mySociety blog » Launches

Matthew’s just updated ScenicOrNot, the little game that we built to provide a ‘Scenicness’ dataset for Mapumental, to include a data dump of the raw data. The dump will update automatically on a weekly basis, but currently it contains averaged scores for 181,188 1*1km grid squares, representing 83% of the Geograph dataset we were using, or 74% of all the grid squares in Great Britain. It is, in other words, really pretty good, and, I think, unprecedented in coverage as a piece of crowd sourced geodata about a whole country.

It’s available under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial 3 Licence, and we greatly look forward to seeing what people do with it.

We’ve been hinting for a while about a secret project that we’re working on, and today I’m pleased to be able to take the wraps off Mapumental. It’s currently in Private Beta but invites are starting to flow out.

Built with support from Channel 4’s 4IP programme, Mapumental is the culmination of an ambition mySociety has had for some time - to take the nation’s bus, train, tram, tube and boat timetables and turn them into a service that does vastly more than imagined by traditional journey planners.

In its first iteration it’s specially tuned to help you work out where else you might live if you want an easy commute to work.

Francis Irving, the genius who made it all work, will post on the immense technical challenge overcome, soon. My thanks go massively to him; to Stamen, for their lovely UI, and to Matthew, for being brilliant as always.

Words don’t really do Mapumental justice, so please just watch the video :) Update: Now available here in HD too

Also new: We’ve just set up a TheyWorkForYou Patrons pledge to help support the growth and improvement of that site. I can neither confirm nor deny that pledgees might get invites more quickly than otherwise ;)

Had a public service? Do you care? Tell publicexperience.com!

Banish frustration and pointless griping about public services. We can all stop shouting at the radio. From today there’s an easy way to share the customer view of public services, and suggestions about how they might be better:

Publicexperience.com is a pilot project hosted by mySociety, conceived by some mySociety friends, funded by the Ministry of Justice, which seeks raw, unvarnished feedback from the point where the person in the street meets Whitehall. If there’s a gap between what that feels like and what it should feel like, just say “wouldn’t it be better if….”

It has the ear, to put it no strongly than that, of officials in Treasury and the Better Regulation Task Force. Their interest is in cutting pointless red tape and saving money (for which there is now, to put it mildly, some urgency).

Of course there are already any number of usual rowdy channels for political discourse, digs at opponents, foul language and rehearsing entrenched partisan views. That’s not what PublicExperience is about. PublicExperience is basic ethnography: the dispassionate raw description by the person who has just encountered the workings of the Whitehall tribe. It recognises no opponents. It’s merely futher evidence that raw, unvarnished and constructive feedback is coming.

It’s an idea originally kicked around five years ago under the name UKFeedback or “the Wibbipedia” on Idealgovernment and at the Young Foundation, and when PatientOpinion was starting to do it. Health is trickier. Patient Opinion was doing it very well, and it was emerging that people largely wanted to use it to say “thank you” to their care providers. Health feedback is still better directed to PatientOpinion. If you want your street fixed then FixmyStreet is smarter at directing the right issue to the right local authority. There’s a lovely Fixmysite idea from the Rewired State event for a neat way to report web site failings. Horses for courses.

But if you’re on the receiving end of the workings of Whitehall and you’re not apathetic, if you care about what happened and especially if you encountered pointless red tape or wasted time or money use Publicexperience.com. It could’t be easier. The right people will be listening. If we use it constructively, they’ll continue to listen. Share your experiences, and we’ll see where that takes us.

Score - 9.5: Across Loch Ericht to Sron a Chlaonaidh (by Geoff White on Geograph)

Harry Metcalfe and co have been working for us recently to build a new mini-site, ScenicOrNot.

The goal of ScenicOrNot is to be a gentle-ambling sort of quasi game that’s just compelling enough to keep clicking on, just in case the next picture is the dream valley in which you wish to be buried.

mySociety’s obviously not in the business of building games for their own sake, though. This is another crowdsourcing experiment to solve a specific problem - we need a scenicness map of the UK for a major upcoming mySociety project, and there ain’t one to be had any other way, for love or money.

So if you like mySociety, or just want to ogle the best and worst of this Island, please have a play.

A few moments ago the team rolled out changes to our biggest and best known site, TheyWorkForYou.com meaning that every visitor to any page of the site will be greeted with a call to arms on the issue of some MPs voting this Thursday to conceal their expenses. And after the vote, we’ll be prominently publishing who voted which way - there should be a couple of million visitors at least before the next election.

