mySociety blog » Commentary

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!

Recently I gave a talk at a conference where I told a group of local government officials that FixMyStreet was built not just to provide cleaner streets for their citizens, but also to force the hands of councils to procure and contract internal IT systems fit for the 21st century. In particular I pointed out that companies like Google seek to have people use their service from any site, any browser and device - they don’t just demand that everyone goes to www.google.com. And, I said, it’s only through building nice interfaces (APIs) that you can become an organisation that realises the benefits for yourself and other organisations from taking this ‘we’re happy to interoperate with anyone’ approach.

Less than three weeks later Michael Houlsby from East Hants council has single-handedly built an external facing API for their faults and problems database. So now FixMyStreet posts problems in that council direct into their database, without them first being translated into emails.

This is fantastic, especially as Michael clearly knocked it together in his spare time, and helps confirm what we’ve said before - if government builds nice interoperable APIs people like mySociety will use them to improve citizens’ experiences, whist simultaniously keeping everyone’s unnecessary workloads and expenses to a minimum. Plus it shows that if your IT supplier tells you you need to sign a new five or six figure contract to add an API to a CRM system you’ve already bought - you’re being jerked around.

Hats off to Michael - you’re a great example of a pro-active public servant using your skills to make government both better and more efficient.

LazyWeb hear me - can I please have a service where I can send a one off fax from my web browser, paying per page with a credit card or paypal or similar?

I’ve just spent two hours examining numerous fax services, trying ones that failed to deliver the fax, rejecting ones over priced for my purposes, lugging failing faxing equipment around, and now facing a 40 minute freezing cross London journey to a fax machine because some idiot in a large company demands a fax as a proof of identity and the whole sodding internet can’t supply this noddy service (let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that anyone can buy this particular piece of identity verification for £1 making it entirely unfit for purpose).

You hear me, Lazyweb? I’m prepared to pay for this service even!

Obviously it’s always great when any paper gives mySociety coverage - it helps get the word about our services out and helps more people get things done that help their lives.

However, today’s look at mySociety’s 5 years in the Guardian makes a few claims I think it’s important to challenge, so instead of writing to the readers editor I thought I’d just seize the power of Citizen Media(TM) to note them here.

First, has the No10 petitions site had “little notable impact” on government policy? Given that that project appears almost single handedly to have bounced Parliament into developing an online petitioning system and devoting debate time to major petitions, I’d say that it certainly has had some impact. But there is indeed a bigger problem of pointing at No10 petitions and going “That one changed policy.” It’s a problem of two halves: scale, and deniability.  Governments almost never acknowledge that they were forced into anything, ever. Policy announcements are almost always framed as if the right course of action was being followed all along. So apart from the fact that I don’t know how one could possibly assess the impacts of so many thousands of petitions without a huge research project, I would expect that even those that do have in impact will still usually be denied by the government, even when shifting policy. I would encourage No10 and the whole of Government to take a look at directly challenging this culture, and employ someone whose job it is to find out which petitions are having an impact, and shout about them in plain English.

Second, the majority of mySociety’s sites are programmed by staff and contractors, not volunteers. The volunteers are super-essential to mySociety running every day, but the sheer size of some of our projects makes it unlikely a volunteer could have built them without giving up their day job for many months. This needs mentioning to explain why it matters if our finances are precarious!

Next - do councils find FixMyStreet an irritation or an asset? Well, last time we did a count a few weeks ago, we had 4 complaining emails from councils, and 62 supportive ones, with several linking directly to us. As for the Customer Relationship Management at councils, we’d be delighted to send reports straight into their databases without going via email first, it’s just that only one council has set up such an interface so far. I hope that FixMyStreet can put pressure on councils and their suppliers to build a small number of standardised interfaces for the good of everyone. And yes, we are building FixMyStreet for iPhone and Android, and I’m happy to talk to anyone who wants to build UIs for any other phones.

There - hope that doesn’t come across as too ungrateful to Michael Cross et al. See you at the next birthday party, I hope!

Update: I also meant to mention that I’ve never been a ‘Downing Street Insider’. I was a junior civil servant in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, which is not in Downing Street and more loosely affiliated than the name might suggest.

…so what of the future?

