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.

December 21st

New Year Resolution coaster by BazaarBizarreSF

What’s behind the window? 10 red-faced novice joggers.

It’s not long now until you’ll be making your new year’s resolutions. But will motivation drop off by February? Time to acquaint yourself with one of mySociety’s clever little projects: Hassleme.

Hassleme sends you reminders to do whatever it is you want to do, whether that’s to go for a run, tell someone you love them, or write another chapter of your blockbuster novel. Think of it as benign nagging.

Yes, you could set up your Google calendar to do just the same, but here’s the clever bit – Hassleme sends reminders at “semi-unpredictable intervals” . You can set a rough time period, such as every three days or every year – but you’ll never know precisely when that reminder will drop into your inbox.

You can even make a joint resolution, as a family, perhaps, or even in the office. Input multiple email addresses and we’ll randomise who gets each reminder – ideal for allocating tasks fairly.

Or use it to send a message to yourself ten years hence. Here are some examples from people who have done just that.

December 20th

Elves by Choo Yut Shing

What’s behind the door? Santa’s little helpers.

mySociety runs some pretty ambitious projects. There’s TheyWorkForYou, which publishes all parliamentary activity since 1935, as well as representatives’ voting records. Then there’s WhatDoTheyKnow, which has sent, and archived, over 30,000 freedom of information requests.

FixMyStreet maps all of Great Britain and sends your reports to the correct council contact. And now we also run FixMyTransport, with its details of over 300,000 public transport routes and stops.

None of these projects runs itself. mySociety’s core team only consists of a few people, so we rely on dedicated volunteers to help us manage the day-to-day maintenance of these sites. Our volunteers have been key to forging a community around each site, and to helping us understand exactly what we want the sites to be.

For example, our FixMyTransport volunteers (aka Anoraks) spend a lot of time leaving helpful comments on users’ problems, often before the operators can get around to answering themselves. Leading by example, they’re making FixMyTransport into a friendly and useful community, encouraging other users to make very constructive contributions, too.

The TheyWorkForYou volunteer team spent quite a bit of time analysing voting records earlier this year, allowing us to add more policy lines to each MP’s page, and providing a snapshot of their affiliations.

And, although WhatDoTheyKnow has been around for three years, the team still find themselves actively debating site policy.

We’re always delighted to welcome new volunteers. If you’re interested, drop us a line at hello@mysociety.org, or come along to one of our pub-meets. There’s one tomorrow! See the Dec 16th advent calendar entry, below, or watch this blog for details of the next one.

December 19th

Image by Smoobs

What’s behind the door? A little donkey.

If you’re using public transport this Christmas, make sure you pack all the essentials: good food, presents – and the web address for FixMyTransport.com.

We hope you have a smooth journey, but if not FixMyTransport will allow you to report overcrowding, delays, or freezing cold carriages – and all on-the-go, if you have a smartphone.

Christmas is for giving, so share that URL with family, friends, and even your fellow passengers, should you find yourself in a coach or train that’s going nowhere. The power to contact the nation’s transport operators directly may just be the greatest gift you’ll ever give.

Well, ok, maybe that’s putting it a bit strongly, but when we see new bus stops being installed, new ticket machines, and longer trains being commissioned, we do start to hear angels sing.

Start your report here, or click on issues near you to see what’s irking passengers in your area. Transport all running smoothly? Lucky you – but the recent issues page is always an interesting read.

December 16th

What’s behind the door? A cup of good cheer.

Holiday Cheer by John Morgan

Our last pub-meet of the year will be the usual chance to come and have a chat with the mySociety team and volunteers. Reindeer antlers and Santa hats are optional, but welcome. Mulled wine may be in evidence. Mince pies could well be found on the premises.

If you’ve been wanting to ask more about any of our projects, to find out about volunteering – or if you would just like a chat and a drink with friendly people – please do pop by.

When? This Wednesday, the 21st of December, from about 6pm and into the evening.

Where? We’ll be at the Prince Arthur, near Euston station in London (map). One or more of us will be wearing a mySociety hooded top, to help you identify us.

One of our New Year’s resolutions is to have meet-ups in places other than London, so if you live outside the capital, watch this space.

Spread the word Because we’re one of those new-fangled digital-type organisations, we encourage use of a hashtag: #mySocial. And you can let us know you’re coming by dropping us a tweet on @mySociety.

December 15th

What’s behind the door? A half-dead Christmas tree.

Time Over, Trees by Bruno Sanchez-Andrade Nuño

Christmas comes but once a year… and in its wake, the inevitable slew of dumped Christmas trees and uncollected bins.

In Swindon last year, household bins weren’t collected for three weeks. In Canterbury, a puzzled American tourist mistook the dead fir trees on every street for some kind of crazy English tradition.

Perhaps worse (certainly when it comes to timing), Midnight Mass was made considerably less pleasant for this church-goer in Appledore when he stepped in some dog poop.

