mySociety blog » Appeals

Image by John Blackbourn, used under the Creative Commons licence, with thanks

In the nine days our Fix Before the Freeze campaign has been running, there’s been a 47% increase in reports on FixMyStreet.com. Thank you to everyone who has spread the word or remembered to use the site to get something fixed.

As you may remember, the campaign encourages you to report problems such as broken streetlights or potholes before winter comes. It’s great to see this start to happen, and we hope you’ll experience the benefits once the cold weather takes grip. Hey, you might even find that the warm glow of community spirit cuts a few quid from your fuel bills…

Meanwhile, we’re sure there are still plenty of pavements, roads and amenities that could do with a patch-up before winter. So if there’s a gap on a notice board near you, don’t forget our print-outs and resources here. How about printing out a few and leaving them in your local library, cafe, or community centre?

You may already be aware of our website FixMyStreet.com, which helps you report common street problems – such as potholes and uneven pavements – to the relevant local council. This year, we thought we’d give people a gentle nudge before winter comes.

Many of the 1,000  issues which the site deals with every week are of the sort which are far better seen to before the big freeze. Potholes only worsen with the frost, and no-one wants a dodgy streetlight once the long dark nights are here.

How to join Fix Before the Freeze

• Check for problems Will your walk home from work tonight be in the dark? Look out for areas that could be better lit or paths that might cause people to stumble in the dark.

• Report it If you see something that is better fixed before the freeze, now’s the time to let your council know. It only take a minute at FixMyStreet.com.

• Spread the word We’ve created the image above as a website icon, flier, and poster. Follow the links at the foot of this post to download them, or use the code if you’d prefer to link back. Why not put one on your blog, hand them out at work, or stick one in your window? Please spread the word among friends and family too.

• Spread the word further We’d be grateful for mentions on your preferred social media hang-out (you can use the #FB4TF hashtag).

• Keep in touch You can ‘like’ us on Facebook here, or follow us on Twitter here.

Let’s get our local communities as safe as they can be, before the cold weather hits.

Downloads

Click on each thumbnail to be taken to the actual-size resource, then right click or ctrl+click to save a copy to your hard drive.

A4 sheet of fliers to print out:

Poster to print out:

Badge for your blog or website (165×165 pixels):

(If you’d like a larger image, feel free to save the one at the top of this post).

HTML for inserting the badge onto your site without downloading – just copy and paste the below into your HTML editor:

<a href=”http://www.mysociety.org/?p=4790″ title=”Find out more about Fix Before the Freeze from FixMyStreet.com”><Img alt=”Fix Before the Freeze – report those dangerous potholes and  broken streetlights before winter hits” src=”http://www.mysociety.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/fixbeforethefreezebadge165.gif”></a>

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.

Photo from the Library of Congress

It is a cliché for any manager to say that they are proud of their team, and mildly nausea-inducing to listen to anyone who goes on about it too long. However, the purpose of this post is to argue that the world would benefit from a new kind of post-graduate Masters programme – something that is hard to do without  describing the virtues of the type of people who should come out of it. So please bear with me, and keep a sick bag to one hand.

mySociety’s core development team is very, very good. But they’re not just good at turning out code. Louise Crow, for example, has a keen eye for things that will and won’t make a difference in the offline world, as well as the skills to build virtually whatever she can think of. And the exact same thing is true of the whole coding team:  Duncan, Matthew, Edmund and Dave in the current team, plus Francis, Chris and Angie before them.

mySociety didn’t give these people their raw talent, nor the passion to be involved with projects that make a difference.   What it has given them, though, is the chance to spend a lot of time talking to each other, learning from their triumphs and their mistakes, and listening to users. This space and peer-contact made them into some of the world’s few genuine experts in the business of conceptualising and then delivering digital projects that deliver new kinds of civic and democratic benefits.

So, why am I sitting here unashamedly blowing my colleagues trumpets like this? (I don’t have these skills, after all!) Well, in order to point out that there are quite simply far too few people like this out there.

Too few experts

“Too few for what?” you may well ask. Too few for any country that wants to be a really great place to live in the 21st century, is my answer.

There is barely a not-for-profit, social enterprise or government body I can think of that wouldn’t benefit from a Duncan Parkes or a Matthew Somerville on the payroll, so long as they had the intelligence and self-discipline not to park them in the server room. Why? Because just one person with the skills, motivation and time spent learning can materially increase the amount of time that technology makes a positive contribution to almost any public or not-for-profit organisation.

