mySociety blog » TheyWorkForYou

An MP page scorecard from the re-launched Mzalendo

When TheyWorkForYou was built by a group of volunteer activists, many years ago, it was a first-of-a-kind website. It was novel because it imported large amounts of parliamentary data into a database-driven website, and presented it clearly and simply, and didn’t supply newspaper-style partisan editorial.

These days dozens of such sites exist around the world. But today sees the launch of a rather-special new transparency site: Mzalendo, covering the Parliament of Kenya.

Mzalendo (which means ‘Patriot’ in Swahili) has been around for a few years too, as a blog and MP data website founded by volunteer activists Conrad and Ory. However, over the last few months mySociety’s team members Paul, Jessica and Edmund, plus the team at Supercool Design have been helping the original volunteers to rebuild the site from the ground up. We think that what’s launched today can stake a claim to being a true ‘second generation’ parliamentary monitoring site, for a few reasons:

• It is entirely responsively designed, so that it works on the simplest of mobile web browsers from day one.
• All the lessons we learned from storing political data wrongly have been baked into this site (i.e we can easily cope with people changing names, parties and jobs)
• Every organisation, position and place in the system is now a proper object in the database. So if you want to see all the politicians who went to Nairobi University, you can.
• There is lots of clear information on how parliament functions, what MPs and committees do, and so on.
• It synthesizes some very complex National Taxpayer’s Association data on missing or wasted money into a really clear ‘scorecard‘, turning large sums of money into numbers of teachers.

The codebase that Mzalendo is based on is free and open source, as always. It is a complete re-write, in a different language and framework from TheyWorkForYou, and we think it represents a great starting point for other projects. Over the next year we will be talking to people interested in using the code to run such sites in their own country. If this sounds like something of interest to you, get in touch.

Meanwhile, we wish Ory and Conrad the best of luck as the site grows, and we look forward to seeing what the first users demand.

December 23rd

Santa's Chocolate Coin Mint by Johnathan_W

If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do,

If you haven’t got a ha’penny,

Then God bless you.

We wish you all a merry and prosperous Christmas – and for those of you who are already feeling quite prosperous enough, may we point you in the direction of our charitable donations page?

mySociety’s work is made possible by donations of all sizes and from all sorts of people. Those donations help fund all the online projects we create; projects that give easy access to your civic and democratic rights. If that’s important to you, show your appreciation, and we promise we’ll make the best use of every penny.

Thank you for sticking with us through this month-long post. We hope you’ve found it interesting and we wish you the very merriest of Christmases.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ – see our Contacts page to find individual projects’ social media links.

December 22nd

Santa Watching by LadyDragonflyCC

What’s behind the door? A letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

We think we’ve been pretty good this year. We’ve tried to keep our local neighbourhood clean, help with problems, and aid those in need, so we’re hoping there are a few presents coming our way.

If you can fit them down the chimney, here’s what we’re dreaming of:

More publicly available data Of course, we were delighted to hear in Mr Osborne’s autumn statement that all sorts of previously-inaccessible data will be opened up.

We’re wondering whether this new era will also answer any of our FixMyStreet geodata wishes. Santa, if you could allocate an elf to this one, we’d be ever so pleased.

Globalisation …in the nicest possible way, of course. This year has seen us work in places previously untouched by the hand of mySociety, including Kenya and the Philippines. And we continue to give help to those who wish to replicate our projects in their own countries, from FixMyStreet in Norway to WhatDoTheyKnow in Germany.

Santa, please could you fix it for us to continue working with dedicated and motivated people all around the world?

A mySociety Masters degree We’re lucky enough to have a team of talented and knowledgeable developers, and we hope we will be recruiting more in the coming year. It’s not always an easy task to find the kind of people we need – after all, mySociety is not your average workplace – so we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably easiest to make our own.

Back in February, Tom started thinking about a Masters in Public Technology. It’s still something we’re very much hoping for. Santa, is it true you have friends in academic circles?

FixMyTransport buy-in - from everyone! Regular users of FixMyTransport will have noticed that there are different kinds of response from the transport operators: lovely, fulsome, helpful ones, and formulaic ones. Or, worse still, complete refusal to engage.

Santa, if you get the chance, please could you tell the operators a little secret? Just tell them what those savvier ones already know – that FixMyTransport represents a chance to show off some fantastic customer service. And with 25,000 visitors to the site every week, that message is soon spread far and wide.

