No lolling about in the sun for us, as we follow an endless chain of projects through the hot months. Inured to hasslebot, we’ve not been posting to this blog much. Instead, busy working on, or soon about to work on:
- The ePetitions site for Number 10
- On a syndicated version of PledgeBank for someone’s large global warming campaign later in the year, and another for a fundraiser for a Brazilian NGO
- Making more maps (like these) for the Department for Transport
- Adding an API to TheyWorkForYou, paid for by an award from the Department for Constitutional Affairs
- Meetings endless meetings. I’ve given up trying to track Tom meeting people, and just assume at all times he is in an important meeting.
- Supporting all our existing sites – customer support emails, nursing parliament screen scrapers, fixing up WriteToThem contact details, making sure our servers don’t break.
And that’s without mentioning Neighbourhood Fix-it and the call for proposals. Later in the year. Have I missed anything?
Have a good weekend!
I haven’t posted here for a while – in late May / early June I was on holiday in China for a month. After 18 months of hectic mySociety with only a break for a week, I needed it!
Since I got back, I’ve been busy on the no. 10 petitions site, which in the tag-team coding way that we do, Matthew has now taken over for a bit. And I’m doing something I’m hesitatingly calling “geocascading pledges”.
I’m not quite sure what to call it yet. It lets you make one pledge, but whose target counts separately in different towns. When someone signs up, they also choose a place. Rather than having to make a separate pledge for everywhere in the world, you can just make one.
Here’s an example pledge, which is also real (more on that later), so do sign it if you like. And then post your thoughts in the comments – it needs a bit of polishing yet.
mySociety has been asked to do some work on an online petition system for Number 10 Downing street. mySociety is delighted to have been asked to bring our experience to the task, and aims to develop a new tool as easy to use, popular and trustworthy as our other non-partisan democractic web sites. In particular we are pleased to have jointly designed a system in which moderation is extremely transparent, and which we hope can be used as an exemplar of good practice elsewhere.
Francis and Matthew have just started coding, and we plan to have a public beta running later in the year. All the code that is generated by mySociety (and which isn’t specific to the No10 site, like logos) will of course be available under open source licences, and we will be delighted to talk to other organisations who are interested in petition systems themselves.