What they can do for an organistion

Such people can tell the management which waves of technology are hype, and which bring real value, because they care more about results than this week’s craze, or a flashy presentation. They can build small or medium sized solutions to an organisation’s problems with their bare hands, because they’re software engineers. They can contract for larger IT solutions without getting ripped off or sold snake oil. And they can tell the top management of organisations how those organisations look to a digital native population, because they come from that world themselves.

And why they don’t

Except such experts can’t do any of these things for not-for-profit or public institutions: they can’t help because they’re not currently being employed by such bodies. There are two reasons why not, reasons which just may remind you of a chicken and an egg.

First, such institutions don’t hire this kind of expert because they don’t know what they are missing – they’re completely outside of the known frame of reference. Before you get too snarky about dumb, insular institutions, can you honestly say you would try to phone a plumber if you had never heard that they existed? Or would you just treat the water pouring through the ceiling as normal?

Second, these institutions don’t hire such experts because there just aren’t enough on the market: mySociety is basically the main fostering ground in UK for new ones, and we greedily keep hold of as many of our people as possible. Hands off my Dave!

Which leads me to the proposal, a proposal to create more such experts for public and non-profit institutions, and to make me feel less guilty about mySociety hoarding the talent that does exist.

Describing the Masters in Public Technology

The proposal is this: there should be a new Masters level course at at least one university which would take people with the raw skill and the motivation and puts them on a path to becoming experts in the impactful use of digital technologies for social purposes. Here’s how I think it might work.

In the first instance, the course would only be for people who could already code well (if all went well, we could develop a sister course for non-coders later on). Over the course of a single year it would teach its students a widely varied curriculum, covering the structure and activities of government, campaigns, NGOs and companies. It would involve dissecting more and less impactful digital services and campaigns, like biology students dissect frogs, looking for strengths and weaknesses. It would involve teaching the basics of social science methodologies, such as how to look for statistical significance, and good practice in privacy management. It would encourage good practice in User Experience design, and challenge people to think about how serious problems could be solved playfully. It would involve an entire module on explaining the dos and don’t of digital technology to less-literate decision makers. And most important, it would end with a ‘thesis’ that would entail  the construction of some meaningful tool, either alone or in collaboration with other students and external organisations.

I would hope we could get great guest lecturers on a wide range of topics. My fantasy starter for 10 would include names as varied in their disciplines as Phil Gyford, David Halpern, Martha Lane Fox, Ben Goldacre, Roz Lemieux, William Perrin, Jane McGonigal, Denise Wilton, Ethan Zuckerman, as well as lots of people from in and around mySociety itself.

What would it take?

I don’t know the first thing about how universities go about creating new courses, so having someone who knew about that step up as a volunteer would be a brilliant start!

Next, it would presumably take some money to make it worth the university’s time. I would like to think that there might be some big IT company that would see the good will to be gleaned from educating a new generation of socially minded, organisation-reforming technologists.

Third, we’d actually need a university with a strong community of programmers attached, willing and ready to do something different. It wouldn’t have to be in the UK, either, necessarily.

Then it would need a curriculum, and teaching, which I would hope mySociety could lead on, but which would doubtless best be created and taught in conjunction with real academics. We’d need some money to cover our time doing this, too.

And finally it would need some students. But my hunch is that if we do this right, the problem will probably be fending people off with sticks.

What next?

I’m genuinely not sure – I hope this post sparks some debate, and I hope it provokes some people to go “Yeah, me too”. Maybe you could tell me what I should do next?

I was just talking to someone in a local council about the fact that they’d opened up the location of 27,000 streetlights in their council area. They wanted to know if FixMyStreet could incorporate them so that problem reports could be more accurately attached.

This conversation reminded me that we’ve had an informal wish list of geodata for FixMyStreet for some time. What we need is more data that lets us send problems to the correct entity when the problem is not actually a council responsibility.

I’m just posting these up to see if anyone knows a guy who knows a girl who knows a dog who knows how to get hold of any of these datasets. In some vector data format, if possible, please!

• Canals and responsible authorities
• Supermarkets (esp car parks) and responsible companies
• Network Rail’s land
• Council owned land
• Land and roads controlled by the Highways agency
• Shopping malls
• National parks
• BT phone boxes (the original problem which inspired FixMyStreet)

So, do you know someone who might know someone who can help us improve FixMyStreet? And guess what, if we do add this to our web services, you’ll probably be able to query them too.