(more…)

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.

TheyWorkForYou has, until now, only covered things that have already happened, be that Commons main chamber debates since 1935, Public Bill committees back to 2000, or all debates in the modern Northern Ireland Assembly.

Upcoming business

From today, we are taking the UK Parliament’s upcoming business calendar and feeding it into our database and search engine, which means some notable new features. Firstly, and most simply, you can browse what’s on today (or the next day Parliament is sitting), or 16th May. Secondly, you can easily search this data, to e.g. see if there will be something happening regarding Twickenham. And best of all, if you’re signed up for an email alert – see below for instructions – you’ll get an email about any matching future business along with the matching new Hansard data we already send. We currently send about 25,000 alerts a day, with over 65,000 email addresses signed up to over 111,000 alerts.

Mark originally wrote some code to scrape Parliament’s business papers, but this sadly proved too fragile, so we settled on Parliament’s calendar which covers most of the same information and more importantly has (mostly) machine-readable data. Duncan and I worked on this intermittently amidst our other activities, with Duncan concentrating on the importer and updating our search indexer (thanks as ever to Xapian) whilst I got on with adding and integrating the new data into the site.

New TheyWorkForYou home page

I’ve also taken the opportunity to rejig the home page (and fix the long-standing bug with popular searches that meant it was nearly always Linda Gilroy MP!) to remove the confusingly dense amount of recent links, bring it more in line with the recently refreshed Scottish Parliament and Northern Ireland Assembly home pages, and provide more information to users who might not have any idea what the site covers.

Signing up for an email alert: If you want to receive an email alert on a particular person (MP, Lord, MLA or MSP), visit their page on TheyWorkForYou and follow the “Email me updates” link. If you would like alerts for a particular word or phrase, or anything else, simply do a search for what you’re after, then follow the email alert or RSS links to the right of the results page.

One of the most popular features on TheyWorkForYou is the plain English, non-judgemental vote analyses on MP pages that say things like “voted strongly against introducing a smoking ban“.  We call these ‘policies’, and they are authored by skilled people using the volunteer run PublicWhip website.

Making each one of these policies is a painstaking task, requiring good knowledge of how the Parliamentary voting system works, good writing skills, patience, and the strength of character not to let your own views about the issues cloud the analysis. It is of utmost importance to both mySociety and our users that these policies are fair and trustworthy.

Earlier this year we started to update the process by which we made new policies to make it even more rigorous, which we wrote about here. Marcus Fergusson and Stephen Young came onboard and did sterling work, but they have now moved on to greater things, and so we’re looking to recruit two to three new people to do this job. Uber volunteer Richard Taylor has been helping out recently, but this is really a job for two or more people.

You might very well ask ‘why two people, given the work is part time?’. The answer is that we really want every new policy to be cross-checked by two different people every time it is added or amended. This is to help eliminate possible mistakes, and prevent any unconscious biases.

We pay for this work on a piece work basis – £160 a time for a combination of one new policy authored, and one other policy double-checked. This money comes mainly from people making small donations, which I think helps keep everyone focussed on how important it is to get these right. We hope to add about two new policies a month, once the new team is up to speed.

If you’d like to be considered, please email hello@mysociety.org with ‘mspolicies’ in the subject line. Applications close 22nd November 2010.

The two days leading up to election day are a hugely important time for less politically-obsessive voters. The parties know that a lot of people are only starting to seriously think how to vote today and tomorrow, and TheyWorkForYou saw its biggest spike ever the day before the election, way back in 2005.

This means it’s a super-important time to get trustworthy, non-partisan information in front of as many people as possible. And you can help by doing the following simple things:

1. Go to your constituency page on the TheyWorkForYou Election Quiz and take a good look at the answers. Is there anything surprising in the answers? Has anyone failed to respond who really shouldn’t? Is there anything funny in the responses? Make a couple of notes about what you think are the most interesting findings.

2. If you know the name of your local papers or radio stations, try to Google for the email or phone number of the news desk. If you don’t know the names, try sticking the name of your nearest town into a media database like this, to get a phone number or email address.

3. If possible, you should start your pitch by phoning rather than emailing. If you get a phone number for a news desk, give them a bell and say that you’re a volunteer from “The country’s largest non-partisan election information project”, and ask for the email of a specific person who might be interested in a story about what local candidates are saying.