Our explicit goal is to have a lot of constituents from around the country let their MPs know they won’t be impressed with a ‘yes’ vote or an abstention (the same thing in this case), and to build our Facebook group to the point where the mainstream media starts to take notice of this Net driven discontent.

Please do everything you can to get as many people as possible writing to their MPs and joining that Facebook group. We’re doing our bit - please do yours. Together we can stop the encouraging trend of more openness in our Parliament scrunching into reverse.

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.”

I’m very excited to announce that the iPhone app for FixMyStreet is now live and available for download on the App Store (link opens the App Store in iTunes). You can now record a problem when out and about with your iPhone, using its camera and GPS, ready for checking and submitting to the council. Hopefully people will find this useful! :)

Download FixMyStreet iPhone on the App Store.

The Empty Homes Agency asked us to build it, Matthew did the hard work, and today it launches. Enjoy!

One of mySociety’s most below-the-radar projects is GroupsNearYou.com , a project to build a web service that eventually will allow other websites, such as FixMyStreet, to tell their users “Look! There’s a local email list here. Why not join it and discuss what you can do to stop those phoneboxes being smashed up?”"

However, in order for GroupsNearYou to become a useful web service for mySociety and the rest of the geospatial Internet, it really needs a good pile of pre-existing groups adding from across the globe. To help with this process Richard Pope has built a little game, rather in the spirit of our video timestamping game. To play it involves trying to identify which Yahoo Groups (and soon others, like Google Groups) cover which areas on the ground.

Reasons we think you should have a play include:

1. That strange instinct we all sometimes have that compels us to scrabble to the top of any league table.
2. The chance to learn about the most random community groups and what they’re up to in strange places you’ll never visit.
3. The warm glow of knowing you’re helping build up a little piece of the web of small pieces.
4. The prospect of free food, hoodies and love from the mySociety community.
5. Chance to come to our sold-out 5th birthday party in London
6. Your day job is less fun than this game.

Thanks Richard!

Angie Ahl has finally finished her epic migration of the much neglected mySociety.org site to a shiny new Wordpress install. Angie’s been pretty ill whilst doing this, and I’m way beyond hugely impressed by her determination and good cheer whilst getting this done.

Richard Pope has given the site a lick of paint too, and the rest of us have been busily using the CMS to update all the horribly out of date text that littered the old site.

There are many changes, but perhaps most useful for many of you will be the fact that the blog is now fully categorised - so if you want posts or feeds on just one site, or just on technical topics, or on everything, it’s all there for the taking.

Angie (by Tommy Martin)

Factoid of the day - the mySociety logo was designed by Matt Jones now of Dopplr fame, and the old site design was Jason Kitcat, now a Green party councillor. There’s online democracy for you.

We’re very excited to announce that our Parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou.com now includes video of debates in the House of Commons - but we need your help to match up each speech with the video footage.

It’s really easy to help out. We’ve built a really simple, rather addictive system that lets anyone with a few spare minutes match up a randomly-selected speech from Hansard against the correct snippet of video. You just listen out for a certain speech, and when you hear it you hit the big red ‘now’ button. Your clip will then immediately go live on TheyWorkForYou next to the relevent speech, improving the site for everyone. Yay!

You can start matching up speeches with video snippets right away, but if you take 30 seconds to register a username then we’ll log every speech that you match up and recognise your contribution on our “top timestampers” league table. We’ll send out mySociety hoodies to the top timestampers - they’re reserved exclusively for our volunteers as a badge of honour.

We think that this really easy approach to crowd-sourcing data about online video could come in useful in many different situations - not just for politics - and we hope that it gets used all over the place. It might even be a world first, we’re not sure. If you’d like us to create something similar for your local legislature, sports team, Am Dram group or anything else that can be audio or video recorded then please get in touch. We’d also really appreciate your feedback on the current beta system - please send your email to team@mysociety.org.

Note to MPs, researchers, office staff, campaigners and bloggers - we know that you want to concentrate on matching up the speeches of a particular MP, or of a particular debate. If this sounds like you, please send an email to team@mysociety.org with what you want, and we’ll help you do it.

