mySociety blog » TheyWorkForYou

Last week I gave my first presentation by video conference. It was to the intriguing Circus Foundation, who are running a series of workshops on new democracy. It came about because I was a bit busy and tired to travel from Cambridge into London. Charles Armstrong, from the Circus Foundation, suggested that I present over the Internet.

We used Skype audio and video, combined with GoToMeeting so my laptop screen was visible on a projector to an audience in London. Apparently my voice was boomed round the room. It was a slightly odd experience, more like speaking on the radio. However, I had a good serendipitous one to one chat while we were setting up, with Jonathan Gray from OKFN.

I was asked to give a quick overview of mySociety, as a few people in the audience hadn’t heard of us, and also to talk about how I saw the future of democracy. I talked about three of our sites, and what I’d like to see in each area in 10 years time.

• TheyWorkForYou opens up access to conventional, representational democracy, between and during elections. In 10 years time, I asked for Parliament to publish all information about its work in a structured way, as hinted at in our Free Our Bills campaign. So it is much easier for everyone to help make new laws better.
• FixMyStreet is local control of the things people care about, a very practical democracy. In 10 years time I’d like to see all councils running their internal systems (planning, tree preservation orders… everything that isn’t about individuals) in public, so everyone can see and be reassured about what is being done, why and where.
• WhatDoTheyKnow shows the deep interest that there is by the public in the functioning of all areas of government. In 10 years time, I’d like to see document management systems in wide use by public authorities that publish all documents by default. Only if overridden for national security or data protection reasons would they be hidden.

Charles Armstrong, from the Circus Foundation, has written up the workshop.

Downsides of the video conferencing were that I couldn’t hear others speak, as they didn’t have the audio equipment. I had to take questions via Charles. This meant I also couldn’t participate in the rest of the evening, or easily generally chat to people. All very solvable problems, with a small amount of extra effort - Charles is going to work on it for another time.

Of course this also all saves on carbon emissions (cheekily, taking off my mySociety hat for a moment, sign up to help lobby about that).

My house mate just said that his friend, who is at sixth form college, just had a PSHE (personal, social and health education) lesson in which they studied the website TheyWorkForYou.com.

Apparently it is good and I should go to it.

The epic task of manually matching each of the 42,019 video clips of MPs was started way, way back, ooh, about 12 whole weeks ago. Two days ago the Number 1 rated volunteer timestamper in our league table, Abi Broom, completed the last clip in our database, bringing her personal tally to 8,543 clips.

Abi Broom, No1 timestamping league table champ

Last night we went out and met with Abi and Robert Whittakker, one of the other super-timestampers who had done over 2,000 himself.

As a result of their efforts, and those of hundreds of other volunteers, we have put all the video that we have of the House of Commons sitting over the last year online, next to the text of the debates. The many thousands of people per day who visit TheyWorkForYou can, as a direct consequence of this work, now see video of most of the debates for the last year. When people embed clips on their own sites, that’ll also be thanks in part to our volunteers.

Robert Whittaker, down in 5th place with a measly 2047 clips to his name

When Parliament starts again in the Autumn there’ll be another 300-400 clips a day to do, but we have a feeling the only problem doing them will be who gets to them first.

In the meantime, we’ll soon be working on another game-like toy to help create more data. Hint - it might have something to do with GroupsNearYou.

One of the special pieces of magic in TheyWorkForYou is its email alerts, sending you mail whenever an MP says a word you care about in Parliament. Lots of sites these days have RSS, and lots have search, but surprisingly few offer search based email alerts. My Mum trades shares on the Internet, setting it to automatically buy and sell at threshold values. But she doesn’t have an RSS reader. So, it’s important to have email alerts.

So naturally, when we made WhatDoTheyKnow, search and search based email alerts were pretty high up the list, to help people find new, interesting Freedom of Information requests. To implement this, I started out using acts_as_solr, which is a Ruby on Rails plugin for Solr, which is a REST based layer on top of the search engine Lucene.

I found acts_as_solr all just that bit too complicated. Particularly, when a feature (such as spelling correction) was missing, there were too many layers and too much XML for me to work out how to fix it. And I had lots of nasty code to make indexing offline - something I needed, as I want to safely store emails when they arrive, but then do the risky indexing of PDFs and Word documents later.

The last straw was when I found that acts_as_solr didn’t have collapsing (analogous to GROUP BY in SQL). So I decided to bite the bullet and implement my own acts_as_xapian. Luckily there were already Xapian Ruby bindings, and also the fabulous Xapian email list to help me out, and it only took a day or two to write it and deploy it on the live site.

If you’re using Rails and need full text search, I recommend you have a look at acts_as_xapian. It’s easy to use, and has a diverse set of features. You can watch a video of me talking about WhatDoTheyKnow and acts_as_xapian at the London Ruby User Group, last Monday.