Ever got a problem fixed by reporting it on FixMyStreet? Written to your representative via WriteToThem? Here’s an opportunity to pay the favour forward to someone stranded on a wet Wednesday by the non-arrival of the number seven bus.

Bus Stop by Myles Noton (cc)

We’ve reached the point in FixMyTransport development where we can start asking for your help. We need to fill in the information we’ll use to report people’s transport problems to the companies that run bus and train routes. If you have five minutes to spare, please spend them adding a contact email address or two for your local bus companies to this spreadsheet:

http://bit.ly/aVZzlb

…then you can bask in the glory of a karmic balance restored*.

* Will also work if you accidentally ran over a kitten on your way to work this morning.

Screenshot from Brief Encounters

FixMyTransport is the most challenging project mySociety has ever tried to build. It’s so ambitious that we’re taking the unusual move of breaking off part of the problem and stress-testing it in the form of the new mini-site Brief Encounters, which has gone live today. It was built by Louise Crow, or Crowbot, as we know her, with design support from Dave Whiteland.

Brief Encounters is not, as the name might suggest, mySociety’s long awaited attempt at a dating site. Instead it’s a place where people can share whimsical stories about unusual things that happened them them, or other people, on public transport. We hope you’ll have a go, read some examples and then contribute your own.

You might be thinking that a whimsical story site doesn’t sound very mySocietyish – and you’d be right. Brief Encounters is actually a technology test-bed to help us crack a new design and data problem: how do you make it as easy as possible for users to pinpoint a specific bus stop, or train route, or a ferry port, as easily as possible? There are over 300,000 such beasties, and nobody has ever really tried to build an interface that makes it easy to find each one quickly and reliably.

So, what we want from you, dear readers, is three fold. We want:

1. Stories – the more hilarious or sob-inducing the better
2. Feedback on the user experience – how can we make finding a route or node easier?
3. Feedback on any data problems you find, ie “My bus stop is missing” – we’re going to have to patch our data with your help, there’s just no other way

For those of you tech minded, the project is built in Ruby and uses the NaPTAN dataset of stations, bus stops and ferry terminals, the National Public Transport Gazetteer database of towns and settlements in the UK, and the National Public Transport Data Repository of sample public transport journeys, from 2008. The first two datasets are free of charge, and the third one mySociety pays for.

Lastly, kudos must go to the hyper-imaginative Nicky Getgood who suggested we collect stories on FixMyTransport, as well as problem reports.

The two days leading up to election day are a hugely important time for less politically-obsessive voters. The parties know that a lot of people are only starting to seriously think how to vote today and tomorrow, and TheyWorkForYou saw its biggest spike ever the day before the election, way back in 2005.

This means it’s a super-important time to get trustworthy, non-partisan information in front of as many people as possible. And you can help by doing the following simple things:

1. Go to your constituency page on the TheyWorkForYou Election Quiz and take a good look at the answers. Is there anything surprising in the answers? Has anyone failed to respond who really shouldn’t? Is there anything funny in the responses? Make a couple of notes about what you think are the most interesting findings.

2. If you know the name of your local papers or radio stations, try to Google for the email or phone number of the news desk. If you don’t know the names, try sticking the name of your nearest town into a media database like this, to get a phone number or email address.

3. If possible, you should start your pitch by phoning rather than emailing. If you get a phone number for a news desk, give them a bell and say that you’re a volunteer from “The country’s largest non-partisan election information project”, and ask for the email of a specific person who might be interested in a story about what local candidates are saying.

4. Once you have an email address of a specific journalist, compose a locally specific email for them, along the following lines:

“Hi X,

I’m a resident of Z constituency, and this election I’ve been one of 6000 volunteers helping  to build an unprecedented project to get candidates across the country to go on the record, in conjunction with the website TheyWorkForYou.com. It’s a strictly non-partisan project, aimed at giving voters a really clear, spin-free view of what their candidates stand for. I’d really appreciate it if you could give it some coverage before election day.

