias Escher’s excellent research papers will make a compelling read. Thank you Toby!

The reports

Download Tobias Escher’s research report on WriteToThem.com

or TheyWorkForYou research report by Tobias Escher

…and do come back and tell us what you found interesting.

PS

We hope to publish two evaluation reports like this at the start of each new year from now on. Next year’s sites will probably be FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow. Do get in touch if you’d like to input!

Image by Tim Dobson

Don’t forget the mySociety pub meet this Thursday. Hope to see you there! If you need to identify us, we’ll be the ones wearing very attractive, high-fashion mySociety hoodies.

Marquess of Anglesey, image from www.themarquess.co.uk

Questions to ask us? Fantastic ideas for what we should be doing next? Thinking about joining our team of volunteers? Or perhaps you just like a drink in the company of exceptionally nice people.

We’re reviving the monthly mySociety London pub meet (hoorah!) and if you can make it, we’d very much like to see you there.

When? Thursday the 16th of June from 7.30 onwards

Where? Marquess of Anglesey, 39 Bow Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7AU Google map

And if you’re in or around Oxford the night before, Wednesday the 15th, you might be interested to know that our developer Louise Crow will be speaking about FixMyTransport at the Oxford Geek Night. As the project nears completion, this should be an interesting look at where the idea came from, what we hope it will do, and the challenges of building it.

TheyWorkForYou has, until now, only covered things that have already happened, be that Commons main chamber debates since 1935, Public Bill committees back to 2000, or all debates in the modern Northern Ireland Assembly.

Upcoming business

From today, we are taking the UK Parliament’s upcoming business calendar and feeding it into our database and search engine, which means some notable new features. Firstly, and most simply, you can browse what’s on today (or the next day Parliament is sitting), or 16th May. Secondly, you can easily search this data, to e.g. see if there will be something happening regarding Twickenham. And best of all, if you’re signed up for an email alert – see below for instructions – you’ll get an email about any matching future business along with the matching new Hansard data we already send. We currently send about 25,000 alerts a day, with over 65,000 email addresses signed up to over 111,000 alerts.

Mark originally wrote some code to scrape Parliament’s business papers, but this sadly proved too fragile, so we settled on Parliament’s calendar which covers most of the same information and more importantly has (mostly) machine-readable data. Duncan and I worked on this intermittently amidst our other activities, with Duncan concentrating on the importer and updating our search indexer (thanks as ever to Xapian) whilst I got on with adding and integrating the new data into the site.

New TheyWorkForYou home page

I’ve also taken the opportunity to rejig the home page (and fix the long-standing bug with popular searches that meant it was nearly always Linda Gilroy MP!) to remove the confusingly dense amount of recent links, bring it more in line with the recently refreshed Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly home pages, and provide more information to users who might not have any idea what the site covers.

Signing up for an email alert: If you want to receive an email alert on a particular person (MP, Lord, MLA or MSP), visit their page on TheyWorkForYou and follow the “Email me updates” link. If you would like alerts for a particular word or phrase, or anything else, simply do a search for what you’re after, then follow the email alert or RSS links to the right of the results page.

On Wednesday this week, mySociety’s Tom and Paul were in Southampton, competing in the Geovation finals.

Geovation is an initiative coordinated by Ordnance Survey which gives out funding to projects that help “communities address their unmet needs through the application of geographic data, skills and expertise”. When we discovered that the theme this time was “How can we improve transport in Britain?” we knew we had to enter.

As many of you will know, mySociety has been working for some time on FixMyTransport, a project for reporting problems with public transport. Taking much of what we’ve learned from FixMyStreet, we are, in the trademark mySociety way, building a website that will make the process easy, whilst hiding all the complexities out of sight.

FixMyTransport is well under way, and we’re hoping to launch shortly. But with Geovation funding, we hoped to be able to roll out an accompanying mobile application.

