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Some time in the middle of last night, our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow.com was used to send its 100,000th FOI request. It was a simple one, made to the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

WhatDoTheyKnow was launched in February 2008, with these aims: to make it easy to file a FOI request, and to keep a public archive of the requests and (more importantly) the responses received from public bodies. The Freedom of Information Act had been in force since 2005, but we wanted to make it fully accessible to people who were not journalists, lobbyists or professional operatives – it is a law that gives us all a right, not just those experts.

At base, mySociety is about giving people power to people who don’t believe that they have any way of affecting the world around them. Giving practical access to the right enshrined in this Act was and is a meaningful way of advancing that goal.

Then, thanks to a flash of inspiration from our late colleague Chris, we saw a great opportunity to increase the value created by the existence of the Act: we built a system that published the entire exchange of messages between users and public bodies online.

We believe that because of this decision to publish all exchanges with public bodies, WhatDoTheyKnow represents a very unusual phenomenon: a third-party web site that takes an existing piece of legislation and makes it better value for money for the taxpayer. Public money was already being spent answering FOI, but by running WhatDoTheyKnow we could magnify the value generated by each request by making it public, without requiring anyone who worked in a public sector to retrain, buy a new computer system or spend any new money.

And this theory turned out to be right. For every request made on the site, around twenty people come to read materials contained on WhatDoTheyKnow. The multiplier is remarkable, and one of the things that we think is most worth celebrating about this site.

WhatDoTheyKnow’s success is only possible because of a team of fantastically dedicated volunteers. These loyal enthusiasts have helped countless users, and do a simply amazing amount of maintenance work to keep the site friendly, helpful and effective. They are astonishingly talented, principled and knowledgeable, and mySociety owes them a debt of gratitude it will never really be able to pay back.

However, to give them a bit of the credit they deserve, and to highlight some of the countless uses of WhatDoTheyknow, we asked them to pick out some notable requests from the last four years.

Helen “The use of the site by campaign groups like the Campaign for Better Transport to find out about bus subsidy cuts as part of their save our buses campaign.”

John “There was the accidental release of how tax is applied to the Royal Family – which resulted in a Daily Mail front page story.”

Alex “This request about the Warmfront boiler installation scheme has a significant number of annotations. What makes it different is that the user patiently persisted with her original FOI requests, and then has carried on by continuing to help loads more people with details of how to complain and lobby for help and general warm encouragement.”

WhatDoTheyKnow is one of mySociety’s most visited sites, with one and a half million unique visitors in 2011. Like our other projects, it was built as an open source project. Thanks to the Open Society Foundation, we are in the process of making it much easier to re-deploy around the world, under the brand name ‘Alaveteli’.  As we speak, there are sites based on our code in places as far apart as New Zealand, Kosovo, Brazil, and the EU, and we’re looking forward to helping people from around the world create more grandchild sites in the years ahead.

Our 100,000 request milestone comes at an interesting time for the Freedom of Information Act. It’s currently under scrutiny by the Justice Select Committee, who are investigating whether it works effectively and in the way that it was intended.

As you might expect, at mySociety, we’re passionate about the right to information. We’ll be submitting evidence to the Justice Select Committee to show just how vital FOI is to good government and a good society. If FOI has touched your life, you might want to do the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it for?

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

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

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

Who made it?

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

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

Why is it dedicated to Angie Martin?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by European Parliament.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Research

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

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

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

Swings and Roundabouts

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

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

Stories

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

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

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

The reports

Download Tobias Escher’s research report on WriteToThem.com

or TheyWorkForYou research report by Tobias Escher

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

PS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Warning - the following is an exceedingly dull blog post but important for accountability]

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

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

Our structure

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

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

The latest accounts

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

Anyone reading our accounts would notice two important points:

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

PRIOR YEAR ADJUSTMENT
In previous years, amounts of £136,274 received from the subsidiary, mySociety Limited, a company, were classed as donations from them. However, these amounts were for paying the VAT creditor and repayments to the parent for services provided by them. This has resulted in donations received (and consequently the net income) being overstated by £136,274, hence the need for the prior year adjustment.

Which leads to these questions:

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

2) Why are the accounts so late?

3) What does the adjustment note mean?

