Members of the team running mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com also campaign for improvements to freedom of information law.

Volunteer John Cross has been drawing his MP’s attention to a major loophole in the UK’s Freedom of Information Act which means that a company wholly owned by one local authority is subject to the act but a company owned by two local authorities is not. John’s MP, Peter Bottomley, has been convinced that this anomaly in the law does not make sense and has submitted an Early Day Motion calling for the loophole to be closed. The EDM also highlights the fact that currently a company owned 95% or even 99.5% by a single public authority is not subject to the provisions of the act, as only companies owned 100% by a single authority are currently covered.

The text of the motion states:

“That this House notes that section 6 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with certain exceptions makes companies wholly owned by the Crown or by a single public authority subject to the Act; further notes that a company wholly owned by two or more public authorities or 95 per cent. owned by a single public authority will be outside the scope of the Freedom of Information Act 2000; and calls for the closure of this loophole and for companies owned 90 per cent. or more by any number of public authorities to be subject to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.”

The motion is currently open for other MPs to sign-up to and show their support. If you would like to help increase the number of public bodies that are covered by Freedom of Information legislation please consider writing to your MP, asking them to add their name to the current signatories.

There are many situations where public authorities working together or even setting up jointly owned companies is commendable. Such arrangements can lead to savings though economies of scale and avoid duplication; we may see more such companies set up as a response to economic pressures. What is problematic though is the loss of accountability which currently occurs when public bodies come together and set up these companies without requiring them to follow the highest standards of openness, transparency and accountability.

Examples of Companies Which Would Be Made Subject to FOI if the Loophole was Closed:

• Connexions Nottinghamshire Limited – provides support services to young people and is jointly owned by Nottingham City Council and Nottinghamshire County Council.
• Coventry and Solihull Waste Disposal Company – owned two thirds by Coventry City Council and one third by Solihull MBC
• G-Mex Limited – Through its ownership of Destination Manchester Ltd and investment in Modesole Ltd, Manchester City Council has a 95% shareholding in G-Mex Limited
• Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) – this company is the official agency for the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative information about higher education.
• Manchester Airport PLC – the Manchester Airport Group is owned by the ten local authorities of Greater Manchester
• The Russell Group – is owned by, and represents 20 of the UK’s largest universities, the company’s aims as set out in documents filed on incorporation included “to influence and make representations to stakeholders and legislators”

Many housing associations, purchasing consortia, representative bodies and urban development companies are among the organisations which would be required to operate in a more transparent manner should this loophole be closed.

We’re surprised and disappointed to see our methodology for collecting data on how well MPs respond to constituency mail being called “unreliable”, especially from a paper that makes a number of simple mistakes of its own in just a few lines on one page.

• On page 5, they state that WriteToThem has been “tracking responsiveness to emails via their website for three years”. Most importantly for the theme of the report, we don’t just send emails – we send faxes to a number of MPs (and other representatives) who do not accept or want messages via email.
• The figures given for survey responses in the table are backwards; 2007 and 2005’s figures should be interchanged – how could we get more survey responses than messages (again, not necessarily emails) sent? :-)
• They claim there is “no quantification of the response categories provided” – the raw data used to automatically generate these categories is given in the adjacent column (”very high” simply means a response percentage of 80% or more, for example; our code is all open source).
• We exclude MPs with very small sample sizes, and take a range of steps to make sure the data is not abused.
• We have four years of statistics now, not three; our stats for 2008 were published nearly six months ago.

The Hansard Society, to the best of my knowledge, never got in touch with us to request any clarification or ask about our data or methodology, which we would have been more than happy to supply.

Skills

• World-class skills in one or more of PHP, Perl
• Substantial expertise in open source operating systems, databases, and version control
• Experience of working in corporate environments.
• Project management skills, included detailed record keeping of phased technology developments
• Java experience also desirable

Personal qualities

• Laziness, Impatience, Hubris
• Fascination with understanding how complex systems work, and satisfaction at mastering them quickly
• Self-starter, with the ability to manage your own work.
• ‘Completer-finisher’ personality, with track record of delivering projects to deadline
• Team player with strong communication skills

Benefits and Salary

• Salary £38k+
• Office in London.