In my constituency, N candidates have completed our survey. From this we can see some quite interesting things, namely:

* Candidate A thinks…

* Candidate B thinks…

Would you be so kind as to print a story encouraging people to check our their candidates via TheyWorkForYou.com, and mentioning some of the highlights I’ve included?

all the best,

Your name, email, phone”

5. An hour after you send the email through, give the journalist a call back to see if they need any more help.

6. If you do this, please leave us a comment on this post so we know who’s had a go!

Thank you for helping spread some non-partisan information this election time, and enjoy the election…

In January last year, at our yearly staff and volunteers retreat, we decided that TheyWorkForYou should do something special for the general election. We decided that we wanted to gather information on where every candidate in every seat stood on what most people would think were the biggest issues, not just nationally but locally too.

Our reasons for setting this ambitious goal were two fold. First, we thought that pinning people down to a survey that didn’t reward rhetorical flourishes would help the electorate cut through the spin that accompanies all elections. But even more important was to increase our ability to hold new MPs to account: we want users of TheyWorkForYou in the future to be able to see how Parliamentary voting records align with campaign statements.

This meant doing quite a lot of quite difficult things:

1. Working out who all the candidates are (thousands of them)
2. Working out how to contact them.
3. Gathering thousands of local issues from every corner of the country, and quality assuring them.
4. Developing a balanced set of national issues.
5. Sending the candidates surveys,  and chasing them up.

The Volunteer Army

This has turned out to be a massive operation, requiring  the creation of the independent Democracy Club set up by the amazing new volunteers Seb Bacon and Tim Green,  and an entire candidate database site YourNextMP, built by another new volunteer Edmund von der Burg.  Eventually we managed to get at least one local issue in over 80% of constituencies, aided by nearly 6000 new volunteers spread from Lands End to John O’Groats. There’s at least one volunteer in every constituency in Great Britain, and in all but three in Northern Ireland. Volunteers have done more than just submit issues, they’ve played our duck house game (you can still win!)  to help gather thousands of email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses.

The Survey

What we ended up with is a candidate survey that is different for every constituency – 650 different surveys, in short. The survey always contains the same 15 national issues (chosen by a politically balanced panel held at the Institute for Government)  and then anything between zero and ten local issues. We’ve seen everything from cockle protection to subsidies for ferries raised – over 3000 local issues were submitted, before being painstakingly moderated, twice, by uber-volunteers checking for for spelling, grammar, obvious bias and straightforward interestingness (it isn’t really worth asking candidates if they are in favour of Good Things and against Bad Things).

In the last couple of days we’ve started to send out the first surveys – we’ve just passed 1000 emails, and there are at least 2000 still to be sent.

The Output

We’re aiming to release the data we are gathering on candidates positions on 30th April. We’ll build a nice interface to explore it, but we also hope that others will do something with what we are expecting to be quite a valuable dataset.

The Pressure

Candidates are busy people, so how do we get their attention? Happily, some candidates are choosing to answer the survey just because TheyWorkForYou has a well know brand in the political world, but this has limits.

The answer is that we are going to ask Democracy Club, and it’s army of volunteers to help. We’ll shortly roll out a tool that will tell volunteers which of their candidates haven’t taken the opportunity to go on the record , and provide a range of ways for them to push for their candidates to fill it in.

It would be a lie to say we’re confident we’ll get every last candidate. But we are confident we can make sure that no candidate can claim they didn’t see, or didn’t know it was important to their constituents. And every extra voice we have makes that more likely.

Join Democracy Club today

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.

Go straight to the 2009 Call for Proposals

Do you have a ‘mySocietyish’ idea that you’d like to see become reality? Is there something radical about the sites we already run that should change? Do you have any smart ideas about helping more people to benefit from the services we already offer? Or would you just like to read and comment on ideas submitted by other people?

If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then we’d like you to submit your idea to our 2009 Call for Proposals (built for us by Richard Pope). We’ve run these twice before in 2003 and 2006, resulting in the launch and success of sites such as WriteToThem and WhatDoTheyKnow.

Just as on previous occasions we’ll pick a winner and some runners up, but also just as before we can only promise to do our best – we don’t have the resources to solemnly promise to build the winner, whatever it might be.