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

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

The answer to 3) is the next section.

Okay, so what does the adjustment note mean?

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

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

This had three results:

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

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

So what have we done about it?

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

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

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

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

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

So to sum up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’ve been doing some work with Barnet Borough Council recently, such as this nice planning alerts tool. Simple, useful, well built stuff that meets an obvious need – exactly the sort of stuff we’re keen to work on with all our clients.

During our conversations with the officers at Barnet, it became apparent that one thing they were thinking about a lot was how to support all the people who want to have Royal Wedding street parties. The dilemma was pretty simple: they want people to have a good time, but each street party means closing a street to traffic and doing other things that take time and money. And this isn’t worth doing if it turns out the people on the street weren’t really up for it anyway.

Reducing a risk like this sounded like exactly the sort of problem that PledgeBank was built to tackle, so we’ve customized it a bit for this specific purpose, added a big, cheesy picture of the happy couple, and launched Barnet’s Royal Wedding Street Party page.

The mechanic is nice and simple – you tell the council who you are and what street you live on. They then send you a back link to a street-specific pledge that needs signing by people in three households. You pass this around your neighbours, get the signatures, and presto,  Barnet will support your party.

Lovingly built by mySociety’s Dave Whiteland, this might not exactly be the biggest story in local government history. However I do  think it’s a nice and surprisingly rare example of developing a small bit of policy that aligns just so with a new bit of technology. It’s not trying to ram a square technology peg into a round policy hole. I hope we get to work on more things like this in future.

At mySociety we love our site FixMyStreet – it’s the epitome of a web tool that gives simple tangible benefits whilst generating a little accountability at the same time. Reports through the site were up 40% last year, so it’s clear that users quite like it too.

FixMyStreet has been copied in many different countries, which makes everyone in mySociety very happy, too, even apparently appearing in a slide deck the White House uses to show innovative services. However, it turns out that the cheerfully minimalist, almost wantonly unfashionable user-interface has an unfortunate down side: most people who copy the site look at it, think “That looks easy!” and then cheerfully start coding their own clone.

Deceptive simplicity

Alas – the very simplicity that makes the site good hides the fact that making a site like FixMyStreet really work well is actually way harder than it looks. What will you do when a government email inbox fills up? What about when administrative boundaries change, due to an election or restructuring? How do you know you’re not scaring users away with careless wording? All the hard-won lessons from these questions have been baked into the FixMyStreet codebase, and we’re only too keen to talk to people about them.

We were therefore particularly pleased when the Nowegian Unix User’s Group (NUUG) came to us to ask if we could help improve FixMyStreet to make it easier for them to install. Over the last month mySociety Senior Developer Matthew Somerville has been working hard with Petter Reinholdtsen and Christer Gundersen of NUUG, and here’s what they’ve managed in just a handful of weeks.

• The launch of a Norwegian FixMyStreet called Fiksgatami, covering nearly every corner of Norway’s 300,000 square kilometers.
• Problems reported anywhere within Norway will be correctly directed to any of the 400+ responsible municipalities, thanks to Petter and Christer’s amazing data sourcing skills.
• As a necessary side-effect of developing this, Norway now has a free, public administrative web service gazeteer – http://mapit.nuug.no. If Norway is anything like the UK this will soon become an indispensable service for many other web sites and mobile tools.
• The standard mapping is now OpenStreetMap, pulled together by the brilliant Norwegian OpenStreetMap community*. We couldn’t take a technological step backward, and so whilst the site uses OpenLayers if you have JavaScript, the map continues to work just fine without as well.
• The open source FixMyStreet codebase has been upgraded to make it easier to translate into other languages, easier to use different mapping with, and easier to install. These efforts will continue, as we realise this has been one reason why others have made their own versions.
• All this has been done without forking, so various major upgrades we have planned for the UK version will be exportable later in the year.

NUUG’s Fiksgatami is the epitome of what makes civic open source at its best so unmatchably good. It was developed incredibly quickly: just a month to create what is effectively a fully fledged, best-of-breed nationwide e-government service – albeit an unofficial one. Thanks to the hard work of the public servants who fix problem reports, it will make small but meaningful improvements to the lives of a lot of people in Norway.  And it has made the free FixMyStreet codebase better and easier for other people to use to help them do the same thing in other countries.