This is incredibly important because, after all, the best time to make a transport report is immediately you experience the problem.

mySociety has, of course, always been into maps and geodata – we use them in what we hope are fun and innovative ways across many of our sites, including (obviously) Mapumental, and (less obviously) TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. We’re also rather fond of public transport.

We also really enjoyed meeting the other contestants, particularly Cyclestreets whose project looks like it will be one to watch.

At the end of the day, we were delighted to learn that we had been awarded £27,000 to develop a simple, intuitive, cross-platform mobile application for FixMyTransport. We can’t wait to get started. We really believe it’s going to be of real benefit to public transport users across the UK (and possibly further, given the open-source nature of all our work).

If you’d like to stay up to date with FixMyTransport as we build and launch it, you might want to be one of the very first to “like” our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

We’re writing this post today because we’ve made a mistake. It’s not a mistake that will matter to many people, but because (rightly) our accounts are public, anyone looking at those that we just filed this week will see that we’ve admitted we made some mistakes in previous accounts.

It’s not a very exciting mistake – no money has been lost or misused – but we made some previous declarations about how money was accounted for inside mySociety that were wrong. And in the interests of complete transparency, we’ve written this post to explain how.

Our structure

First off, it is probably worth explaining that mySociety is a project run by the charity UKCOD. UKCOD runs all of the not for profit sites that you see and use under the mySociety umbrella.

In order to fund the development and support of these not for profit sites we carry out commercial work from which we make profit. This commercial work is carried out by mySociety Ltd – a commercial trading company that is wholly owned by UKCOD.

The latest accounts

Yesterday UKCOD and mySociety Ltd submitted their accounts to Companies House (and, for UKCOD, to the Charity Commission) for the financial year ending 31st March 2010.

Anyone reading our accounts would notice two important points:

1) Both sets of accounts were several months late
2) In both sets of accounts the figures for the previous financial year 2008/09 have been restated, and a note has been added to the accounts which states for UKCOD:

Which leads to these questions:

1) Is the financial health of UKCOD/mySociety worse than previously reported?

2) Why are the accounts so late?

3) What does the adjustment note mean?

The answer to 1) is no, absolutely not – see below for more detail.

The answer to 2) is quite simply that discovering the errors that led to us writing the adjustment note resulted in a lot of extra work having to be carried out in order to ensure that the accounts are correct and the prior years are appropriately restated.

The answer to 3) is the next section.

Okay, so what does the adjustment note mean?

mySociety Ltd, our commercial arm, makes payments to the charity UKCOD to pay for the commercial development work carried out by UKCOD developers. In addition it makes payments to UKCOD to cover its share of the group VAT liability. Any surplus profit it makes is donated to UKCOD to support the not for profit work.

In previous years all of the payments made from mySociety Ltd to UKCOD had erroneously been reported as donations. So, for instance in a year when mySociety Ltd had paid £20,000 for VAT, £60,000 for development time and a £30,000 donation all £110,000 had been reported as a donation. The £80,000 for VAT and development had been noted, but treated as an unpaid debt owing from mySociety Ltd to UKCOD.

This had three results:

1) The surplus of UKCOD had been overstated.
2) The profit of mySociety Ltd had been under stated (or to be more precise, the loss it made was over stated).
3) A non-existent debt was reported as existing between mySociety Ltd and UKCOD.

This was, quite simply, a mistake that should have been picked up by both ourselves and our accountants. Sorry. It is embarrassing, but it does not alter the overall financial position of UKCOD/mySociety Ltd.

So what have we done about it?

1) We have reviewed our accounts and inter-company transactions for the last three years to ensure that we correctly apportion the payments between the two organizations.

2) For mySociety Ltd we have restated the profit and loss figures for the financial year 2008/09 and the creditor position at the end of the financial year 2009. In addition we have restated the donation value from mySociety Ltd to UKCOD for the financial year 2008/09.

3) For UKCOD we have restated the surplus/deficit position for the financial year 2008/09 and the debtor position at the end of the financial year 2009. In addition we have restated the donation value from mySociety Ltd to UKCOD for the financial year 2008/09.