4. Once you have an email address of a specific journalist, compose a locally specific email for them, along the following lines:

“Hi X,

I’m a resident of Z constituency, and this election I’ve been one of 6000 volunteers helping  to build an unprecedented project to get candidates across the country to go on the record, in conjunction with the website TheyWorkForYou.com. It’s a strictly non-partisan project, aimed at giving voters a really clear, spin-free view of what their candidates stand for. I’d really appreciate it if you could give it some coverage before election day.

In my constituency, N candidates have completed our survey. From this we can see some quite interesting things, namely:

* Candidate A thinks…

* Candidate B thinks…

Would you be so kind as to print a story encouraging people to check our their candidates via TheyWorkForYou.com, and mentioning some of the highlights I’ve included?

all the best,

Your name, email, phone”

5. An hour after you send the email through, give the journalist a call back to see if they need any more help.

6. If you do this, please leave us a comment on this post so we know who’s had a go!

Thank you for helping spread some non-partisan information this election time, and enjoy the election…

As you may know, TheyWorkForYou are conducting a survey of candidates for Parliament. You can view the questions for your constituency on this list.

Quite a few people have been asking how we worked out the questions. There are two parts to this, one local and one national.

Local questions

We used the power of volunteers.

Thousands of DemocracyClub members were asked to suggest local issues in there area. These were then edited by other volunteers, to have consistent grammar, and be worded as statements to agree/disagree with, and filtered to remove national issues. The full criteria and examples are available.

You can view the issues for any constituency on the DemocracyClub site. They are in the “local questions” tab. e.g. For Liverpool, Riverside (where I live) you would go here.

We’ve ended up with local issues for about 85% of constituencies. They’re really interesting and high quality, and quite unique for a national survey.

Thank you to all the volunteers who helped make this happen!

National questions

This was hard, because we felt that asking more than 15 questions would make the survey too long. We also wanted to be sure it was non-partisan.

We convened a panel of judges, either from mySociety/Democracy Club or with professional experience in policy, and from across the political spectrum. They were:

• James Crabtree, chair of judges, trustee of mySociety, journalist for Prospect magazine
• Tim Green, Democracy club developer, Physics student, Cambridge University.
• Michael Hallsworth, senior researcher, Institute for Government.
• Will Davies, sociologist at University of Oxford, has worked for left of centre policy think tanks such as IPPR and Demos.
• Andrew Tucker, researcher at Birkbeck, worked for Liberal Democrats from 1996-2000.
• Robert McIlveen, research fellow, Environment and Energy unit at Policy Exchange, did PhD on Conservative party election strategy.

They met at the offices of the Institute for Government, and had a 3 hour judging session on 29th March 2010. They were asked to think of 8-15 questions, with multiple choice answers, which could usefully be answered both by members of the public and prospective candidates for national office.

To ensure maximum transparency, the discussions of the judges were recorded. You can download the recordings in two parts: part 1, part 2 (2 hours, 20 mins total).

Details of the broad framework the judges operated under are given by the chair of judges, James Crabtree, a trustee of mySociety, in the opening to the recordings.

Please do ask any questions in the comments below.

The following is a message that we’d like to see emailed around within political parties of all stripes. If you work for a party, or know anyone who does, please send it along:

———-

Hi there,

TheyWorkForYou.com has sent online surveys to nearly 3000 candidates
across the UK, including most of your party’s candidates. If you don’t know it, TheyWorkForYou is probably the largest politician transparency website in the UK, with about 3m visitors last year.

The survey we’ve sent is a rigorously neutral attempt to clarify candidates positions on many of the biggest issues at the election. It is also a long-term document – the data that comes from candidate responses will be viewed millions of times between now and the general election after this one. It also contains both local and national questions.

There are 6000+ volunteers now nagging non-responsive candidate.  You can help your party improve its responsiveness rating, here, but passing on the word that TheyWorkForYou’s survey is not push-polling, not single issue, not short-termist:
http://www.democracyclub.org.uk/twfy/chart/

Please help us by passing on the message that TheyWorkForYou will be one of the main ways that new MPs from all parties (and none) will be scrutinised and neither we nor new MPs want to start our relationship with a “refused to go on the record” badge on their pages.