We know councils are doing their best to clear things up in the new year, up and down the country – but if those browning Christmas trees, overflowing bins and bottle-littered streets are getting you down, don’t forget FixMyStreet.com.

December 14th

Puds in the Making by Infobunny

What’s behind the door? A steaming Christmas pudding.

TheyWorkForYou.com keeps a complete record of parliamentary business as far back as 1935. So not only does it  help  you stay up to date with the latest business in Parliament, it also acts as a fascinating, searchable archive.

Consider, for example:

• Why was an American actress refused permission to act in the pantomime Mother Goose? (More details in this 1936 newspaper)
• Just two months after WW2 broke out, which German goods were found on British shelves?
• How many Christmas cards did Tony Blair send in 2004?
• If church bells could only be rung as a signal of invasion, would ringing them on Xmas day cause confusion?
• Was Aberdeen worse hit than the rest of the country when it came to making Christmas puddings?
• Who played Father Christmas at the Westminster party this year?

You can search for any word or phrase on TheyWorkForYou.com. Click on ‘more options’, and you can also restrict the dates you search within.

December 13th

What’s behind the door? An icy pothole.

Roadworks by John Ashby

Does it count as bleak mid-winter yet? After the mild start to the season, in some parts of the country it still feels as if the really cold weather is yet to come.

And yet, the freeze won’t be long in coming. Uneven pavements and potholes turn from a mild inconvenience to a real hazard in the ice – and you will certainly have already noticed if your streetlights aren’t coming on, now that the dark evenings are here.

So here’s for one last big push on our Fix Before the Freeze campaign. Make sure you report all those pesky potholes, uneven pavements, and broken street lights before the snow and ice get here in earnest, and help make your local community a safer place this winter.

December 12th

What’s behind the door? An angelic host, complete with shiny halos.

Image by Mikael Colville-Andersen

Our website Pledgebank has been used for some good causes around Christmas time. It’s based on the simple idea of promising that you will do something if other people promise to, too. It’s an effective way of taking an action and multiplying its impact.

In previous years, we’ve seen a pledge to visit people who may be alone at Christmas, and another to walk for an hour on Christmas day, among others.

If you’ve got plans this Christmas – say, donating to charity, giving gifts to the poor, or even organising a party,  Pledgebank could be the tool that tips the balance and helps you get the people-power you need.

Pledgebank isn’t just for individuals: Barnet council have been innovative in their usage of the Pledgebank software for the good of their community. Check out how they are using it to arrange a collection of gifts for the needy, and gritting.

December 9th

Snowman Neighbor by Melinda Shelton

What’s behind the door? Frosty the headless snowman.

FixMyStreet is our website for reporting problems such as potholes or broken streetlights, but last January, one user in Brighton and Hove wanted to express his outrage about something else.

Unfortunately, the council have rather less control over the kicking down of snowmen. Much as we sympathise with the frustrated anonymous reporter, we can’t really blame the council for not responding to this particular complaint.

Meanwhile, in Midlothian, we see nature doing the fixing but the council apparently taking the credit, much to our user’s displeasure.

If your neighbourhood suffers from uncleared snow, by all means use FixMyStreet.com to report it this year. If you feel the gritting could have been better, report it. If your snowman suffers an injury, however, maybe keep it to yourself.

December 8th

Tree Baubles by Paula Bray

What’s behind the door? A boring old bauble again.

What is a “Christmas Tree bill”?

A search through Hansard reveals that this is a commonly-used term in Parliament, and it refers to a bill which, as it passes through its various stages, has all sorts of “baubles” hung on it – that is to say, small, unrelated issues which are added to the main legislation.

The term apparently originated in the States, but has become commonplace in UK parliamentary discourse – and indeed provides an opportunity for some florid extemporising, as David Burrowes, Private Secretary, demonstrated recently in a debate about knife crime:

“As we look forward to Christmas and see today the Third Reading of a criminal justice Bill, I am reminded of previous Government Bills that ended up as Christmas tree Bills with baubles being hung on them at any given opportunity as they went through Parliament. I am sure that as this Bill goes to the other place, Ministers will want to ensure that further baubles are not hung on it in the form of extra pieces of law that take the fancy of noble Lords, as well as any little elves.”

Did you know that you can subscribe to any word or phrase on TheyWorkForYou? It’s very handy for making sure you know whenever your pet topic is debated. Set up your alert here.

December 7th

What’s behind the door? A kindly Santa Claus

Random Xmas by Knitting Iris

Our website WriteToThem.com allows you to contact your elected representatives – even if you don’t know who they are.

When you input your postcode, you’re given a list of your local councillors, MPs, MEPs and anyone else who represents you in any of our governmental bodies. The site then allows you to contact them directly.

That’s all very well, but what about the highest administration of them all – the one who decides if you’ve been naughty or nice? Sadly, WriteToThem.com does not cover Lapland, but we do have a helpful page providing Santa’s postal address in full.