4) We have sought independent legal advice and engaged a second firm of accountants with a charity specialism to review these changes. On the advice of accountants we haven’t resubmitted the accounts for any prior years as the above changes are sufficient to reflect the reporting correction. There is no increase in the tax liability of mySociety Ltd for prior years as result of these restatements.

5) We have already started work on the preparation of our 2010/11 accounts to ensure that they are delivered in a much more timely manner.

So to sum up

The net financial position of UKCOD and mySociety has not changed in any way. The accounts submitted yesterday have corrected the reporting errors of prior years so that both the starting and ending financial positions of the two organizations are correctly stated.

This is a fairly long and detailed post, but as an organization that champions transparency we felt that it was important to be as open and clear as possible about what has happened.

Paul Lenz, Head of Operations and Finance
Amandeep Rehlon, UKCOD Treasurer

Note [added 06.03.12]: We have modified this blog post to remove a single word, and replace it with one more appropriate to the topic.

As well as council elections and the referendum, the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly, and Northern Ireland Assembly are holding elections this May. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, there are accompanying boundary changes, meaning this year you might be voting in a different constituency from last time.

To help people, as we’ve again had a few requests, our service from the 2010 general election is back, at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/boundaries/, just for the Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly. Our generic lookup service MaPit also provides programmatic access to these results (technical footnote).

Alongside this service, we have refreshed our Scotland and Northern Ireland front pages, to slightly better display and access the wide array of information TheyWorkForYou holds for those devolved legislatures.

Sadly the Scottish Parliament changed the format of their Official Report in mid January and we haven’t been able to parse the debates from then until its dissolution this March – hopefully we’ll be able to fix that at some point, and apologies for the inconvenience in the meantime.

There don’t appear to be any central official lists of candidates in these elections. http://www.amnesty.org.uk/content.asp?CategoryID=11993 has a PDF of all candidates in Northern Ireland; David Boothroyd has a list of Scottish Parliament candidates at http://www.election.demon.co.uk/scotcand.html. CAMRA appears to have lists for both Scotland and Wales at http://www.camra.org.uk/page.aspx?o=100278. Those were simply found while searching for candidate lists, we obviously hold no position on those organisations :)

Technical footnote: To look up the new Scottish Parliament boundaries using MaPit, provide a URL query parameter of “generation=15″ to the postcode lookup call. The Northern Ireland Assembly boundaries are aligning with the Parliamentary boundaries, so you can just perform a normal lookup and use the “WMC” result for the new boundary.

Street party photo by garryknight (flickr)

Being strictly non-partisan mySociety has no official view on Wills & Kate, but we are unashamedly Pro People Having Parties. And recently we’ve been able to work on a project with Barnet council that has helped us make more of them.

Most councils want people to be able to have a street party if they want – I mean, who’s against a party? But closing a street has costs associated with it, and there’s no point in spending that money if the ‘Street Party Committee’ is actually just one person, and the party isn’t actually going to happen.

Tackling this particular problem seemed ideally suited to PledgeBank, which exists solely to make sure there are enough people signed up to make a particular activity worthwhile.

So after some custom hackery, here’s what happens if you live in Barnet and apply to run a street party for the Royal Wedding. First, you visit this page and give your details. Then the council makes a pledge like this one, and then emails it back to the applicant. All the pledges are of the same form, and read:

“Barnet Council will arrange free public liability insurance for a street party in [Your Street name] but only if 3 or more households will get involved.”

It is then the applicant’s task to get another couple of people (or more) to sign the pledge. Once the signers exceed the threshold, the council believes the party is bona fide and starts work. Simple.

And it works! There are 24 parties currently listed that have passed the threshold, so that’s 24 streets that are already good to go. There are another 27 that may succeed or fail, depending on their organiser’s motivation.

Strangely, though, our invitations haven’t arrived yet, but, you know… they probably got lost in the post (sniff).