mySociety blog » Appeals

Bob Spink has written an Early Day Motion (EDM) that asks mySociety to add Early Day Motions to TheyWorkForYou. You can read it here.

TheyWorkForYou doesn’t currently include EDMs for a couple of reasons:

1. They’re clearly less important to what Parliament does than Bills and committees, and are way down the priorities list as a consequence. We’ve nearly finished the process of adding bill committees, but we need the help of everyone who can lend a hand to overcome the opposition of senior unelected officials to get Bills published in a way we and others can use. If you haven’t already, please join the Free Our Bills campaign.

2. We are very tightly constrained by the amount of money we have, and we barely have enough to keep the site running, let alone add every new feature requested.

3. We’re a bit wary about EDMs in general because they’re not tied to any actual power. But that’s a reason to warn and educate readers, not exclude them from the account of Parliament.

So, if you really want EDMs on TheyWorkForYou, then, there are two things you can do. The first is donate to our parent charity, UKCOD. The second is to push in every way you can to get Bills published in the way we’ve asked for. That means writing to your MP, or if you are an MP, asking the modernisation committee and the Leader’s office what they’re doing to push past internal opposition to get Bills done right.

NB. Interestingly, the internal opposition is so ill-informed that we have it in writing they they think that TheyWorkForYou already includes EDMs - doh!

Please pass this on if you have any first or second-hand contact with Technorati:

“Hello!

Can we please have an API key with a high or unlimited daily query cap so that we can help users of TheyWorkForYou to see what discussions about Parliament are going on across the web?

thanks,

Everyone at mySociety”

We’re not actually running for president, but we are up against Mr Obama in this years Top 10 Who Are Changing the World of Internet and Politics.

Can you spare us a vote, guv?

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.

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.