Meanwhile, it’s just a thought – but you might find that putting your wishlist in front of your local representatives actually has more effect than a letter sent up the chimney, especially if it concerns your civic or community rights. Start here.

December 6th

What’s behind the door? A fizzling, blinking neon light

Image by David Zellaby

Our parents always told us that if decorations weren’t removed by Twelfth Night, terrible things would happen – but it seems that some councils are not so superstitious. Users of our website FixMyStreet reveal the occasionally erratic handling of this tradition.

7th of January was already too late for a resident of Durham. How would he have felt had he lived in Thatcham, where decorations were still up on the 18th of January?

It gets worse. In Birmingham, one lonely decoration was spotted on the 31st of January. In Consett, not only were the decorations taken down after Epiphany had passed, but they had been on 24 hours a day for the entire Xmas period. In the village of Cark, the Christmas tree was blocking access to a car park in early February. But we think Bournemouth takes the prize, with a Christmas decoration reported as still being in place on the 15th of March.

People are always complaining that Christmas starts too early – and now it seems it’s also dragging on too late. If you’d like to report council decorations that have outstayed their welcome, don’t forget FixMyStreet.com this January.

The 5th of January, in fact, if you’d like to adhere to Twelfth Night superstition. We’ll be looking out for the spike in users on that day.

December 5th

The Great British Property Scandal

What’s behind the door? An inn, with no vacancies over the Christmas period

It’s more than 2,000 years since a heavily pregnant Mary was told there was no room at the inn. With zoning restrictions a thing of the far-distant future, an empty stable was repurposed for her use, and… well, you know the rest.

Today, if there’s an empty stable (or, more likely, a house) near you, Channel 4 want to know about it. They are broadcasting the first in their Great British Property Scandal series tonight, examining the causes behind homelessness.

Key to the campaign is the fact that there are over a million empty properties in the UK, while two million families need a home. On their site you’ll find an empty property spotter tool, which allows you to report any vacant buildings to your council. There’s also an app.

Those tools have been built by a crack team of mySociety developers, drawing on our extensive experience of mashing up postcode and constituency data, and sending reports off to the right council contacts. If you’re wondering where we honed such skills, look no further than FixMyStreet, WriteToThem, and TheyWorkForYou, among other mySociety projects.

Not everyone knows that mySociety are available for contracting. All revenue from our commercial activities goes towards funding our not-for-profit projects. It’d really make our Christmas special if you were to spread the word, next time you hear of someone in need of innovative and really rather well-priced development work.

December 2nd

Tweet Worthy by Alexander Baxevanis

What’s behind the door? Ten Lords a-tweeting

Why is a Christmas card better than a tweet? It turns out not to be the start of a bad joke…

As Roger Gale MP revealed in a debate on the use of electronic devices (including mobile phones) in the Chamber of the House of Commons, “multi-tasking and a dual use of time” means that in the six weeks before Christmas “committee tables will suddenly be piled with Christmas cards being signed while Members are also participating in Committee business”.

Gale’s point is that such behaviour is excusable, but that having MPs updating their Twitter and Facebook statuses in the Chamber would be a bridge too far. What do you reckon? Personally we’d rather have a stream of useful comment, accessible from our phones or desktop computers, than a hastily-signed Christmas card.

Whether you’re a social media junkie, or agree that such things are unwelcome in the workplace, the entire debate is worth a read – along with hundreds of thousands of other speeches and statements from Lords and MPs, available on mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com.

December 1st

Children everywhere open the first door of their Advent calendars today – and we’re digging deep into the mySociety vat of Christmas spirit and presenting our very own countdown to the 25th. Didn’t think a civic and democratic charity had much in common with Christmas? Well, we’re here to prove otherwise.

Between now and the 25th, we’ll be updating this post each weekday with a Christmassy nugget from our archives. Enjoy them, and here’s hoping that Santa brings you whatever your heart desires, whether it’s the reply to that FOI request you put in on WhatDoTheyKnow.com, or the improved bus service you asked for on FixMyTransport.com.

Street Decoration by Sylvain Racicot

What’s behind the door? A string of flashing lights

As Christmas lights go on in towns and cities across the country, your inner Scrooge might be prompted to ask just how much they’re costing the public purse.

Never fear, Bah Humbuggers, for this is a topic that has been thoroughly explored by the users of our Freedom of Information request website WhatDoTheyKnow.com. See, for example, how Manchester cannily bartered for free celebrity appearances last year, while Lewisham puts importance on low-energy lightbulbs.

You can also check Westminster, Lewes, and Cardiff’s costs – and plenty more besides. We think that Leeds has the highest expenditure mentioned, at £477,600 for this year, but leave us a comment if you find a higher one.

Don’t forget that if you want to know how much your own council spent on Christmas decorations – or indeed anything else – you have the right to submit an  FOI request. Just remember to check that the information isn’t already available online before you do.

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.

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.

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.

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…

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.

———-

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

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.