Background

This project was initially commissioned and funded by the BBC, who asked mySociety to create a searchable, online video archive of debates based on footage from BBC Parliament. We were thrilled to help out, because we think that it will enhance the public understanding of - and respect for - the work of Parliament. The initial goal of this project was to use the BBC’s captions to help chop up the video into different speeches. Tom Loosemore arranged for access to the BBC’s internal captions data, Etienne Pollard was commissioned to build an open source recording/transcoding/web-serving system (and then donated some of his wages back to pay for enough hard drive space for the video!), Stef Magdalinski donated a network storage array to hold the disks. However, after lots of hard work trying to get our computers to automatically slice up the video into chunks according to the BBC’s captions we concluded that this on its own wasn’t sufficiently accurate to reliably match up every speech in Hansard with the appropriate snippet in our video footage.

Adversity, however, is a great source of innovation. Matthew Somerville, working on a spec first sketched out by Tom Steinberg customised the flash interface substantially so that users could watch video and help add correct timestamps. Now that’s built, what remains is for you to do your part! What’s more, once we get a significant number of speeches timestamped we can start providing web feeds and APIs for MPs to embed video footage directly on their own websites, and video of your MP’s most recent speeches on their MP page on TheyWorkForYou.

There are some conflicting views about whether this all online video of Parliament is a good idea - for instance, this video snippet (created using the new system) shows that the Deputy Leader isn’t so keen on the idea of Parliamentary footage appearing on sites like YouTube. Or perhaps she’s just been misunderstood - now you can judge for yourself what she was saying, based on her appearance and intonation. On the other hand, the BBC seem to understand the benefit of putting video content online (and they’re a fully paid up member of ParBol, the Parliamentary Broadcasting group), and Parliament themselves have an alternative set of online video streams. Unfortunately the official Parliamentary video service can’t be integrated with Hansard, is only available in Windows Media format, only has enough storage to keep the most recent 28 days of footage in archive, and doesn’t even attempt to break up the video into individual speeches apparently you can search for speeches after all, although this capability isn’t actively advertised. It perhaps goes without saying that mySociety considers it an important public service for citizens to be able to find footage of their MPs doing their work, and we will resist attempts to deny this service to citizens.

One final thing - we’re currently trying to persuade the clerks in Parliament to tweak their internal processes a bit, and make it easier for people to see how laws are made. It’s called the Free Our Bills campaign, and we need as many people as possible to join the campaign, so that we can bring law-making into the 21st century. Please sign up now!

Update 1.40PM
There are already over 1000 timestamps, and we’ve not even gone for any media coverage yet. Well done all!

Update 11.00AM on Thursday 5 June 2008
6769 speeches have now been timestamped, which is exactly 20% of the current total of 33838 speeches. Thanks for all your efforts, and keep up the good work!

We’re busy as bees, lots of things happening, increasingly many of which are commercial, and we can’t talk about until they’re released.

Commercial? But you’re a charity! Yes - but just as Oxfam have a trading subsidiary company which runs the second hand clothes shops, we have a trading subsidiary company that sells services relating to the websites that we make (structural details here).

Everything from other small charities to large media companies are buying our services - which range from customised versions of FixMyStreet, through to strategic consulatancy. If you’ve got something that you think we might be able to help with, email Karl. He’s easier to talk to than us geeks.

Meanwhile we’re cracking on with our free services for the public, which are increasingly funded by this commercial work.

TheyWorkForYou recently launched a Scottish version, thanks to volunteer Mark Longair, and Matthew. More goodies in store as the Free Our Bills campaign unfolds. We’ve started a sprint to get a photo for every MP’s page. If you work for or are an MP or have copyright of a photo of one that we’re missing, then email it to us.

WhatDoTheyKnow is getting lots of polishing - the new site design that Tommy has been working on is nearly ready. Today I just turned on lots of new email alerts and RSS feeds, so you can get emailed, for example, when a new request is filed to a particular public body, or when a request is successful.

Our super ace volunteers have been busy adding public authorties to the site, and we now have 1153 in total. We’re getting a steady trickle of good requests (pretty graph) coming in. Blogs such as Blind man’s buff and confirm or deny are sorting the wheat from the chaff. Do blog about and link to any interesting requests that you see!

Other things in the works are a much needed revamp of www.mysociety.org, some interesting things on GroupsNearYou, and no doubt squillions of other things. I’ll let Matthew post up anything I’ve missed :)

Last week at the SustainIT eWell-Being Awards, we picked up an award for FixMyStreet. The judges said it was “[a]n excellent example of an independent website which empowers the general public in their dealings with their local council. It is a relatively simple application, yet highly effective and replicable.” One example the accompanying Independent supplement mentioned was “a community in Great Yarmouth which joined forces through FixMyStreet to clear their local unused railway track. The site made possible a dialogue between community members and the council’s community development worker, who organised a “clear up” day where locals could get involved with rectifying the situation, with tools, insurance and even a barbeque provided.” It’s great to see that sort of thing happening on the site, and also great to be recognised in this way.