I know that at mySociety we are all looking forward to working with NUUG again. And I hope that this story inspires others to look at our code, and to work with mySociety to make FixMyStreet a service that can help everyone who would benefit from it.

* We’ll be rolling out updated mapping (including OSM) and more in the UK, soon.

Do you care for usability as much as you care for elegance? Do you enjoy knocking the rough edges off user journeys, as well as making them playful and attractive? Are you looking for a contract that will make a real difference to the lives of your fellow citizens? If so, we’d like to talk to you about becoming the design lead on mySociety’s next site, FixMyTransport.

Why we need better design, and why we need it now

FixMyTransport will be the next major charitable project built by mySociety. It is a project of a registered charity, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com. Our sites have strong reputations for being effective and highly usable, but are not known for their shininess or fun-loving nature.

With FixMyTransport we want to change this reputation, and start to become known for tools that are as lovely as they are effective. This decision reflects mySociety’s view that we have a leadership responsibility within the global community of civic-minded software developers: a responsibility to push the boundaries of what has been achieved previously, and to critically assess our own achievements.

Why we think collaborating on the design for FixMyTransport would be pretty cool

FixMyTransport is a particularly interesting challenge because it represents a deliberate attempt to pioneer a new approach to motivating civic action through the web. Our specific goal is to build a platform that can coax people who do not think of themselves as ‘activists’ or ‘campaigners’ over the edge into being micro-activists, by focusing on capturing and magnifying the passion that is created when people have problems with public transport.

The design challenges that fall our way are therefore complex and fascinating. The service needs to be friendly and reassuring enough to encourage people to make what may be a hugely significant ‘first’ in their lives. But it must also be professional-looking enough to make the targets of campaigns feel that it means business. Furthermore, as a platform, different campaigns will head in different directions, and the design and work-flow will have to cope with many unanticipated uses.

Organisational Context

mySociety has ten full time staff, and a wider community of energetic and creative volunteers. We pride ourselves on being pretty good at smooth user journeys and worthwhile incentives for using the services. But we know that we have weaknesses when it comes to making things beautiful and playful, which is why we’re looking for a designer who is willing to do more than just prettify whatever we give them. We’re looking for someone with knowledge of user-experience deep enough to challenge us about the layout of pages and the user journeys through them, whilst being respectful of our own knowledge. We’re looking for a genuine collaborator who will teach us and learn from us as we work together, and someone who will understand when conversion tracking is worth using, and when it isn’t.

We need someone who has a good understanding of the nature of interactive design, and who knows what web developers need from designers. And perhaps most importantly, we’re looking for someone who will bring a vision for how the whole user experience should fit together into something warm, reassuring and compelling to use.

This contract and beyond

We envisage that the contract will last 15-25 working days and we will pay standard commercial rates. We do not have a fixed office space, although for the duration of the contract we may hire co-working space in London for you and the FixMyTransport engineers, if required.

Once we have established a strong working relationship with a good designer, we wish to continue that to implement redesigns across all our major sites.

Person Specification

Must have:

• A portfolio of at least three web sites where you were the sole or lead designer
• At least 2 years experience in a role that involved regular use of Photoshop or similar graphics packages for the design or mockup of web pages
• At least 12 months experience working with software developers to implement designs (or must be a developer yourself)
• Working knowledge of UX design, as distinct from graphic design
• Must be resident in the UK

Desirable qualities:

• Prior knowledge of our services
• Experience of iterative design based on conversion tracking

How to Apply

Send us an email to hello@mysociety.org briefly explaining why you’re the person for this job, and put the tag msjob8 into the subject line. Please share some of your portfolio, and write us 100 words on what sort of approach you think FixMyTransport needs from a designer. Deadline for applications is 9AM on Wednesday 2nd March.

Updated 4th March 2011. Recruiting has been extended, and a slightly edited version of this description (including new instructions on how to apply) is available at the Guardian Jobs website.

mySociety Communications Manager

Do you enjoy communicating through all the channels that the modern internet has to offer? Do you enjoy helping users as well as pitching to journalists and companies? Are you looking for a communications job with a greater sense of purpose? If so, mySociety’s new Communications Manager role could be for you.

mySociety is a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com. Our services had over 5 million unique visitors in 2010, but we believe that there are a lot more people who would benefit from what we do, if only we were better at communicating. The job of the new Communications Manager will be to help mySociety reach out to these potential beneficiaries, as well as to prospective commercial clients.