If you are a candidate, and you want to do the survey, check your email for TheyWorkForYou (no spaces). If you don’t have it, drop a mail to developers@democracyclub.org.uk and it’ll be sent along shortly.

many thanks,

The staff and volunteers at TheyWorkForYou and Democracy Club

In January last year, at our yearly staff and volunteers retreat, we decided that TheyWorkForYou should do something special for the general election. We decided that we wanted to gather information on where every candidate in every seat stood on what most people would think were the biggest issues, not just nationally but locally too.

Our reasons for setting this ambitious goal were two fold. First, we thought that pinning people down to a survey that didn’t reward rhetorical flourishes would help the electorate cut through the spin that accompanies all elections. But even more important was to increase our ability to hold new MPs to account: we want users of TheyWorkForYou in the future to be able to see how Parliamentary voting records align with campaign statements.

This meant doing quite a lot of quite difficult things:

1. Working out who all the candidates are (thousands of them)
2. Working out how to contact them.
3. Gathering thousands of local issues from every corner of the country, and quality assuring them.
4. Developing a balanced set of national issues.
5. Sending the candidates surveys,  and chasing them up.

The Volunteer Army

This has turned out to be a massive operation, requiring  the creation of the independent Democracy Club set up by the amazing new volunteers Seb Bacon and Tim Green,  and an entire candidate database site YourNextMP, built by another new volunteer Edmund von der Burg.  Eventually we managed to get at least one local issue in over 80% of constituencies, aided by nearly 6000 new volunteers spread from Lands End to John O’Groats. There’s at least one volunteer in every constituency in Great Britain, and in all but three in Northern Ireland. Volunteers have done more than just submit issues, they’ve played our duck house game (you can still win!)  to help gather thousands of email addresses, phone numbers, and postal addresses.

The Survey

What we ended up with is a candidate survey that is different for every constituency – 650 different surveys, in short. The survey always contains the same 15 national issues (chosen by a politically balanced panel held at the Institute for Government)  and then anything between zero and ten local issues. We’ve seen everything from cockle protection to subsidies for ferries raised – over 3000 local issues were submitted, before being painstakingly moderated, twice, by uber-volunteers checking for for spelling, grammar, obvious bias and straightforward interestingness (it isn’t really worth asking candidates if they are in favour of Good Things and against Bad Things).

In the last couple of days we’ve started to send out the first surveys – we’ve just passed 1000 emails, and there are at least 2000 still to be sent.

The Output

We’re aiming to release the data we are gathering on candidates positions on 30th April. We’ll build a nice interface to explore it, but we also hope that others will do something with what we are expecting to be quite a valuable dataset.

The Pressure

Candidates are busy people, so how do we get their attention? Happily, some candidates are choosing to answer the survey just because TheyWorkForYou has a well know brand in the political world, but this has limits.

The answer is that we are going to ask Democracy Club, and it’s army of volunteers to help. We’ll shortly roll out a tool that will tell volunteers which of their candidates haven’t taken the opportunity to go on the record , and provide a range of ways for them to push for their candidates to fill it in.

It would be a lie to say we’re confident we’ll get every last candidate. But we are confident we can make sure that no candidate can claim they didn’t see, or didn’t know it was important to their constituents. And every extra voice we have makes that more likely.

Join Democracy Club today

Making Parliament clearer; mySociety announces a new process for monitoring MP's votes. (Image: Monet)

mySociety is lucky enough to have a number of small donors who give us monthly donations, normally ranging from £5-£20 (if you like our work and want to support us, please do join them!). Today we’re announcing a change to TheyWorkForYou which is supported by these donations.

One of the most popular features on TheyWorkForYou is the vote analysis – the bit that tells you that your MP “voted strongly against introducing a smoking ban” and so on. These voting analyses cut through a massive wall of parliamentary opacity whilst still allowing visitors to examine the details first hand. Despite each analysis resulting in just a single line on TheyWorkForYou, each one is rather time-consuming to construct, and TheyWorkForYou has not updated them as much as our users deserve.

Thanks to our small donors we’ve now been able to commission two part time researchers, Marcus Fergusson and Stephen Young, to help add new vote analyses more regularly. We’re pleased to say that we’ve just rolled out the first new policies, covering issues relating to schools, inquests and the House of Lords. We aim to add a couple of new vote analyses a month for the foreseeable future.

We take the business of authoring analyses that are scrupulously fair and neutrally worded extremely seriously. To this end we have replaced our previously ad-hoc approach with a newly instituted process designed to ensure the maximum rigour and balance, and to ensure we focus on issues which MPs thought were important even if they were not so well covered by the media.