What We’re Looking For (or, an insight into the mySociety mindset)

The characteristics of the winning and runner up ideas are highly likely to include one or more of the following factors. Don’t try and include all of them, that’d be silly :)

1. They have to involve the Internet. We don’t do clay modelling.
2. They will capitalise on one or more things that the Internet does really well, better than offline or other forms. WhatDoTheyKnow, for example, seizes on the fact that email can be simultaneously published and rerouted – a simple but critical insight.
3. They will either be a whole new website idea, or a smart and impactful modification of something we already do.
4. They will be ideas that have clear social, civic or democratic benefits that are really easy to explain to the least political person you know, even if the technology behind them is fiendishly complicated.
5. They will have some characteristic that will widely spread the word that the service exists, or that other mySociety services exist.
6. They will offer brilliant value for money, even if they’re expensive to build in the first instance.
7. They will be genuinely new ideas
8. They won’t contain the phrase ‘social media’

We might well change these guidelines a bit as the first responses come in. The call will stay open until September 15th, and we’ll hope to announce the winners in early October.

So what are you waiting for – check out the 2009 Call for Proposals

‘Thumbs up’ by Carf (cc)

A few days ago mySociety asked the known possible candidates for Speaker to endorse 3 principles relating to making Parliament more transparent on the Internet.

We’ve now had endorsements which you can read on the individual pages of Sir George Young, Sir Menzies Campbell, Frank Field, Tony Wright and Sir Alan Beith , which until Parmijit Dhanda declared this morning, represented endorsement by 50% of the possible field. We also just recieved a typically frank and interrogative phonecall from Ann Widdecombe, who will be writing a formal response soon.

So, come on, John Bercow, Alan Haselhurst, Patrick Cormack, Sylvia Heal, and Chris Mullin. What’s holding up your replies? The days counter on your pages is telling the world how quick you are to respond…

Update: 11 June - John Bercow has now endorsed, and we’ve written to Margaret Beckett and Parmjit Dhanda, who’ve just declared their candidacies.

Update 2: Chris Mullin has told us he is ‘not a candidate’.

Update 3: Sir Alan Haselhurst has also endorsed.

Update 4 – Speaker Election Day: And Sir Michael Lord endorses too.

In less than 24 hours we’ve seen the first reply to our emails asking possible Speaker candidates to endorse our three principles. It is from Sir George Young – we’re looking forward to seeing the responses from the others that we wrote to.

Sir George is broadly supportive, which is great, and we’ve printed his reply in full on his own TheyWorkForYou MP page.

In the mean time, please do write to your MP and ask them to ensure that whoever they vote for, it is a candidate who has endorsed mySociety’s three simple principles, You really can have an impact on this issue: MPs are desperate to be seen to be acting for their constituents right now.

NB mySociety is strictly non-partisan and non-party aligned. We want all candidates from all parties to endorse these principles, and we have ensured that none of the wording of the principles leans towards any particular party or set of beliefs not connected to transparency in the modern age.

Speaker’s Chair (Parliamentary Copyright)

mySociety has today emailed (and in one case, posted) a set of 3 Principles which we believe it is important that all candidates for Speaker endorse, before the election of a new Speaker by MPs.

1. Voters have the right to know in detail about the money that is spent to support MPs and run Parliament, and in similar detail how the decisions to spend that money are settled upon.

2. Bills being considered must be published online in a much better way than they are now, as the Free Our Bills campaign has been suggesting for some time.

3. The Internet is not a threat to a renewal in our democracy, it is one of its best hopes. Parliament should appoint a senior officer with direct working experience of the power of the Internet who reports directly to the Speaker, and who will help Parliament adapt to a new era of transparency and effectiveness.

We will be posting the status of requests on the likely candidates web pages where we expect large numbers of people to see them before the vote in late June. We have also taken the unusual step of allowing possible candidates to leave a statement of up to 150 words on the principles.

(NB no candidates have actually declared at this stage, so we are starting with the BBC’s list of possibles)

Rationale

mySociety helped lead the campaign back in January to prevent the last ditch attempts to conceal MPs’ expenses. We did so not because, like the newspapers, we wanted to revel in embarrassment and scandal, but because we believe that in the Internet age, the only way for our democracy and government to thrive is if they are open and connected to the net as the rest of us expect them to be. The dramatic events seen in Parliament in recent days vindicate the view that secrecy breeds poor policies and seeds untrustworthy behaviour in the weaker willed.

Furthermore, more than a simple attitude of openness is required of the new Speaker: the public needs a genuine will to push for technological reform using the power of the Internet that will take both open-mindedness and a willing to tread on toes, especially in some parts of the unelected establishment.