The Communications Manager will be a new post at mySociety, funded by the Omidyar Network, with a 12 month contract in the first instance.  This is a home working position and the successful candidate can be located anywhere in the UK. Occasional UK travel will be required to meetings and events. Salary: £28-31k.

Organisational Context

mySociety has ten full time staff, and a wider community of energetic and creative volunteers. This is a newly created, full-time role as an employee of mySociety Ltd, reporting to the Head of Operations and Finance but working with everyone, including the volunteers.

mySociety operates a number of not-for-profit websites, and carries out high quality software development on a commercial basis to support the charity. The key objectives of this role are:

1. To drive public awareness and usage of our not-for-profit websites.
2. To work with users of our not-for-profit websites to help them achieve their goals, whether on our sites or elsewhere.
3. To drive awareness of our commercial sites and services, respectively building their traffic and generating commercial sales prospects.

It is important to communicate that the position is a combination of a classic PR role with a more modern digital community management role: the successful candidate will need to feel as comfortable over quiet lunches with journalists as they are with Facebook’s ever-changing featureset.

The focus of activities would be primarily within the UK, but will involve supporting our team’s international partnerships and projects. We have no fixed offices, and have team members working from home spread across the country who work and communicate primarily via the net. There are face-to-face meetups every week or two.

Key Responsibilities and Deliverables

1. Helping mySociety to make the most effective possible use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, through a combination of authorial skills and analytics.
2. Sourcing the materials for a monthly email newsletter, writing and delivering it, and processing click-through data to improve the next iteration.
3. Working directly with users of our sites, especially FixMyStreet and FixMyTransport, to help them work together to achieve their goals.
4. Blogging on mySociety’s site, and encouraging the rest of the organisation to blog and communicate more.
5. Building relationships with journalists, and gaining media coverage of new launches and noteworthy events in the mySociety universe.
6. Co-organising occasional events with mySociety’s Office Manager.
7. Producing copy and coordinating design for commercial briefing documents, such as sales brochures.
8. Managing our Google Adwords account.

Person Specification

Must have:

• At least 2 years experience in a role that involved regular authoring of press releases and blog posts
• At least 12 months involvement with some kind of predominantly online community
• Graduate level spoken and written communications skills

Desirable qualities:

• Experience as a journalist
• Experience of fighting campaigns, especially at a local level
• Experience of monitoring performance of Google Adwords, Facebook adverts, email mailshots, postal mailshots or other kinds of marketing which can be improved through quantitative testing and iteration
• Experience of both charitable and commercial PR
• Pre-existing relationships with journalists and bloggers in a variety of sectors
• Trusted reputation within at least one online social service that is issue specific (e.g. Mumsnet, Rightsnet, Ravelry)

Councils all around England have been busy getting ready to comply with the new duty to provide e-Petitions which kicks in today, 15th December. This means that on council sites across England you should now be able to make petitions which will be formally considered by the councils, in accordance with their chosen policies.

At mySociety we’ve spent a lot of time over the last twelve months helping councils to cope with this new duty by offering  them a commercial petitions service that is really good for users and easy to administer for councils. Some of the sites have been live for months, but many of the 35 council e-petitions sites we’re currently contracted to supply launch today.

mySociety’s core developers Matthew Somerville and Dave Whiteland deserve huge credit for all the work they did re-purposing the No10 Petitions codebase and doing dozens of council customisations and rebrands. I’ve just seen one council officer email “Yippeee” at the prospect of launching, so I reckon they’ve done a pretty good job  - well done gents, everyone in mySociety owes you a debt of gratitude for a time consuming job well done.

Here’s the current list of live local petitions sites. We’ll be adding more as they go up. Happy petitioning!