TheyWorkForYou’s analysis of MP’s voting positions relies on The Public Whip, a project run by Julian Todd which tracks which way MPs vote.

The new process for analysing MP’s positions works like this:

1. A list of votes in the current Parliament, ordered with the highest turnout at the top, is taken as a starting point. The turnout figure used is corrected to account for party abstentions.
2. mySociety’s researchers work down that list writing explanations in easy to read terms describing what the vote was about; they also identify other related votes on the same issue and research those too.
3. A “policy position on the issue” is then chosen against which MP’s votes are compared to determine to what extent they agree or disagree with it. Policy positions are written to be intelligible and interesting to a wide range of users and in such a way that votes to change the status quo are ultimately described on TheyWorkForYou MP pages as votes “for” that change.

We hope you find these analyses useful. Thanks to Richard Taylor for his divisions list and help with this post.

Current Birmingham parliamentary boundaries

Birmingham parliamentary boundaries at the next election

Parliamentary boundary changes appear to be a source of confusion to many people and organisations. The facts are quite simple – parliamentary boundary changes, proposed by the various Boundary Commissions, do not take effect until the next general election. Until then, your MP remains whoever they have been, no matter what literature you may get through your letter box, or what anyone may tell you.

As one example, take Birmingham City Council. Their page on constituencies and wards correctly states that Birmingham is divided into eleven parliamentary constituencies, but then goes on to list only ten – they are listing the new constituencies which do not yet exist, as Birmingham is losing one constituency at the next election. It appears that they have organised themselves along the new boundaries in advance – which is fine, but this doesn’t affect current Parliamentary representation, and so they should explain this clearly, as otherwise members of the public get confused (and blame us for giving them the “wrong” MP, when we haven’t done so). As you can see from the maps above (which highlight Birmingham, Hall Green), the constituencies will be changing their boundaries quite a bit, and we have had reports of people receiving letters from candidates in the next election who are MPs of different neighbouring constituencies, simply referring to themselves as an MP, which is a great source of confusion.

St Josephs Avenue is just below the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital

An inhabitant of St Josephs Avenue, Birmingham (behind the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital), which is currently within the Selly Oak parliamentary constituency (red), and the Northfield ward of Birmingham City Council (green), would, on looking at Birmingham City Council’s website, assume they’re in a parliamentary constituency called Northfield. Northfield is currently the constituency to the west of Selly Oak; at the next election, its boundary with Selly Oak will change to the blue line, at which point St Josephs Avenue will be in the Northfield constituency. But not until then.

Map of Streatham constituency at next election

Current Streatham parliamentary boundary

As another example (chosen purely as it has come up in user support), the Labour candidate for Streatham has a page about the constituency – obviously you would expect a candidate to be talking about the future constituency, but would it hurt to add some explanation that Streatham is currently a slightly different shape?

Boundaries of different things are all independent – if a ward boundary moves due to some local issue, the corresponding Parliamentary boundary does not necessarily change with it (probably not, in fact). So when Birmingham changed its ward boundaries back in 2003, they became out of sync with the Parliamentary constituencies. From the next election, things will be more in sync as the new Parliamentary boundaries are based on more recent ward boundaries, but this will again separate over time. All we can do is always clearly explain the current situation, and ask that others do the same.

Image from jaygoldman

Note: This post is a work in progress, I need your help to improve it, especially with knowledge of non-English sites

I was recently in Washington DC catching up with mySociety’s soul-mates at the Sunlight Foundation. As we talked about what was going on in the field of internet-enabled transparency, it came clear to me that there are now more identifiable categories of transparency website than there used to be.

Identifying and categorising these types of site turns out to be surprisingly useful.  First, it can help people ask “Why don’t we have anyone doing that in our country?” Second, it can help mySociety to make sure that when we’re planning ahead we don’t fail to consider certain options that be currently off our radar. Also, it gives me an excuse to tell you about some sites that you may not have seen before.

Anyway, enough preamble. Here they are as I see them – please give me more suggestions as you find them. As you can see there’s a lot more activity in some fields than others.