Submissions by 11th January 2010. Candidates must be able to start work by 1st  February 2010. Please send your application or any questions to tom@mysociety.org including the tag msjob2 in the subject line.

The defintions of the boundaries for the forthcoming constituencies in England were originally published in The Parliamentary Constituencies (England) Order 2007 (SI 2007/1681), based on ward boundaries as they were on 12th April 2005. However, due to some local government changes since that date, The Parliamentary Constituencies (England) (Amendment) Order 2009 (SI 2009/698) was published changing the boundaries for four constituencies – Daventry, South Northamptonshire, Wells, and Somerton & Frome – to be based on the new council wards as they were on 3rd May 2007.

The forthcoming constituencies in Northern Ireland were defined in The Parliamentary Constituencies (Northern Ireland) Order 2008 (SI 2008/1486). In this, Derryaghy ward was split between two constituencies – Belfast West is given “that part of Derryaghy ward lying to the north of the Derryaghy and Lagmore townland boundary.”

All of which means that other sites that try to tell you what constituency you will be in at the election invariably get it wrong.

Both Labour and the Conservatives say that BA6 8NJ is in Wells at the next election, when it will be in Somerton & Frome. Both say that NN12 8NF will be in Daventry, when it will be in South Northamptonshire. I assume that both sites are using boundary data predating the Amendment Order from March 2009. The Conservatives also say that BT17 0XD will be in Lagan Valley when it will be in Belfast West; Labour simply say “Northern Ireland” for any Northern Irish postcode you provide.

The Liberal Democrats site currently returns no results for any postcode, which I assume is a bug :)

The /current/ boundary between Belfast West and Lagan Valley. (Image produced from the Ordnance Survey electionmap service. Image reproduced with permission of Ordnance Survey and Land and Property Services)

The official election-maps.co.uk service (from where TheyWorkForYou gets its boundary maps) returns the correct results for BA6 8NJ and NN12 8NF, but doesn’t have future boundaries for Northern Ireland. It’s not clear that it doesn’t, as searching for Lagan Valley with “future boundaries” selected returns a result, but that result is the current boundary. This can be seen from the picture on the right – as is clear from the quote I gave above, everything within Derryaghy ward north of the Lagmore/Derryaghy boundary will be in Belfast West at the next election. Plus the site doesn’t work without JavaScript.

TheyWorkForYou’s “constituency at the next election” service gives BA6 8NJ in Somerton & Frome, NN12 8NF in South Northamptonshire, and BT17 0XD in Belfast West. There is enough confusion with the changes to boundaries for everywhere except Scotland, that it is somewhat frustrating to have it compounded by sites giving incorrect information. The lack of any official service also doesn’t help.

Constituency boundaries are changing at the next general election in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland. After some amount of fiddling (I’ll go into technical details in another post, but it wasn’t as easy as just importing some shapefiles), as a slightly early Christmas present, TheyWorkForYou now has a section where you can enter your postcode to find out what constituency you are currently in, and what constituency you will be voting in at the election, along with maps of before and after:

http://www.theyworkforyou.com/boundaries/

This service is also available through the TheyWorkForYou API. This is a facility we have been asked for frequently, more so as we approach the forthcoming election; the large amount of boundary changes have led to confusion from our users and elsewhere, so this will hopefully prove useful.

One site that will need the boundaries before the election is DemocracyClub – join to help make this coming election the most transparent ever!

Side effects of the above process include updated council boundaries, so those councils on WriteToThem that we’ve had switched off since May due to lack of boundary data are now back; a more up-to-date postcode dataset; and the beginnings of parish council support (as in they’re now in the database, but the front-end doesn’t know what to do with them yet).

I hope you all have a happy Christmas and New Year.

Wednesday 20th January, in Manchester; mySociety, Democracy Club, and friends invite you to join us in the Briton’s Protection from 7:30 for conversation on democracy, engagement and tea.

mySociety runs projects such as TheyWorkForYou.com,FixMyStreet.com and WhatDoTheyKnow.com, while DemocracyClub.co.uk is the new independent volunteer network for the upcoming election to keep track of how parties campaign in your local community when they think no one elsewhere will notice.