Case in point: Over the last two years we have been trying to persuade Parliament to acknowledge that the way it publishes its Bills online is hopelessly inadequate for the Internet age. The campaign has faltered, despite multi partly endorsement from 140 MPs and a campaign membership of thousands. To see why, just take a look at this colourful and error-crammed internal email that we uncovered using the Freedom of Information Act, published for the first time today.

The new Speaker will have a tough job on their hands to overcome resistance of this kind. The best thing we can do is help the new Speaker, whoever they are, assume their new job with a clear mandate from the public, as well as from members.

Act!

That is why, as a final part of this call, we are asking you, our community, to write to your MP today to let them know that you expect them to vote for a candidate that has endorsed the principles above. Your voices to your own constituency MPs can resonate in a way that no blog post or newspaper article ever can. Go to it.

‘Comfortable Research’ by Joel Bedford (Creative Commons)

I (Tom, mySociety’s director) am planning to write a book over the next 6-12 months, which I hope will set out a mySocietyish vision for practical steps to a better democracy in the UK.

As I’ve got a lot of day to day mySociety-running to do, there’s no way I can take the time needed to do all the primary research for such a project myself. So this post is a job advert for an internship to help me with this project.

An ideal intern would have roughly this skillset:

• Experience as a researcher, preferably in history or politics
• A pretty good understanding of the Internet
• Great telephone skills for wheedling information out of people who need sweet talking
• Good information organising skills, to keep everything found in a nice, easy to use way
• Able to put in at least 2 days a week for at least two months, starting ASAP.
• A willingness to work with other researcher(s)

I’m not snobbish about academic qualifications, or even about type of training or degree, but I do need proof a candidate knows how to get off their own arse to find out interesting things. I’m also easy about age and location. If you know a smart 50-something investment banker who’s just been laid off, I’d be happy to talk to them.

It is an internship, not a paid job, although as with all mySociety volunteering posts it comes with free food, a chance to sleep on Francis’ sofa, the likelihood of meeting lots of fascinating and well connected people, plus all sorts of other perks (TBD).

If you know anyone who might be interested, please send them the link to this post. And even if you don’t, suggestions for how to spread the word about this ad are very welcome.

7,000 members on the Facebook group, over 93% of MPs contacted. Lots of news coverage: BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph, Times. John Mann MP makes a good point in a letter to the Guardian: “Few of my constituents care about the detail of how I spend their money as long as I do a good job, but nearly all of them care that they have the right to find out if they really feel the need to.”

Tom has updated the main blog post with a quote from President Obama’s speech that I thought was worth repeating, on why this is a much bigger issue than some bits of paper and some minor embarrassment: “And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

If you haven’t already, do write to your MP, and pick up the phone and call your local radio and TV news stations to let them know about this.

We’ve been shown or seen a few responses from MPs, after people wrote to them, saying that they are worried about their addresses being made public. If this is their main barrier to voting No on Thursday, they have nothing to worry about: they voted to exclude their residential addresses (and expenses on security, and future/regular travel) from the Freedom of Information Act in July 2008.

In fact, one of the reasons it is costing so much money to collate and edit these expenses is staff have been going through and making sure precisely that such information would not be released.

It is sad that MPs don’t seem to know what the law is, and I hope someone will stand up in the debate on Thursday and make this point.

Update: WE WON! [the following is now for historical interest]

Uh oh.  Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.

You can help in the following three ways:

1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com – ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3. Write to your local paper to tell them you’re angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety’s never-finished site http://news.mysociety.org might be able to help you here.

NB. mySociety is strictly non-partisan, by mission and by ethics. However, when it looks like Parliament is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction on transparency, we’ve no problem at all with stepping up when changes happen that threaten both the public interest and the ongoing value of sites like  TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

Update: Every page on TheyWorkForYou, our biggest site, is now strongly encouraging people to join the protest.

Update: We’ve sailed past 1000 members to our Facebook group. Onward and upward!

Update: And now past 3000 members! Also, some MPs are claiming that they need to vote for this Order to protect their addresses, even though they already changed to law to do this. Doh!

Update: Now we’re past 6500, and our supporters have mailed their constituency MPs in over 90% of the constituencies in the UK. And rather helpfully, President Obama has just given us a concise explanation for MPs why this is a much bigger issue than some bits of paper and some minor embarrassment:

“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad  habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

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”