1. Transparency blogs & newspapers – At the technically simplest, but most manual labour-intensive end of the scale is sites, commercial and volunteer driven, whose owners use transparency to help them to write stories. Given almost every political blog does this a bit, it can be hard to name specific examples, but I will note that Heather Brooke is the UK’s pre-eminent FOI-toting journalist/blogger, and we’ve just opened a blog for our awesome volunteers on WhatDoTheyKnow to show their FOI skills to an as-yet unsuspecting public.

2. What Politicians do in their parliaments – These sites primarily include lists of politicians, and information about their primary activities in their assemblies, such as voting or speaking. This encompasses mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com, Rob McKinnon’s one man labour of love TheyWorkForYou.co.nz, Italy’s uber-deep OpenPolis.it (6 layers of government, anyone?), Germany’s almost-un-typable Abgeordnetenwatch,  Romania’s writ-wielding IPP.ro, Josh Tauberer’sGovTrack.us, plus the bonny bouncing babies OpenAustralia and Kildare Street (Ireland). Of special note here are Mzalendo (Kenya) who unlike everyone else, can’t reply on access to a parliamentary website to scrape raw data from, and Julian Todd’s UNDemocracy (International), that has to fight incredible technical barriers to get the information out.

3. Databases of questions and answers posed to politicians – These sites let people post politicians questions, and the publish the questions and answers. The Germans running Abgeordnetenwatch (Parliament Watch) seem to have had considerable success here, with newspapers citing what politicians say on their site. Yoosk has some politicians in the UK on it, too.

4. Money in politics – This comes in two forms, money given to candidates (MAPlight), and money bunged by politicians to their favourite causes (Earmark watch). In the UK, as far as I know, the Electoral Commission’s database remains currently unscraped, perhaps because the data is so ungranular.

5. Government spending – where the big money goes. In the US the dominant site is FedSpending.org, and in the UK we have ukpublicspending.co.uk.

6. Websites containing bills going through parliament, or the law as voted on – This includes the increasingly substantial OpenCongress in the US which saw major traffic during the Health Care debates, and the UK government’s own Acts database and  Statute Law Database. Much of the legal database field, however, remains essentially private.

7. Services that create transparency as a side effect of delivering services – Our own sites lead the way here: FixMyStreet‘s public problem reports and WhatDoTheyKnow’s FOI archive are both created by people who aren’t primarily using the site to enrich it – they’re using it to get some other service.

8. Election websites – These come in many forms, but what they have in common is their desire to shed light on the positions and histories of candidates, whether incumbents or new comers. The biggest beast here is Stemwijzer (Netherlands), probably in relative terms the most used transparency or democracy site ever. However these sites are popular in several places,  the big but highly labour intensive VoteSmart (US), Smartvote.ch (Switzerland), plus others.  mySociety is shortly to start to recruit constituency volunteers to help with our take on this problem, keep an eye on this blog if you want to know more.

9. Political document archives - This is a new category, now occupied by Sunlight’s Partytime archive for invitation to political events, and TheStraightChoice, Julian Todd and Richard Pope’s wonderful new initiative for archiving election leaflets and other paper propoganda.

10. Bulk data - Online transparency pioneer Carl Malamud doesn’t do sites, he does data. Big globs zipped up and made publicly available for coders and researchers to download and process. The US government has now stepped into this field itself with Data.gov, doubtless soon to be followed by data.gov.uk.

——

Please don’t shoot me if I’ve missed anything here, the world is a big place. But I thought that was a useful and interesting exercise, and I hope you’ll both find it useful, and help me improve it too. Comment away.

Hansard's Parliamentary Debates by hugovk (cc)

The House of Commons debate coverage on TheyWorkForYou has recently extended back from the 2001 general election to the 1935 general election, and our knowledge of MPs now extends back to the start of the 19th century. This means TheyWorkForYou now includes things such as Anthony Eden on the Suez Canal in 1956, saying “there was not foreknowledge that Israel would attack Egypt“; the debate the day after Bloody Sunday in 1972; Geoffrey Howe’s resignation statement in 1990; Neville Chamberlain on the eve and start of the second World War in 1939; and Winston Churchill‘s speeches to the House, such as We shall fight on the beaches and This was their finest hour in 1940. This and much, much more are available and searchable using our new improved advanced search, which allows you to filter by e.g. date range or person. We hope people enjoy researching this huge wealth of information (I certainly do), and add useful annotations to the text to help other people.

This would not have been possible without the original project by Parliament to digitise historical copies of Hansard and make them available, nor the internal Parliamentary project to clean up the data, match up speaker names, and so on. The project was kindly funded by the Ministry of Justice’s Innovation Fund, which also supported the creation of FixMyStreet and GroupsNearYou.