First, I am more convinced than ever that mySociety offers something quite unique, and something must survive if technology is going to be best applied on the side of the citizen. Despite the explosion of so called web 2.0 technologies being adapted by newspapers, government and other media companies, the tools mySociety builds remain unique. They don’t just involve repurposing generic new communications tools like blogs, they involve conceptualising how technology can empower people from first principles. Nobody else is in the UK even attempts to build services like WhatDoTheyKnow or TheyWorkForYou, they’re just too different from what’s out there to copy. And when we do build them, they get copied across the world - one of the things I didn’t expect five years ago is that I’d be celebrating tonight with Rob McKinnon,  the man who took TheyWorkForYou and made it work in New Zealand, and being toasted from Australia via Twitter. But we know from the continued influence of newspapers, some born in the 19th century, that political media needs longevity to gain the reach and legitimacy required to transform whole systems and to challenge the expectations of whole populations. mySociety needs to work out how to be here not just in 6 months, but in 20 years.

To do this, however, we must do something about our funding. mySociety remains deeply financially insecure, and if we’re to celebrate our 6th birthday, let alone our 10th something urgent has to happen.

Next, we need to admit that we’ve shifted the culture of government internet usage less than we might have hoped over the last five years. Nevertheless, I honestly believe that a relatively minor shake-up at relatively low cost can see a massive step change in the way that government delivers services online, the way that it talks to citizens, and the way that it makes information available. But so long as the cult of outsourcing everything computer related continues to dominate in Whitehall, and so long as experts like Matthew and Francis are treated as suspicious just because they understand computers, little is going to change. Government in the UK once led the world in its own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire’s worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.

In one way that’s great for mySociety’s reputation that government progress has been so slow - even on a bankruptcy budget mySociety will continue to at least appear to out-innovate the entire UK government. But from a public welfare perspective it’s a tragic farce.

What we want from the government is technologies that empower and uplift, not depersonalise and degrade.  mySociety wants to be part of this change, and I hope we don’t have to wait until a new government comes in to have a decent shot at slaying some of the shiboleths that stand in our way to decent reform.

Last, but not least, I want as many of you as possible to be part of making mySociety’s vision of easier, more accessible, more responsive democracy the minimum that people expect, not the best they can hope for. This will take lots of volunteers, and lots of funding funding and ideas and newspaper stories. It’ll take lots of brilliant coding and better design. It will take political leaders who understand that the internet is the big, unique chance their generation has to shake things up and get into the history books.

And, more than anything else, I want to do it with you people. I want to do it with mySociety.

I just had a nice phonecall from a lady in Birmingham who wanted to know how she and her neighbours could use our services to get the council to install more U-turn locations on a main road they live next to.

It’s great getting such calls, but reminds me of something we perhaps don’t make obvious enough.  At mySociety we’re always happy to advise people on how best to use our sites to get things done.  Sometimes sites are best used in combination, for example, such as reporting a problem through FixMyStreet and then writing to lobby politicians about it.

So in short, if you’ve been wondering how to use our stuff, just drop us a line.

One of the nicest things about being involved with mySociety is seeing people in other countries starting similar organisations and building similar websites. After a Skype conversation with another eager hopeful last night, I thought I’d blog a bit about the things I think are most important to know if you’re just starting up. Here goes.

1. Absolutely the most totally essential thing is to be an organisation of amazing, politically minded coders, not an organization employing or contracting good coders*. Their skills are your lifeblood, their ideas your bread and butter, and finding the best civic hackers in your country and building your organization around them is the only path to success. And that means they should be making most of the day to day decisions, not you, you ignorant, arts-degree-clutching clot.

2.Ask the public what they think you should build. Not only will that give you access to more ideas than you have yourselves, it’ll engage people with you. Also, it’ll help you focus on the vital business of building sites that users want, not that YOU want.

3. Keep your cost base low, and put all the money you have into looking after your core staff and being nice to volunteers. Work on building a community of volunteers, even if most of them are really just friends rather than people putting in lots of time. Avoid renting offices, avoid non-essential non-coder staff, get people to donate serving infrastructure and bandwidth. Because building and running democratic websites is a fundamentally new area of human endeavor (not like blogging which at least has an analogy in journalism) there are basically no pre-existing funding streams for the type of work you’re about to do. You will have to create the buzz around yourselves that will lead to people wanting to fund you, and it will probably take years, if you get there at all (mySociety hasn’t quite done this yet, even at 5).

4. Ensure that the core of what you build can struggle on by even if your whole organization collapses. That means being open source, putting energy into sites that are as automated as possible, and making people excited about being volunteers.

