mySociety blog » Successes

FixMyStreet has a lot of RSS feeds. There’s one for every one-tier council (170), one for every ward of every one-tier council (another 5,044), two for every two-tier (county and district) council (544), and two for every ward of every two-tier council (20,296) – two per two-tier council because you might want either problems reported to one council of a two-tier set-up in particular, or all reports within the council’s boundary.

Then there’s an RSS feed every 162m across Great Britain in a big grid, returning all reports within a radius of that point, the radius by default being automatically determined by that point’s population density, but customisable to any distance if preferred. That’s, at a very rough approximation assuming Great Britain is a rectangle around its extremities, which it’s not, 19 million RSS feeds, lots of which will admittedly be very similar. :)

Every single one of those feeds can be subscribed to by email instead if that’s preferable to you, and are all accessible through a simple interface at http://www.fixmystreet.com/alert.

However, none of these RSS feeds was suitable for the person who emailed from a Neighbourhood Watch site and said that all they had was a postcode and they wanted to display a feed of reports from FixMyStreet. Given you could obviously look up a FixMyStreet map by postcode, it did seem odd that I hadn’t used the same code for the RSS feeds. Shortly thereafter, this anomaly was fixed, and if you now go to a URL of the form http://www.fixmystreet.com/rss/pc/postcode you will be redirected to the appropriate local reports feed for that postcode (I could say that adds another 1.7 million RSS feeds to our lot, but given they’re only redirects, that’s not strictly true). And after a couple more emails, I also added pubDate fields to the feeds which should make displaying in date order easier.

It’s great to see our RSS feeds being used by other sites – other examples I’ve recently come across include Brent Council integrating FixMyStreet into their mapping portal (select Streets, then FixMyStreet), or the Albert Square and St Stephen’s Association listing the most recent Stockwell problems in their blog sidebar. If you’ve seen any notable examples, do leave them in the comments.

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.

Ian has used PledgeBank to start a residents association for a new block of flats in Cambridge, UK.

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.

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.