As a new edition has just been released, and I’ve had to tweak the parser to cope with the new highlighting, it’s a good time to write a brief article on TheyWorkForYou’s handling of the House of Commons Register of Members’ Financial Interests (Register of Members’ Interests as was before the current edition). Way back in the day, a scraper/parser was written (by either Julian or Francis) that monitors the Register pages on www.parliament.uk for new editions, and downloads and broadly parses the HTML into machine-readable data. The XML produced can be found at http://ukparse.kforge.net/parldata/scrapedxml/regmem/ – TheyWorkForYou then pulls in this XML into its database, and makes the latest data available on every MP’s page.

However, as it’s been scraping/parsing the Register since 2000, we can do more than that. Each MP’s page contains a link to a page giving the history of their entry in the Register – when things were added, removed, or changed. You can also view the differences between one edition of the Register and the next, or view a particular edition in a prettier form than the official site. There’s a central page containing everything Register-related at http://www.theyworkforyou.com/regmem/

Update: The Telegraph posted a retraction yesterday.

You may have seen coverage on various websites saying that a civil servant was sacked after posting a comment on TheyWorkForYou.

We’ve no idea what this story is about, but we’re pretty certain it has nothing whatsoever to do with TheyWorkForYou. No journalist bothered to contact us before running the story.

• There is no comment on TheyWorkForYou containing the text quoted in that article, nor anything like it, nor has there ever been. Nor in fact (as we’ve checked), on HearFromYourMP, WriteToThem, or WhatDoTheyKnow.
• Only one comment has been left on any contribution by Hazel Blears in 2009, and it’s definitely not related to this.
• 27 comments were left on 13th May, the date the comment was apparently posted; we’ve read them all and they’re all nothing to do with this.

So frankly, we’ve no idea what’s going on.

What we do know is that the implication that mySociety would merrily hand over sensitive personal data that ends up in getting someone sacked, without fighting tooth and nail for their privacy every inch of the way, is a complete misinterpretation of the way we work and the things we hold most dear. No-one has ever contacted us to ask us to hand over such data, nor have we ever done so.

We think what might have happened is a simple mis-remembering of the website that contained the problematic comment. We’re hoping to get in touch with Lisa Greenwood so we can get full details before asking the various media companies that have run with this for a correction.

Richard Pope has been redesigning mySociety’s biggest site TheyWorkForYou.com for a couple of months.

He’s done a heroic job, as has Matthew with his epic import of Hansard data from 1935 onwards.  TheyWorkForYou is a much better site for their combined work recently. We’ll be writing more on the historic stuff soon.

There are a few things I’d like from you as a member of the mySociety community:

1. Please say a big thanks to Richard. This was not an easy or relaxing task at all, and he’s done it brilliantly. Just check a Lords debate to see the attention to detail. We are a very lucky organisation to have him, as he’s always in demand.

2. Please give some constructive criticism on how it could be even better (please note, focussing on design here, we already have a load of feature priorities to deliver).

3. Anyone who could help supply a redesigned logo, or some nicely processed parliamentary-themed artwork to sit in the background grey-boxes on the homepage would be doing a very Good Deed for mySociety.

And lastly, please do pledge to become a TheyWorkForYou Patron, so we can keep doing things like this in the future!

‘Thumbs up’ by Carf (cc)

A few days ago mySociety asked the known possible candidates for Speaker to endorse 3 principles relating to making Parliament more transparent on the Internet.

We’ve now had endorsements which you can read on the individual pages of Sir George Young, Sir Menzies Campbell, Frank Field, Tony Wright and Sir Alan Beith , which until Parmijit Dhanda declared this morning, represented endorsement by 50% of the possible field. We also just recieved a typically frank and interrogative phonecall from Ann Widdecombe, who will be writing a formal response soon.

So, come on, John Bercow, Alan Haselhurst, Patrick Cormack, Sylvia Heal, and Chris Mullin. What’s holding up your replies? The days counter on your pages is telling the world how quick you are to respond…

Update: 11 June - John Bercow has now endorsed, and we’ve written to Margaret Beckett and Parmjit Dhanda, who’ve just declared their candidacies.

Update 2: Chris Mullin has told us he is ‘not a candidate’.