In a spirit of celebration (though more to celebrate the endorsements the campaign has received), TheyWorkForYou now covers the Scottish Parliament - see the TheyWorkForYou news for more information.

New statistics, made by Francis, for your interest and elucidation. They’ll make their way onto TheyWorkForYou shortly.

mySociety has never run a campaign before today. And we’re not sure anyone’s ever run a campaign featuring a charismatic duck-billed platypus escaping from under the closing jaws of a Parliamentary portcullis.

Update 15.34 25/03/2008
Conservative Party leader David Cameron has just endorsed the campaign in this video.

Update 17.14 25/03/2008
Now kind words from techy Lib Dem MP Lynne Featherstone.

Update 11.38 1/04/2008
We’ve just recieved this fantastic endorsement from Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats:

“Parliament belongs to the people. It’s time to open it up so people can find out what’s going on. mySociety has done a brilliant job in recent years in doing that - and it’s time to take this project to the next level and get information about the laws Parliament passes into the public domain.

“It takes a new MP months to figure out how the tortuous bills procedures work - so how we expect the voters to know what’s going on, I have no idea. The changes MySociety are calling for are vital so that every MP is fully accountable for the decisions they take on behalf of their constituents.

“I fully support the Free our Bills campaign, and will do all I can in Parliament to win this battle.”

Thanks Nick!

Say hello to GroupsNearYou.com

The Short Geeky Explanation

GroupsNearYou.com is an entirely user generated API-queryable database of the location and nature of local online communities, irrespective of the platform they are hosted on. A piece of the programmable web, in short, with local community building focus. Check this lovely example of how easily the syndicated community information can be layered onto a map, for example.

The Business Problem it Solves

Do you run a site that tells people stuff about their local area? Do you suspect that there might be quite a lot of internet enabled community activity going on in local areas that you’d like to tell your users about? Use our feeds.

The Social Problem It Solves:

There’s a proven real world social value to people belonging to very local email lists and other forms of local online community. However there is no eBay or Craiglist or other market dominant player in the local online community world, instead there’s a myriad of google groups, yahoo groups, Facebook & other YASN groups, extremely old school CCed email lists, online forums and so on. As a consequence of not having one big simple place to go to find and join local groups (many of which are not even on the web for Google to find) far fewer people ever find out about and join their local online groups. GroupsNearYou.com is about getting more people to join groups, groups that are not hosted by us, and (hopefully) mainly discovering them via uses of our syndicated info on sites that aren’t run by us. It’s a piece of pure internet infrastructure, with a positive social bent.

Who did it?

Astonishingly, the project was almost entirely built by a volunteer, Richard Pope assisted in design by another brilliant volunteer Denise Wilton. Their only reward is a highly sought after mySociety Hoodie, plus the love and gratitude of all our users.

Richard has been an amazingly dedicated volunteer for mySociety and on his own projects for over two years, and deserves the reputation he is rapidly gaining as one of the world’s truly great civic minded web innovators. The project was funded by the UK’s Government’s Ministry of Justice who have been trying to run experiments of different kinds in the realm of electronic democracy. Their money will go to help improve and grow the site, rather than building it, which is a very interesting funding model in its own right. The several hundred groups already in the system are mainly added by users of WriteToThem.com

Next steps

Almost all the groups listed in the database are in the UK at the moment, and they’re all from users of our other sites. We’re interested in working with anyone who runs sites that might want to either take information out of it, or put information into it (Hello email list/social network providers!)

Anyway, it’s dead simple really, just a little brick in the internet wall, albeit one that I hope will help a few more people meet their neighbours and improve their communities.

There’s a lot left to do, but Francis Irving’s brilliant new mySociety Freedom of Information site is now live. You can file requests to central government departments (most of the them), and browse what other people have been requesting (already fascinating). It doesn’t have a name yet, nor any slick design, nor half the features we want it to have, but it works and it gets things done.

And dammit, people, that’s what mySociety’s all about. Can we explain it any better?

Google have launched a new UK politics site at google.co.uk/politics. mySociety were delighted to be asked to build a TheyWorkForYou widget for this site. There’s no doubt that this sort of modular re-purposing of our information is going to happen a lot more in the future, and it’s great to start out with the best of possible partners.