5. If you aren’t pissing off at least some people all the time, you’ve probably been captured by the establishment.

6. Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% of the features you want. Then build it and launch it and your users will tell you which features they actually wanted instead. Build them and bask in the warm glow of appreciation.

*yes, yes I know I can’t code for toffee, and I’ve got an arts degree, but I’m still a geek, honest. (Proudest moment, working out that a batch of PCI network cards were unreliable because they’d come from the factory flashed with the EPROMs for the wrong hardware, and fixed it.)

If you’ve ever worked in an office, especially in a large organisation, have you ever been asked, ‘just give me a page on that’? Yes? Often? Yes? Too often? If so, I hope the following observations are of interest.

From one job to the next, requests to produce a ‘one pager’ have followed me around like a bad smell. A page on a policy idea, a page on why we should buy some bit of kit, a page on a website someone should build, a page outlining the contents of another document consisting of more pages.

The motivations behind these requests vary, as do their levels of estimableness. At the virtuous end of the spectrum, I can understand the desire to be consise and not to impose too much (often un-remunerated) work on the recipient of the request. However, there are some things that are bad and wrong about the classic ‘one pager’ that I feel a need to share with the rest of the world.

1. The one pager is inevitibly written as a Word document, and then attached to an email. This means that instead of simply getting the content you want from the mail you’ve just been sent,  you have to click to open the attachment, then wait for Microsoft Word to load. How many seconds a day around the world are being wasted like this? It makes me vaguely queasy when I start to do the sums in my head.

2. The one pager attachment is in a proprietary data standard which assumes that the person at each end will have paid around £500 somewhere along the line for Microsoft Office. £500? Come on, people! That’s more than most of our computers cost, in this case being deployed for a text editing purpose that could have been achieved equally well on a tiny-brained 80s electric typewriter. I’m not saying Office is a bad piece of software, merely that using it to bang out a few hundred words on an A4 page is like using the Manhatten project to crack a walnut.

3. The one pager attachment is by definition an attachment and therefore not universally addressable on the internet. It doesn’t have a URL, in short, and public, non-sensitive one pagers can’t be found in Google by default, unless someone goes a long way out of their way to upload them.  And not having URLs make things incredibly easy to lose, and harder to share across commes networks that don’t treat attachment so nicely (text messages, anyone?).

4. A one pager is by definition a page of paper. It doesn’t move. It might just possible have un-fetching bright blue links in it, but because it’s probably going to be printed out, it won’t normally have much linking embedded. They can’t contain YouTube videos, or widgets. This insistance on an electronic way of sending a paper format message is quite simply a way of saying “please don’t use state of the art presentational methods, they’re just for the little people on the outside of my organisation. We all know paper is really still king and will be until after I’m dead”

5. There is no discoverable context to a single one pager, except what’s written in it. I can’t find a list of related files. I can’t find how it changed over time. I can’t find who contributed what. I can’t find what people are saying about it in the Netherlands. I can’t reformat it easily to view on my phone, or be read to my via my headset. I can’t hit a key to record a version of me reading it out loud to video, and share that instead. I can’t do anything much except print it out and add to the world’s daily tree massacre.

Still, why am I complaining about the one pager, rather than any other piece of organisational cruft? Why pick on something so innocent?

The answer is precisely because it is often those things that look the most innocent that do the most damage. After all, it’s just a little tube of tobacco that makes people get through the day…

In March this year Ethan Zuckerman gave a talk at ETech called The Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism.

The summary of his theory is that web sites that successfully enable people to post nonsense like pics of their cats are the same systems that get used for activism.

The line that has motivated me to post, reflects something I’ve been noting for a while:

… She became an activist because she was forced to and she reached out for the tools she had access to - which hapened to be MSN spaces. MSN is heavily censored in China - it’s certainly not what we would have chosen for her. But you don’t get to choose the tools - activists use what’s at hand. It’s fine to build tools for activists, but even better to build tools for folks who don’t know they’re activists yet.

Then, as a sort of apology Ethan adds:

(In making this point, I should be very, very careful to point out that I have deep respect for tools that have been developed successfully for activist uses, tools like Martus or FrontlineSMS. My point is simply that there are huge numbers of web users who don’t yet think of themselves as activists who are likely to reach for the tools they have at hand, not to look specifically for tools designed for activists.)