Come join us in the pub (20th Jan, 7:30), or you can sign up to Democracy Club at                            http://www.democracyClub.co.uk

The Briton’s Protection is just behind the Bridgewater Hall, postcode M1 5LE. You’ll find us in one of the two backrooms, wearing a mySociety hoodie or carrying a clear sign. Tom has his picture here: http://www.mysociety.org/about/

A Facebook event is now open.

The Banker

2 Cousin Lane, London, EC4R 3TE

21st December from 6.30pm onwards.

Leave a comment on this post if you’re coming. New faces and old hands equally welcome.

A chunk of the weekend involved vetting the 227 project ideas that were proposed via our Call for Proposals. I’m going to write a separate post on our thoughts about that process, but if you look at the list below you may spot things that were submitted in that call.

One nice innovation that helped us whittle down our ideas from unmanageable to manageable numbers was a pairwise comparison game to help us prioritise ideas, build custom for the occasion by the wonderful and statistically talented Mark Longair.  In other words, we used the technique that powers  KittenWar.com to help decide our key strategic priorities for the next year: after all , if we don’t, who will?

Screenshot from the pairwise comparison game that Mark Longair coded

By the end of the weekend we had not battened everything down – there are too many uncertainties around how much time we will have, and some key ideas that need more speccing.  However, we were able to put various things into different buckets, marked according to size and degree of certainty.  So here goes:

1. Things which were decided at the last retreat, which we are definitely building,  and which (mostly) need doing before next year’s stuff starts getting built

• A top level page for each bill on TheyWorkForYou
• Future business (ie the calendar) for events in the House of Commons, including a full set of alerting options.
• Video clips on MP pages on TheyWorkForYou
• Epicly ambitious election data gathering and  quiz building with the lovely volunteers at DemocracyClub

2. Small new things that we are very probably doing because there was lots of consensus

• Publish a standard that councils can use to post problems like potholes in their databases to FixMyStreet and other similiar sites.
• Template requests in WhatDoTheyKnow so that users are strongly encouraged to put in requests that are well structured.
• After the next general election, email new MPs with various bits of info of interest to them including their new login to HearFromYourMP, their page on TheyWorkForYou, explanation of how WriteToThem protects them from spam and abuse, a double check that their contact details are correct, and a introduction to the fact that we record their correspondance responsiveness and voting records.
• Add to WhatDoTheyKnow descriptions about what kind of public authority a specific entity is (ie ’school’, ‘council’) and the information they are likely to hold if FOIed.
• Show divisions (parliamentary votes) properly on debate pages on TheyWorkForYou, ie show the results of a vote on the same page as the debate where the issue was discussed, with full party breakdowns on each division.
• Add “How to benefit from this site” page on TheyWorkForYou, inspired by OpenCongress.org
• Help Google index TheyWorkForYou faster by creating a sitemap.xml file that is dynamically updated.
• Using the data we expect to have from DemocracyClub’s volunteers, send a press release about every new MP and to all relevent local newspapers
• Incorporate a council GeoRSS problem feed into FMS

3. Slighty more time consuming things we are very probably doing because there was lots of consensus

• 1 day per month developer time that customer support guru Debbie Kerr gets to allocate as she see fit.
• Premium account feature on WhatDoTheyKnow to hide requests so that journalists and bloggers can still get scoops and then share their correspondance later.
• Add Select Committees to TheyWorkForYou, including email alerts on calls for evidence.
• Take professional advice on how to handle PR around the election

4. Much more time consuming things and things around which there is less consensus. NB – We do not currently have the resources to do everything on this list next year – it is an ambitious target list.

• Primary New site: TBA in a new post
• Add a new queue feature to WhatDoTheyKnow so that users can write requests, then table them for comments from other users and expert volunteers before they are sent to the public authority
• Relaunch our Volunteer tasks page on our sites, keep it populated with new tasks, specifically allocate resources to handhold potential volunteers. Allocate time to see if any of the ideas that we didn’t build could be parcelled into volunteer tasks.
• Secondary New site (if we have a lot more time than we expect): Exploit extraordinary richness of Audit Comission local government target data in a TheyWorkForYou-like fashion.
• FixMyStreet to become international with  a) maps for most of the world b)  easy to follow instructions explaining how to supply mySociety with the required data to us to enable us to turn on FixMyStreet in non UK countries or areas. This data would includ  ie gettext powered text translation files,  shapefiles of administrative boundaries, and lists of contact data.
• Add votes and proceedings to TheyWorkForYou (where they reveal statutory instrument titles that are not debated but where the law gets changed anyway)
• Carry out usability testing on TheyWorkForYou with then help of volunteer Joe Lanman – then implement changes recommended during a development process taking up to 10 days.
• Add to TheyWorkForYou questions that have been tabled in the house of commons but which haven’t been answered yet.
• Add a new interface for just councils so that they can say if a problem on FixMyStreet has changed status.

