FaxYourRepresentative/FunctionalityQuestions

What should the site do?

1) Which levels of government should it start with? [TS]

2) Where can the service be accessed from? [TS]

3) How do we point people at the right representative for their concerns? [TS]

More detail

FaxYourMP has a very simple interface: type postcode, type message, confirm your email address, send your message. Obviously we want it to be at least as easy to fax your councillor/MSP/MEP if you know that's what you want to do. Therefore, the site should have "aspects" called (fax/contact/whatever)your councillor, ... your MSP, ... which work like FYMP does now.

Secondly, given a postcode, we should be able to show the user who all their representatives are, and let them choose to whom to write. This will be useful in its own right as lots of people won't know either (a) what levels of government exist in their area; (b) who their elected representatives are. Note that this could get pretty complicated pretty quickly: we might get elected health/police authorities and regional assemblies in England come the next election, and some of these ancillary groups don't fit into a neat hierachy. This needs to be made as clear as possible. Once the user has seen who's available, they can click through to contact them. See also the stuff on multimember constituencies below.

Thirdly, it would be *really nice* if we could create a site where, by answering some simple questions about what they're going to write about, the user can be guided to the appropriate representative. (Tom's #3.) This is a knowledge representation problem; it might be quite hard, or it might not (not really sure). [CL]

[TS] I may be misunderstanding this here, but isn't this going to be a rather two-part project, with a considerable amount of work required to build the expandable, updatable message sending engine, and lots more effort of a different kind going into the user interface/web service components?

It strikes me that we won't know if we /can/ build a robust guide-you-to-your-reprepsentative system without actually trying one out on the public, and we have to work on the assumption that there is a good chance such a thing is actually impossible, or at least more counterproductive than it is useful.

So, If our first objective was the data gathering/message sending engine, the second a minimalist 'pick-your-own' interface, and the third an experimental smart interface, wouldn't that be a sensible way of going about things?

Yes, that's fair. I'd split the project into four basic components, actually: there's the database of regions/authorities/people, the message sending service, the simple interface and the complicated interface. The complicated interface is only worth prototyping once the other three are well on track. [CL]

Links on levels of government in the UK

• http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/elections/electedbodies.cfm

• http://www.gwydir.demon.co.uk/uklocalgov/

• http://www.statistics.gov.uk/geography/admin_geog.asp ("administrative geography")

We have a bunch of different levels, something like this:

Another view of the hierarchy from the Electoral Commission's aboutmyvote site.

Note also that some local authorities have elected mayors!

Very early mockups

• Front page: http://caesious.beasts.org/~chris/tmp/fyr-mockups/frontpage.html

• Select your representative: http://caesious.beasts.org/~chris/tmp/fyr-mockups/whotofax.html

• A very simple "choose your level of government" mockup: http://caesious.beasts.org/~chris/tmp/fyr-mockups/q1.html

(These are based directly on the existing FYMP pages. Since those were designed web browsers have improved enough to let us get away with much cleaner HTML.)

What to do about multimember constituencies?

These arise at several levels in the UK:

• MEPs are elected in multimember constituencies, using a party list in Great Britain and STV in Northern Ireland (see this EuroParl page for a list of UK MEPs and this discussion of the situation in Northern Ireland);

• MSPs, AMs (members of the Welsh Assembly) and members of the London Assembly are elected by a hybrid system with one member per constituency plus a top-up from party lists (see this Scottish Parliament FAQ entry, this BBC piece on the Welsh Assembly elections and the Electoral Commission's discussion on the London elections);

• Local (but not County) elections in Great Britain use FPTP multi-member constituencies; however, in Scotland, they may change to STV, as presently used in Northern Ireland (see this Electoral Commission piece).

In these cases we obviously need to give the user the option of choosing one representative to write to (in the case where they know who to choose). There are two other cases:

• When the user has no preference on who to write to. I'm not sure how to handle this, but it might be easiest to find out how representatives in multimember constituencies actually share their workload.

• When the user wants to contact all of them. Often this will be undesirable, but there are legitimate reasons to do this (e.g. if they want to ask all their representatives to vote for or against some measure).

In the mockup I've assumed the write-to-one-member case. Is that enough?

What to do about zillions of very similar letters?

Owen Blacker wrote, 'One of the things we wanted to do with FYMP was make it so that MPs don't get a hundred messages reading "I want you to vote against the War" or whatever but, rather one message saying that and 99 reading "I would like to agree with and reiterate the points raised by Ms Bloggs in her letter of July 15th". But we never quite worked out how best to do it....'

An off-the-top-of-my-head idea: should we ask each user whether their letter is an "open" letter that they're happy for others to read, and then if someone else comes along and submits a very similar letter, they could be invited to add their signature (so to speak) to the existing letter?

I have no idea how well this would work, and it has some bad implications for the security model and data protection position of the service. I suspect it isn't worth pursuing. Thoughts? (Sounds like something for version 2, we're already doing enough new things in the first version. Oh yes, it's also something you could link to the syndication. e.g. All the people who've come through from a syndicated postcode box on the Countryside Alliance fox hunting webpage will be saying similar things - Francis)