TheyWorkForYou now finds whenever an old version of Hansard is referenced (which they do by date and column number, e.g. Official Report, 29 February 2008, column 1425) and turns the citation into a link to a search for the speeches in that column on that date. This only really became feasible when we moved server, upgraded Xapian, and added date and column number metadata (among others), allowing much more advanced and focussed searching - the advanced search form gives some ideas. Perhaps in future we’ll be able to add some crowd-sourcing game to match the reference to the exact speech, much like our video matching (nearly 80% of our archive done!). :)

Kudos to Google and Yahoo! for spotting this change within a couple of days, as they’re now so busy crawling everything for changes that they’re slowing the whole website down… ;-)

If you enter your postcode on TheyWorkForYou and it’s Scottish or Northern Irish, you’re now presented with your MSPs and MLAs as well as your MP, which makes sense given the site covers their Parliament and Assembly respectively. :-) You also get an extra tab in the navigation linking through to Your MSPs or MLAs. In order to do this, I needed a quick way of determining if a postcode was Northern Irish or Scottish. Northern Ireland was easy, as all postcodes there begin with BT. I assumed Scotland was also easy, which turned out to be true apart from the TD postcode area that straddled the border like a mail-sorting Niagara Falls. After some very dull investigation, I eventually worked out that e.g. most of TD15 is in England, but (amongst others) TD15 1X* is in Scotland, except for TD15 1XX which is apparently back in England. The final result was the postcode_is_scottish() function in postcode.inc, which (hopefully) correctly determines if a given postcode is Scottish or not - perhaps someone else will find it useful.

Debate pages that have at least one timestamped speech (such as the previously mentioned last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions) have a video fixed to the bottom right hand corner (if your browser is recent enough) showing that debate. While playing the video, the currently playing speech is highlighted with a yellow background, and you can start watching from any timestamped speech by clicking the “Watch this” link by any such speech. So how does all that work?

I’m very proud of this feature, I wasn’t sure it would be possible, and it’s very exciting. :-)

Flash has an ExternalInterface API, where JavaScript can call functions in the Flash, and vice-versa. When the video player loads, it requests an XML list from the server of all speech GIDs and timestamps for the current debate (here’s the file for the above debate). So when someone clicks a “Watch this”, it calls a moveVideo function in main.mxml with the GID of the speech, which loops through all the speeches and moves to the correct point if possible.

The highlighting works the other way - as the video is playing, it checks to see which speech we’re currently in, and if there’s been a change, it calls the updateSpeech function in TheyWorkForYou’s JavaScript, which finds the right row in the HTML and changes the class in order to highlight it. Quite straightforward, really, but it does make following the debate very simple and highlights the linking between the video and the text, all done by our excellent volunteers (join in! :) ).

Talking of our busy timestampers, I’ve also been busy making improvements (and fixing bugs) to the timestamping interface to make things easier for them. As well as warnings when it looks like two people are timestamping the same debate at the same time, various invisible things have been changed, such as using other people’s timestamps to make the start point for future timestamps on the same day more accurate. I also added a totaliser, using the Google Chart API, for which you simply have to provide image size and percentage complete.

Approaching 45% of our entire archive of video timestamped, with the totaliser approaching the chartreuse :-)

Previous articles

1. The Flash player
2. Seeking
3. Highlighting the current speech

Our video is streamed via progressive HTTP, using lighttpd and mod_flv_streaming. This works by having keyframe metadata at the start of the FLV (Flash video) file (we add ours using yamdi as that doesn’t load the whole file into memory first), which maps times within the video to byte positions within the file. When someone drags the position slider, or presses a skip button, the player actually changes the source of the video to something like file.flv?start=<byte position> which starts a new download from that point in the video. This means you can seek to parts of the video not yet downloaded, which is definitely a required feature.

The video is split up into programme chunks, according to BBC Parliament’s schedule, so each Oral Questions will (approximately) be its own video chunk, and the main debates will be a couple of chunks. By default, the video player will show a screengrab from the start of the video, as that’s all that’s available when it first loads (you have to load the start of the FLV file to fetch the keyframe metadata in order to move anywhere else :) ). I wanted the player to show a relevant screengrab before you hit Play, so came up with the slightly messy workaround of setting the volume to 0, seeking and playing the video for under a second in order to start it from the new point and show the video, then stopping it and resetting the volume. It works most of the time :-)

Some of our video chunks have jumps in them, due to problems in downloading the original WMV stream. The timestamping interface has a link for people to let us know of such problems, so that we can mark the relevant speeches as missing video and not have them be offered to future timestampers. One valiant volunteer, Tim, let us know about two such videos, but with the added oddity that if you let them play, they would happily carry on past their “end” point, but this made timestamping those speeches quite difficult.

I started investigating, firstly noting that both videos should have been 6 hours long, but were both listed as 1:20:24, which I thought was a bit of an odd coincidence. After reading the FLV file specification, it turned out that 32-bit millisecond timestamps in FLV are split into two - first the low 24 bits, then the high 8 bits. 2^24 = 16,777,216, which in milliseconds is 4 hours, 39 minutes, 37 seconds, which is pretty much exactly what the two videos’ durations were short by! All the timestamps in our FLV files were not setting the high byte, so after 4:39:37, they were wrapping round to 0 (and thus 6 hours became 1:20:24ish).

