NonUK

WriteToThem.com - Cool Open Source Stuff for Political Hackers Outside the UK

So, WriteToThem.com, pretty handy if you're a Brit, pretty useless if you're from anywhere else, right? Wrong.

Everything except the licensed datasets within WriteToThem.com is available Open Source under the Affero GPL. But what's on offer?

At a high level what we offer is a complete infrastructure for locating people geographically, showing them who all their elected representatives are (at different levels of government) and then faxing or emailing them. Whilst it is a new site, the experience of five years running FaxYourMP.com went into the design. We think it's pretty good,and we hope you will too. Included in this is:

A standalone web service, MaPit for converting postcode (zipcode) lookups to information on representatives, and tools for importing the required data from its various sources. Much of the data importing stuff is UK-specific, but there will be bits and pieces which are of more general use.
A message queue for tracking the creation, confirmation and sending of messages, as well as handling problems with bounces, abusive messages, and so on. All presented through a sophisticated admin interface Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2
An anti-abuse filtering system that lets you create and modify regular-expression-based and more sophisticated rules through a GUI interface. We use this for various purposes, including to block organised campaigns which spam MPs and others with form-letters, stopping people from scraping the licensed data from our websites, and so forth. This is based on a rate limiting engine called Ratty.
An elected representatives database called DaDem, with a user interface for maintaining and updating details, with a full audit log and lots of code for importing data from perhaps imperfect sources.
A user corrections system, which allows people who spot mistakes in representative data to submit corrections straight into the system for vetting.
And lots of other stuff, including a fast cross-platform RPC-over-HTTP layer, and various other miscellaneous bits and pieces.

What we'd like

We're aware that lots of people are building or have built or want to build sites which enable citizens of their country to quickly and easily contact their elected representatives. We'd like any such projects to consider using our code - we've worked hard to build an elegant, abstracted, modular system that's ripe for re-using.

Where's the code?

Browse it through CVSTrac here: https://secure.mysociety.org/cvstrac/dir?d=mysociety

or check it out of our anonymous CVS repository like this:

CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@cvs.mysociety.org:/repos
export CVSROOT
cvs login        # blank password
cvs co mysociety # will get you the whole tree, including
                 # works-in-progress

WriteToThem.com - Cool Open Source Stuff for Political Hackers Outside the UK

Where's the code?

How can I talk to you to ask questions about this

Who Wrote the code?

Other cool British civic sites