I’m posting because I don’t think Ethan should be apologising, I think that those of us who run civic, democratic and activism websites should be thanking him for expressing a perhaps uncomfortable truth plainly. What Ethan’s pointing out is that for most people doing grass roots activism online means is using one of the megasites like Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, MSN or Hotmail to express your views to you friends and (hopefully) to more people. It’s bigger campaigns with higher starting capital that tend to use their own plaforms successfully, like Obama or Avaaz.

A few months ago it really struck me when reading Clay Shirky’s much praised Here Comes Everybody that even as he told the stories of a number of different bits of online activism, not a single one used a dedicated campaigning platform. It was blogger, twitter and email all the way.

Just to make things clear, I’m not posting this to moan that people don’t use the right platforms: after all mySociety doesn’t build anything that competes directly with Twitter, say. However, I would like to encourage some discussion about what role there is for smaller dedicated activist-coder groups like mySociety in a world where the first step on a just-born activist’s fight will almost always be their own IM, email, blogging or social networking tools.

Right now I’m trying to work out what sorts of path we should pursue in a universe where most users will behave like this. I don’t think the answer is as simple as ‘build widgets and plugins for all these sites’ either, none of our widgets has ever been as well used as simply providing permalinks to bits of debate in TheyWorkForYou which people link to in volumes. I hope this post can provoke some thoughts about how we can best strike a symbiotic relationship with the big beasts, especially seeking analogies from other sectors.

A WhatDoTheyKnow user Tom Taylor has posted a cool query to the Royal Mail - he wants a list of where all the postboxes in the UK are (presumably so he can build a ‘find your nearest post box’ web site).

After some delay Colin Young of the Royal Mail responded with a list in a PDF file. However, whilst the list is pretty long, it only contains the postcode location of each postbox, not an actual coordinate that can be plotted on a map. So neither he, nor anyone else, can build a postbox finder service.

Just think about that for a second. The Post Office doesn’t know where its Post Boxes are. Whoda thunk? Good use of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, Tom!

There’s been a lot written recently about the cognitive surplus, a phrase coined by Clay Shirky to describe the amount of human energy that can be deployed to create things if only barriers are lowered and incentives sharpened.

mySociety has recently been fortunate enough to see a little of this phenomenon through the explosion of volunteering activity which grew up around our TheyWorkForYou video timestamping ‘game’. For those of you not familiar, we needed video clips of politician’s speaking matched with the text of their speeches, and in just a couple of months a gang of volunteers new and old have done almost all of the video in the archive. Other, much larger examples include reCAPTCHA and the ESP game

Reflecting on this, my friend Tom Lynn suggested that there was a gap in the market for a service that would draw together different crowdsourcing games, ensure that their usability standards and social benefit were high, and which then syndicate them out in little widgets, recaptcha style, to anyone who wanted to include one on a web page.

This is where Mozilla and Ubuntu come in. Anyone who uses Firefox knows what the home page is like, essentially the Google homepage with some Firefox branding. Ubuntu’s default browser homepage, post patch upgrade especially, is similarly minimalist and focussed on telling you what’s changed.

Therein lies the opportunity - using pieces of these default home pages (maintained by organisations that claim to have a social purpose, remember) for more good than simply repeatedly reminding users about the the brand of the product. Traditionally that would mean asking people to donate or become volunteers, but the new universe of ultra-easy crowdsourcing games are challenging that assumption.

Here’s a scenario. One time in ten when I load Firefox, the homepage contains a widget right under the search box that contains an almost entirely self explanatory task that contributed to the public good in some way. This could be spotting an object on a fragment of satellite photo after a disaster, typing in a word that’s difficult to OCR, timestamping a video clip, or adding tags to an image or a paragraph of text. The widgets would be syndicated from the central repository of Cognitive Surplus Foundation ‘games’, and would help groups like Mozilla and Ubuntu to show themselves to millions of tech-disinterested users to be the true 21st century social enterprises that they want to be.

The Office of Public Sector Information (snappy name, lads) has launched a simple new service where you can publicly lodge a request for some public sector data that you can’t get, but need for some reason. They’ll then act as your behind-the-scenes champions and attempt to lever it out of which ever bit of government is trying to keep hold of it for no good reason.

You can also read other people’s requests, which hopefully will help people realize how much good data there is out there, and leave comments suggesting further reasons why it might be a good idea to let it loose.

Full disclosure, this was my idea, as part of the Power of Information review, so I’m not neutral in wanting to see people get what they want through it.

Go, post!

Matthew and I have been sitting next to each other today looking at the outputs of his lovely new custom built conversion tracking system, designed to ensure that the optimal number of users who just come to one of our services as a one off get signed up to something else longer lasting.