Phew. And that’s not even counting the projects we hope to help with in Central and Eastern Europe, our substantial commercial work, or the primary new site idea, which will be blogged in Part 2.

Today we have a strange story about a department that appears to think that it has a duty not to release information under FOI if it makes people angry.

It all starts in January 2009 the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) appointed an expert by the name of Graham Badman to conduct a review of elective home education in England. It probably goes without saying that this is an issue far from our concerns, and an issue that mySociety has no views on – what makes us interested is the process that followed.

Shortly after the publication of the report, Elaine Walton, a user of mySociety’s freedom of information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com requested copies of communications between the Department for Children, Schools and Families and Nektus Ltd. the company through which it appears Mr Badman was paid for his work.

According to email replies to Ms Walton, the DCSF located two relevant invoices which show how much money was paid, but refused to disclose them.  Strangely, though, they were not refused on grounds of commercial confidentiality, but rather on something more unusual. Here are the exemptions they cited:

• Section 40 – Personal Information
• Section 38 – Health and safety

Health and Safety? A little investigation reveals more.

When Ms Walton appealed against this decision, an internal review was carried out within the DSCF.  The internal review’s findings stated that Mr Badman was likely become a victim of harassment if certain personal details were made public, hence a health and safety concern, and hence no publication of these invoices. Fair enough – nobody would be in favour of revealing private, sensitive information that would endanger anyone’s life or family, especially in the presence of a known threat.  But take a look at this:

“That the Department had initially been drafting a response that included the release of invoices with only personal data redacted. But before the draft was complete it was apparent that there was a campaign of harassment and vilification against Graham Badman and other individuals/organisations that had contributed to the Report. In the light of this, at the weekly review meeting of FOI cases, it was considered that the balance of public interest might have shifted towards withholding.”

What is very curious here is the admission that the department had been thinking of releasing the invoices with personal data hidden (ie no home address, bank details etc).  But then because of a campaign of harassment, it was decided that they wouldn’t publish anything at all. So not just no personal information, but no dates, no amounts of money, nothing.

What is so unease-making about this FOI decision is that it appears to be saying that departments may conceal information on how much public money has been spent on something because releasing that information will make some angry people even angrier. Surely this can’t be right – if it were every budget would be conducted in complete secrecy. We would encourage the Information Commissioner’s Office to take a look.

derived from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern-Europe-map2.svg

If you live in Central or Eastern Europe, we’re now in a position to help you get effective democracy and transparency websites built. mySociety have teamed up with the Open Society Institute (OSI) and together we are now looking for determined people with great ideas for new digital transparency and accountability services in their countries.

Over the next few months we are running a Call for Proposals, similar to the one we recently ran in the UK. The big difference is that this time we’re not looking for projects that we will build. We’re looking for projects you want to build, but that for lack of funds or lack of the right skills, you can’t get started yourself.

Each month the Open Society Institute and mySociety will work closely together to select a series of projects to fund and mentor. Crucially, the call isn’t solely for existing NGOs: the process is absolutely open to submissions from individuals or groups with no prior direct experience of working in the transparency and accountability sector, but who have a good idea that addresses a problem they see in their country. We will, however, look more favourably on applicants with access to the advanced programming skills required to build sites like this.

The criteria are simple, though demanding:

1. The projects have to generate some kind of meaningful transparency, accountability, or democratic empowerment of another kind.
2. The projects must seize the unique benefits that the Internet brings with it, such as scalability, two way communication, easy data analysis and so on.

More details are available over at our new CEE site, but even if you don’t live in one of the eligible countries please help us spread the word about this exciting new opportunity!