Ashfield http://petitions.ashfield-dc.gov.uk/

Barnet http://petitions.barnet.gov.uk

Barrow http://petitions.barrowbc.gov.uk/

Bassetlaw http://petitions.bassetlaw.gov.uk/

Blackburn with Darwen http://petitions.blackburn.gov.uk/

East Cambridgeshire http://petitions.eastcambs.gov.uk/

East Northants http://petitions.east-northamptonshire.gov.uk

Elmbridge http://petitions.elmbridge.gov.uk

Forest Heath http://petitions.forest-heath.gov.uk

Hounslow http://petitions.hounslow.gov.uk

Ipswich http://petitions.ipswich.gov.uk

Islington http://petitions.islington.gov.uk

Lichfield http://petitions.lichfielddc.gov.uk

Mansfield http://petitions.mansfield.gov.uk/

Melton http://petitions.melton.gov.uk/

New Forest http://petitions.newforest.gov.uk

Nottinghamshire http://petitions.nottinghamshire.gov.uk

Reigate & Banstead http://petitions.reigate-banstead.gov.uk

Runnymede http://petitions.runnymede.gov.uk

Rushcliffe http://petitions.rushcliffe.gov.uk/

South Holland http://petitions.sholland.gov.uk

Spelthorne http://petitions.spelthorne.gov.uk

St Edmundsbury http://petitions.stedmundsbury.gov.uk

Stevenage http://petitions.stevenage.gov.uk

Suffolk Coastal http://petitions.suffolkcoastal.gov.uk/

Surrey County Council http://petitions.surreycc.gov.uk

Surrey Heath http://petitions.surreyheath.gov.uk

Tandridge http://petitions.tandridge.gov.uk

Waveney http://petitions.waveney.gov.uk

Waverley http://petitions.waverley.gov.uk

Wellingborough http://petitions.wellingborough.gov.uk

Westminster http://petitions.westminster.gov.uk

Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead http://petitions.rbwm.gov.uk

Woking http://petitions.woking.gov.uk

A number of non-departmental government bodies / quangos have been named as being up for abolition, merger, privatisation or absorption into parent departments, as part of the Coalition Government’s Spending Review, due this autumn. This has been widely dubbed in the press as a “bonfire of the quangos“.  The list of quangos up for review is still being compiled by the government, and there have been a number of clarifications, amendments and retractions as further details come to light.

The Telegraph has obtained and published today a leaked list of 177 quangos up for abolition, plus a further 200 that are still being reviewed.

This is a great opportunity to highlight that mySociety’s Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow covers nearly all of these little-known bodies that spend public money (we currently have just over 3,800 public authorities listed on the site).  Given their impending doom, there is little time left to find out what they spent public funds on, as only their most important records will be transferred to the National Archives or successor bodies for permanent storage.  The remainder are likely to be shredded, or deleted, as only “records identified as valuable for future administrative need” are kept.

You can see our annotated list of the Telegraph’s list here - our volunteers have added links to most of the bodies’ pages on WhatDoTheyKnow, so you can more easily make your final FOI requests to them…

Please send any missing contact details to the WhatDoTheyKnow team.

I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode. It has a number of features not available elsewhere as far as I know, including:

• Full Northern Ireland coverage – we found a free and open dataset from the Office of National Statistics, called NSPD Open, available for a £200 data supply charge. We’ve paid that and uploaded it to our data mirror under the terms of the licence, so you don’t have to pay – if you feel like contributing to the charity that runs mySociety to cover our costs in this, please donate! :-)
• Actual boundaries – for any specific area, you can get the co-ordinates of the boundary in either KML, JSON, or WKT – be warned, some can be rather big!
• Point lookup – given a point, in any geometry PostGIS knows about, it can tell you about all the areas containing that point, from parish and ward up to European electoral region.
• History – large scale boundary changes will be stored as new areas; as of now, this means the site contains the Westminster constituency boundaries from both before and after the 2010 general election, queryable just like current areas.

If you wish to use our service commercially or are considering high-volume usage, please get in touch to discuss options; the data and source code are available under their respective licences from the site. I hope this service may prove useful – we will slowly be migrating our own sites to use this service (FixMyStreet has already been done and already seems a bit nippier), so it should hopefully be quite reliable.

Thanks must go to the bodies releasing this open data that we can build upon and provide these useful services, and everyone involved in working towards the release of the data. Thanks also to everyone behind GeoDjango and PostGIS, making working with polygons and shapefiles a much nicer experience than it was back in 2004.

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.