I’ve been banging on for ages about how government should seize on cross selling people who’ve just finished using one online service into using another of a more democratic nature, so it seems worth spelling out some of the lessons.

First, there’s some interesting data from the last few weeks, since our newest conversion tracking infrastructure has been running in its nice new format.

One of the adverts randomly served to users of WriteToThem (after they’ve finished sending their letter) encourages them to sign up to TheyWorkForYou email alerts - the service people use to get emailed whenever their MP speaks in Parliament. The advert features a slogan of encouragement, and a pre-populated email form containing the user’s email, and a ‘Subscribe me’ button. This advert was shown to 2328 users last month, of whom 676 became TheyWorkForYou email subscribers, which is a pretty cool 29.04% conversion rate. However, we also showed another advert for the same service, to the same WriteToThem users, which also had the same button and text, but which hid the form (and their address). That was shown to 2216 users of whom 390 signed up, a more modest 17.6%. So the impact of simply showing an email box with the users email address in it, versus hiding it, was worth 10% more users. Why? Go figure!

So now we’ve canned the advert that hides the address form, and instead we’re comparing two different adverts both of which feature the pre-populated signup form, but which use different words. It’s probably too early to judge, but the new ad appears to have a very similar conversion rate suggesting it might be hard to squeeze many more subscribers out of this page. We’ll keep trying though!

Another thing we learned of interest was that monthly subscribers to email alerts on TheyWorkForYou were down year on year in the month before we added this new advertising & conversion tracking system, even though the total number of visitors were clearly up on the same month last year. This appears to suggest that two things are happening. First RSS is catching on, so some users who would previously have got email alerts are subscribing to RSS feeds instead. Second, it suggests that the TheyWorkForYou user audience might have been getting more saturated with regulars - proportionally fewer new users coming (although more visitors in absolute terms) so fewer people signing up to get alerts. The cross marketing and conversion tracking seems to have reversed that trend, which is awesome.

We also advertise several different services to people who just finish signing up to get email alerts on TheyWorkForYou itself. We’ve just noticed that a full 25% of people shown the advert to sign up for HearFromYourMP proceed to sign up. We’ve therefore just decided to dump other adverts shown on TheyWorkForYou (such as advertisements for other sorts of TheyWorkFor you email alert) and concentrate on just cross selling HearFromYourMP. A back of the envelope calculation suggests that by just advertising this one site from the completion page we should get an extra 10,000 subscribers to HearFromYourMP this year on top of the organic growth. Not bad for a few minutes analysis, and a number likely to make a fair few more MPs post messages to their patiently waiting constituents.

One last interesting thing (at least to me) is how some more demanding services are a much harder sell than others to users. So asking people to make new groups on GroupsNearYou.com or report a problem in a street on FixMyStreet tend to result in more traditional online marketing scale conversion rates of 0.1% to 2%. Still worth doing, and so we compare different versions of those ads too, to try and eke up those rates for these sites that arguably have more tangible, direct impacts on people and communities.

It will be a challenge for mySociety’s future to work out how to trade off impact against scale of service use - are 10 HearFromYourMP subscribers worth one pothole that doesn’t get fixed? Answers on a postcard…

Some of the work we do at mySociety these days is policy related, and happens behind the scenes. I’m conscious that we haven’t been blogging here like we did in the early days, and that is partly because advice and consultancy often have to be confidential.

Two speeches, both of which mention TheyWorkForYou, were recently given by senior members of the UK’s two main opposing parties. They’re both worth reading, and will set you thinking about how much further mySociety’s work can be taken.

First a recent speech by Tom Watson MP, a Cabinet Office Minister on “Transformational Government”. He talks about the massive change we are living through, in terms of how IT can and will improve Government.

Less than a decade ago, people were just recipients of information, they got what they were given when they were given it. Today, the most successful websites are those that bring together content created by the people who use them (Tom Watson)

Second a speech by David Cameron, Leader of the Opposition, which talks a lot about open knowledge. Can local government be transformed by better information? TheyWorkForYou for local councils?

We will require local authorities to publish this information - about the services they provide, council meetings and how councillors vote - online and in a standardised format. (David Cameron)

Warning, this is a personal view and I’m sure doesn’t reflect the views of the trustees or directors of yadayadayada. Actually, it probably does, but I’ve not checked because they’ve got grown up day jobs and stuff.