Update 3: Sir Alan Haselhurst has also endorsed.

Update 4 – Speaker Election Day: And Sir Michael Lord endorses too.

In less than 24 hours we’ve seen the first reply to our emails asking possible Speaker candidates to endorse our three principles. It is from Sir George Young – we’re looking forward to seeing the responses from the others that we wrote to.

Sir George is broadly supportive, which is great, and we’ve printed his reply in full on his own TheyWorkForYou MP page.

In the mean time, please do write to your MP and ask them to ensure that whoever they vote for, it is a candidate who has endorsed mySociety’s three simple principles, You really can have an impact on this issue: MPs are desperate to be seen to be acting for their constituents right now.

NB mySociety is strictly non-partisan and non-party aligned. We want all candidates from all parties to endorse these principles, and we have ensured that none of the wording of the principles leans towards any particular party or set of beliefs not connected to transparency in the modern age.

Speaker’s Chair (Parliamentary Copyright)

mySociety has today emailed (and in one case, posted) a set of 3 Principles which we believe it is important that all candidates for Speaker endorse, before the election of a new Speaker by MPs.

1. Voters have the right to know in detail about the money that is spent to support MPs and run Parliament, and in similar detail how the decisions to spend that money are settled upon.

2. Bills being considered must be published online in a much better way than they are now, as the Free Our Bills campaign has been suggesting for some time.

3. The Internet is not a threat to a renewal in our democracy, it is one of its best hopes. Parliament should appoint a senior officer with direct working experience of the power of the Internet who reports directly to the Speaker, and who will help Parliament adapt to a new era of transparency and effectiveness.

We will be posting the status of requests on the likely candidates web pages where we expect large numbers of people to see them before the vote in late June. We have also taken the unusual step of allowing possible candidates to leave a statement of up to 150 words on the principles.

(NB no candidates have actually declared at this stage, so we are starting with the BBC’s list of possibles)

Rationale

mySociety helped lead the campaign back in January to prevent the last ditch attempts to conceal MPs’ expenses. We did so not because, like the newspapers, we wanted to revel in embarrassment and scandal, but because we believe that in the Internet age, the only way for our democracy and government to thrive is if they are open and connected to the net as the rest of us expect them to be. The dramatic events seen in Parliament in recent days vindicate the view that secrecy breeds poor policies and seeds untrustworthy behaviour in the weaker willed.

Furthermore, more than a simple attitude of openness is required of the new Speaker: the public needs a genuine will to push for technological reform using the power of the Internet that will take both open-mindedness and a willing to tread on toes, especially in some parts of the unelected establishment.

Case in point: Over the last two years we have been trying to persuade Parliament to acknowledge that the way it publishes its Bills online is hopelessly inadequate for the Internet age. The campaign has faltered, despite multi partly endorsement from 140 MPs and a campaign membership of thousands. To see why, just take a look at this colourful and error-crammed internal email that we uncovered using the Freedom of Information Act, published for the first time today.

The new Speaker will have a tough job on their hands to overcome resistance of this kind. The best thing we can do is help the new Speaker, whoever they are, assume their new job with a clear mandate from the public, as well as from members.

Act!

That is why, as a final part of this call, we are asking you, our community, to write to your MP today to let them know that you expect them to vote for a candidate that has endorsed the principles above. Your voices to your own constituency MPs can resonate in a way that no blog post or newspaper article ever can. Go to it.

UPDATE: If you approve of what we did this week, and what to help make sure we can still do it in the future, please pledge to support us: http://www.pledgebank.com/supportmysociety

The vote on concealing MPs’ expenses has been cancelled by the government!

In other words – we won!

This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellwether for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.

Over 7000 people joined a Facebook group, they sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs. Hundreds of thousands of people found out about the story by visiting TheyWorkForYou to find something they wanted to know, reading an email alert, or simply discovered what was going on whilst checking their Facebook or Twitter pages. Almost all of this happened, from nowhere, within 48 hours, putting enough pressure on Parliament to force change.

Make no mistake. This is new, and it reflects the fact that the Internet generation expects information to be made available, and they expect to be able to make up their own minds, not be spoon fed the views of others. This campaign was always about more than receipts, it was about changing the direction of travel, away from secrecy and towards openness.

Today we stopped moving in the wrong direction. Tomorrow we start moving the right way. Sign up to our news mailing list (box on the right) to get updates on what mySociety gets up to.