Our video processing consists of four major steps - the downloading script uses ffmpeg to convert each 75 minute chunk from WMV to MPEG; then nightly processing uses ffmpeg again to convert the right bits of these MPEG files to FLV, mencoder to join the relevant FLV files into one FLV chunk, then yamdi to add the metadata. My first try at a solution was to alter yamdi to increment the high byte itself, which fixed the duration display and let you seek to high times, but when you tried to go to e.g. 5 hours, the video started playing from the right point but the video thought it was playing from 20 minutes in. This would obviously confuse timestamping!

As the FLV files produced by ffmpeg were all under 75 minutes long, they couldn’t have the problem. It turned out we were running an old version of mencoder, and updating that and converting all our long video files fixed the problem. Phew :-)

Join us later today for my third short technical talk on TheyWorkForYou video, where I’ll explain how our Flash application talks to the HTML and vice-versa to enable the “Watch this” and highlighting of speeches.

1. The Flash player
2. Seeking
3. Highlighting the current speech

TheyWorkForYou video timestamping has been launched, over 40% of available speeches have already been timestamped, and (hopefully) all major bugs have been fixed, so I can now take a short breather and write this short series of more technical posts, looking at how the front end bits I wrote work and hang together.

Let’s start with the most obvious feature of video timestamping - the video player itself. :) mySociety is an open-source shop, so it was great to discover that (nearly all of) Adobe Flex is available under the Mozilla Public Licence. This meant I could simply download the compiler and libraries, write some code and compile it into a working SWF Flash file without any worries (and you can do the same!).

Writing a Flex program is split into three main areas - MXML that lays out your application, defines any web services you’re using and so on; CSS to define the style of the various components; and ActionScript to deal with things like events, or talking to the JavaScript in the parent HTML. My code is probably quite shoddy in a number of places - it’s my first application in Flex :-) - but it’s all available to view if you want to take a peek, and it’s obviously running on the live TheyWorkForYou site.

To put a video component in the player is no harder than including an <mx:VideoDisplay> element - set the source of that, and you have yourself a video player, no worrying about stream type, bandwidth detection, or anything else. :) You can then use a very useful feature called data binding to make lots of things trivial - for example, I simply set the value of a horizontal slider to be the current playing time of the video, and the slider is then automatically in the right place at all times. On the downside, VideoDisplay does appear to have a number of minor bugs (the most obvious one being where seeking can cause the video to become unresponsive and you have to refresh the page; it’s more than possible it’s a bug in my code, of course, but there are a couple of related bugs in Adobe’s bug tracker).

As well as the buttons, sliders and the video itself, the current MXML contains two fades (one to fade in the hover controls, one to fade them out), one time formatter (to format the display of the running time and duration), and three web services (to submit a timestamp result, delete a mistaken timestamp, and fetch an array of all existing timestamps for the current debate). These are all called from various places within the ActionScript when certain events happen (e.g. the Now button or the Oops button is clicked).

Compiling is a simple matter of running mxmlc on the mxml file, and out pops a SWF file. It’s all straightforward, although a bit awkward at first working again with a strongly-typed, compiled language after a long time with less strict ones :-) The documentation is good, but it can be hard to find - googling for [flex3 VideoDisplay] and the like has been quite common over the past few weeks.

Tomorrow I will talk about moving around within the videos and some bugs thrown up there, and then how the front end communicates with the video in order to highlight the currently playing speech - for example, have a look at last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions.

1. The Flash player
2. Seeking
3. Highlighting the current speech

Wow! The video timestamping site on TheyWorkForYou has been live for just under ten days, but you’ve already managed to timestamp almost 14,000 clips - that’s almost 40% of our entire video archive!

Thank you for all the good work - and especially to our top timestampers. David Jones, Alex Hazell and Lee Maguire are currently the top three in the overall rankings, but there are five more people who have timestamped more than 500 clips, another seventeen people who have done 100 clips or more, and more than 100 people who’ve done anything from 1 to 100 clips. And of course, there’s also a fair few anonymous people who haven’t yet registered, so their individual contributions to the “anonymous” total of 3349 clips are not recorded on the league tables. Remember, we’ll be handing out prizes to the top timestampers, so get registered before you timestamp your next video!

We’re starting to collect a list of notable clips that we can use to compile a “best of parliament” video gallery - if you would like to nominate a particular speech, please leave a comment below or send an email to team@theyworkforyou.com - just tell us the name of the MP speaking, and the URL of the page where this speech appears on theyworkforyou.com. We’ll put the best of them together and publish a list later this summer.

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!

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)

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.

Some lovely new volunteers have been working their socks off to add the Scottish Parliament to TheyWorkForYou. Yay!

Unfortunately, the server that TheyWorkForYou sits on is almost full, so we can’t launch their hard work. Boo!

TheyWorkForYou isn’t an externally funded project, and we need funding from other sources to keep it growing and improving. So if the season has filled you with generosity of spirit, why not drop us a few pennies to pay for some upgrades? Any extra beyond what we need will go into the general pot to keep mySociety running and the developers from starving.