Today is the 31st January 2008. That means all around the UK millions of people will be trying to pay their tax - it’s the last day before you start having to pay the government interest.

Where do you go if you want to pay your tax then? How about the HM Revenue and Customs Website?

Brilliant, there it is. Right…. now, erm…. hang on. How do I actually pay my tax? There’s no obvious button! In fact, the link to help you pay is below the fold on my browser, is in about 3 point text, being link number 8 in one of no fewer than 5 lists of links on the homepage. Once you click through the experience becomes even more unforgivably awful. In fact, I can’t actually bring myself to write it up.

Hilariously, there IS a great big homepage link to apply for online tax returns “In time to do it”, even though it’s now too late to apply. Genius - why not warn your users with menaces only to show your own ineptitude in the process: that way they’ll love you more!

This sort of incompetence isn’t as high profile as the loss of those two famous CDs, but it drives people away from the more efficient online services towards more costly phone and paper based transactions, and inconveniences millions of people at the same time.

I’m concious I’ve probably just blown any chance of mySociety now ever doing any usability improvements for HMRC, but some things just have to be said. It’s a bit like the former NHS home page that had over 100 links, none of which was “I’m sick - what should I do?”, but at least they’ve improved that a bit…

Updated
The total cost of the HMRC IT systems of which this is part is apparently about £8bn over 10 years. That makes it about as expensive to run per year as Google’s general running costs (exc R&D) in 2006.

It’s been a long year.

A friend just pointed me to this by Danny Hillis from the Whole Earth Catalog, Winter 2000.

Like much of my generation, I grew up believing that I should try to “change the world,” presumably for the better. But I didn’t know how to do this. Looking at how other people have changed the world I concluded there are five ways of doing it:

• Some people change the world by imposing their will on it.
• Some people change the world by discovering a truth.
• Some people change the world by changing people’s minds.
• Some people change the world by creating things of great beauty.
• Some people change the world by making new tools for change.

Danny Hillis goes on to say that the last one, the making of new tools for change, is the one that appeals to him the most. I think my friend was just flattering me, as that is what mySociety tries to do.

Chris, who I started this year with and have sadly ended it without, would, I think, have been on the surface deeply cynical about even the last one. He’d have sad that tools could be used for evil - indeed, part of the point of campaigns that he took up from his heart, such as no2id, is to point out how computers are just such a tool that can be used for evil.

Nevertheless, he worked tirelessly to make other tools (e.g. WriteToThem), so that we could all use them for good. Hopefully, you can pick the tools that you make, choosing ones that maybe a few will use unwisely, but for which the many will make it up by using them wisely.

Happy Christmas!

May your New Year be full of will imposed judiciously, truth that both aches and thrills, minds changed to be more enlightened, beauty that is great, and more tools that everyone can use wisely for change.

I’ve just come back from a hectic week away - visiting friends and working while there. It’s good teleworking, I worked in a welsh valley on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday staying at my friend Ben’s house.

Ben has been working for the Media Standards Trust, on their fab new site Journa-list. It’s a kind of a TheyWorkForYou-style site, but which gathers info and stats about journalists (as opposed to MPs). I’ve added links to it from TheyWorkForYou, so if you browse to an MP page who is also a journalist you can easily look up what they wrote.

Hopefully this will put some much needed scrutiny on journalists - rewarding the good ones, who are both allowed the time to properly research stories, and are energetic enough to do so. Now, what will be the next Great British Institution to have some sunlight on it…

Ben and I whizzed to London on the train to catch Steve Coast’s talk last night. He was as usual, excellent. We also had some great questions - it was interesting to hear a detailed account of the financial side of Open Street Map. Afterwards we had Italian food and beer. mySociety’s next disruptive tech talk is at the end of November. It’s by Jason Kitcat of the Open Rights Group talking about electronic voting. Sign up now.

I’m glad to be back home after a week away.

Last week we seemed to spend all week in London. Partly interviewing people, partly redesigning PledgeBank, partly plotting the overthrow of Parliament (joke), partly preparing for the election (thank god it didn’t happen - we’d be far too busy). We even did some general work, scurrying wifi out of the ICA and at one of our trustee’s offices.

As if that wasn’t enough, Stef gave the first of our disruptive technology talks, mainly about Farm Subsidy and UNDemocracy. It was interesting, engaging, fantastically attended, and turned into beer and Sushi. Adam’s posted up a recording of the talk (scroll down in the comments). Make sure you come to the next one on 1st November.