What The Papers Say
A histogram showing the positions that newspapers/media take on key issues (abortion, supporting the Government, etc.) and their circulaton/viewing figures. Would visually represent the influence of "the media" over "the general public". It could also show positions taken by media grouped by proprieter (Rupert Murdoch, etc.).
Authorizethis.com
A disasters and emergencies site to help defeat bureacratic blockages, obviously inspired by the hurricaines Katrina and Rita. People on the ground who want to act post what they need in the way of clearance and authorization, and who from. They then set about their urgent work on the ground. Meanwhile, more distant people who want to help select a case, and use the phone, email or whatever it takes to beg & blackmail to get the official OK, the authorization papers, or whatever is required for the person on the ground. They post progress on the site, and groups of people can work together to overcome particularly bad blockages.
Postcode Wiki/Api A wiki style database to record location data. Api would allow people to search by postcode/constituency/grid ref. Where unavaliable, you are invited to help complete the database.
If the posting part were provided as a service, it could integrate with Gaze to help build up a public domain version of the Post Office PAF? ![[WWW]](/wiki/mstheme/img/moin-www.png){kind=small}
http://www.mysociety.org/?p=83. i.e. whenever someone fills in a form on site Foo, and they are asked for their town and post code, the info is posted to a web service which just stores the data. For this to work, it would need a bit of a campaign to convince enough people to start using the service to reach critical mass; it would also presumably require adding a note in the privacy information on a participating site.
UnConference Session Optimiser
The trend for UnConferences like Barcamp and Foocamp has led a problem. It is quite common to have six parralell streams of sessions, and people often miss a lot of good stuff.
What's needed is a timetable-optimiser that people at an Unconference can dump their session ideas into, and then everyone else dumps in their preferences, and which organises all the sessions in the optimal possible fashion.
Thanks to James Aylett for the original spark
MyPublicDiary.org
A site for the publicising of your location or probable future locations for the benefit of your friends etc. Fancy a night on the town and want to know where people are going to be ? down the pub and wandering which of your friends is nearby and may be up for a quick bevy ?
Data entered in a diary or calender style input/ uploaded from standard diary functions on pdas & computers/ sent as text messages. Most important data field to be collected is location, other fields provide context to that location, why will you be there etc.
Output as a layer on a map, or by text messages/emails, when friends come within a certain radius of your present location.
Extra Bit: Scrape the diaries of public figures / politicians etc and add them to the layer. Want to know whether your MP is at Portculis House or back home in the constituancy or just opening another supermarket? search for his name and have his locations appear.
Extra Bit: Seven degrees of seperation, none of your close friends nearby, have the location of their friends appear as well, Trust the good taste of your friends that their friends are worth meeting up with.
A truly European blog, whose posts and comments are translated into all EU languages.
- Might be worth looking at Amazon's Mechanical Turk for this - easy translation and not too expensive. DC.
TinyGiving.com
People commit a small % of their monthly income (say between 0.3 and 1%) to a common fund.
Anybody can then submit bids on what to do with this fund, e.g.
I need £50 to help setup an after-school book-club / I need £800 to help towards a scanner for my local hospital.
The contibuters can then vote for x number of proposals a month, and the bids with the highest number of votes (proportional to the amount of the bid) will get some cash. With people encouraged to give money to things that are relivant/local to them.
- Richard Pope ![[MAILTO]](/wiki/mstheme/img/moin-email.png){kind=small}
mail@memespring.co.uk
I Voted For You Because...
Most parties seem to take election as a mandate on all their policies. People should be able to tell their new MP why they voted for them, what they expect them to do and what policies they were apprehensive about voting for.
e.g.
Dear
.
I voted for you as my MP in the recent general election.
My main reasons I voted for you over the other candidates were
.
This was despite me not agreeing with the following policies
. (and
so in voting for you I was not giving my approval to these policies).
My priorities for you in the new parliament are
Richard Pope
How about the associated I Did NOT Vote For You Because...
- dhfanzer
FCO Feeds
A site in the style of www.thegovernmentsays.com which parses the Foreign and Commonwealth office's warnings, turns them into RSS, produces a readable feed, and allows for email alerts. Interested in this:
Sam Smith
S@mSmith.net (guy behind thegovernmentsays.com)
Broken Civic Infrastructure
User annotated high scale maps report problems to local councils, and provide a place for local people to discuss whether or not stuff is getting fixed. Turn complaining from a 1-1 experience, to a general community experience.
' Public To Do Queue for Local councils '
An extension of above, but how about having a sort of queue that the council can 'tick off' respond too. Allow the poster to close the query etc? A council that does not respond well will have an embarassing mass of open tasks compared to a responsive council.
Fix yer bloody website
User annotated list of broken websites and how they fail, how they can be fixed and how it affects users. Suggestions would be online job applications for places like councils, royal mail, etc. Could also include private companies such as odeon or comet. Best of all would be some way to communicate with relevent business leaders and councillors about the problems raised.
Having wasted a couple of hours helping somebody non-technical trying to apply for jobs online for her even less technical father I'm shocked at how badly public and private companies manage to screw up even simple websites.
see http://use.perl.org/~TeeJay/journal/26811 for examples. also 123reg notes that fixyourbloodywebsite.org.uk is available.
Buzzword Spotter
<Steiny> Oh - little idea that came from talking with Jason Kitcat last night <Steiny> Scrape a load of trendy tech blogs for words and phrases (not links). Compare with a dictionary of known words and phrases. When a new word or phrase appears, flag it up. Presto - a buzzword spotter. If it existed, the 'folksonomies' light would be flashing red <chris> hmm <chris> might be workable <chris> be a bit hard to automatically distinguish people's names from New Trends(TM) <Steiny> Well, then just rename the service. Buzzwords and Hot New People-o-meter <Steiny> then run it JUSt across .gov.uk and sell to papers <Steiny> hurrah! <chris> heh <chris> that's quite amusing <Steiny> I think I will drop it in an email to a bunch of people like etienne <Steiny> see if anyone with some time bits <Steiny> bites
Creative Commons Licensed MP Photos
Use the WriteToThem engine to write to all MPs after the photo to ask for a good quality picture, and the license to make it available for free on the web. There are endless uses for such pictures, and we could help provide them pretty easily.
Living Will Generator
I'm not quite sure if this is quite within the remit, but I just had the thought today that it would be quite nice if there was a site that could generate a templated living will for various circumstances. I'm not sure what the normal form of these is - whether there's just effectively a single axis running from <i>harvest my organs today</i> to <i>don't touch that switch</i> or whether there's several dimensions and the template would look like a kind of CC licence for the end of life. You end up with a small PDF you print out and stick in your wallet + perhaps an email that you can send to your next of kin. A central repository that could be used by clinical staff might be good but opens up a world of trouble in terms of privacy, liability etc
OpenToPersuasion.com
Or possibly 'ChangeMyMind.com'... The idea is for a site which would encourage and engender widespread genuine open-minded debate, and offer people who feel passionately about any issue the chance to change people's minds who think differently. So for example, in the run-up to an election, there would be areas for people voting for each party, but who were open to persuasion to vote otherwise... or for people who were not minded to vote, but were open to persuasion. Visitors to the site could bid to be a Persuader, perhaps with a pithy sentence. The person to be persuaded (persuadee?) could accept, and then an open exchange of five messages each way would take place - through the web site, so people would not have each other's email address and could stop contact at any time. After five each way, the person to be persuaded would state whether or not they had been persuaded from their original position. It would be cool to score people on how many people they had persuaded on an issue. You could run one on the European constitution, when the referendum comes round, or have an area where people could say they are open to persuasion on any topic at all. People could take part anonymously - still valid?
A BackOtheEnvelope project about local history
Democracy 2.0 UK
A free-to-edit MediaWiki-based website which allows anyone to rewrite UK laws collaboratively. Every edit would be saved, and the starting template would be the current UK laws. Democracy 2.0 already exists ( http://wiki-law.org/mwiki/index.php?title=Democracy_2.0:_Main_Page ), but it is specifically aimed at the United States.
Charity shop PAT testing
A lot of charity shops in my area have stopped accepting electrical goods, because they would be required to PAT test them before selling them, and they simply don't have the resources to do this. Conversely, there must be at least one electrician in every town who wouldn't mind giving up half an hour on a Saturday afternoon to pop in and test items donated in the previous week.
Site would simply consist of (location grouped) postings from charity shops requiring such help, and hopefully such a site could be advertised in a few trade magazines.
- oliver at onesteprevolution dot com
Voting by Area Breakdown
I'd like a site (and might be interested in putting it together if possible) that showed how MPs in specific areas were voting (maybe using the Google Maps API?). Theoretically, each MP can be assigned a position on a map, then could be given a different colour for yes, no, both and abstain, and with or against the proposing party, with or against their own party etc, for the specific issue / vote.
- dave at ilovejackdaniels dot com
Local Gift Network / Free-use
I'd like a site which facilitates local gifting - that is, people giving gifts to one another. It's a bit like The FreeCycle Network (TM) (SM) (C), but working better. At the moment, that particular network has a number of heinous problems: a. works via Yahoo groups mailing lists, which are often high volume and administratively expensive (e.g., spam), b. can result in 'mail blizzards' when a nice item is posted and everyone and their dog replies 'yes please', c. is geographically unlimited: people can look for items within a certain radius of their location, rather than having to join a number of 'local' e-mail lists.
I see it as being a bit like a classifieds ad system, but with people being able to register their interest in an item in a kind of queue, so that the giver can arrange collection with subsequent people if the first people don't turn up. Having some kind of search / filter / etc. system would be great to cut down the noise of items you don't care about, and items can be removed when they're collected (no more "TAKEN" mails to the list). E-mails could be generated automatically if an item you're interested in comes up. Another benefit would be that items could stay on the site for a longer time, so if the giver is willing to keep it around, they don't need to be constantly re-advertising it via the list to catch the attention of a current potential taker.
- lgn at alexhudson dot com