Form an orderly queue, please.

The next project on the mySociety schedule is currently called YourConstituencyMailingList. We’ve set up a handy page so that you can start using the site even though we’ve not built it yet. That’s the kind of folks we are, mySociety fans.

5 Comments

  1. Tom – I’m sure collectively you’ve thought of this already, but might it be a good idea that when someone uses writetothem.com or theyworkforyou.com to contact/find their local MP, they are prompted to sign up to YourConstituencyMailingList with their postcode data pre-filled?

    Just a thought…

  2. And, on another note, what’s the YourConstituencyMailingList policy going to be in the run up to an election? Obviously there’s a big risk of an incumbent MP using the list for electioneering to the detriment of the other candidates standing in the constituency…

  3. We haven’t done it so the details are pre-filled (people might get angry if they clicked by accident), but there are already links from the completion pages of WriteToThem, from your MP page on TWFY and from the MP pages on PublicWhip. We do our best to create a ‘joined up’ experience 🙂

  4. Francis Irving

    You’re right, that during election campaigns we’ll have to disable the lists.

  5. This is a *very* minor technical niggle, but a bit more about the philosophy of it…

    Will there be some way to not punish those few who are actually doing good work in this area already? Supposing Tom Watson (taking his name totally in vain…) gets a request to email 20 people, when he’s already being very accountable through his (comments-enabled) blog? This could just be an annoying inconvenience to him, having to post stuff twice for a little second audience, and check in two places for questions to answer.

    It’ll work better maybe if it’s both a way to praise good practice like this, as well as offering a minimum set of tools for those MPs that haven’t engaged yet with another system. Could be maybe an option after their first post to close off comments and direct new consituency searches to their existing system (providing that one is accountable enough). That way Your Constituency keeps its role as a useful hub for finding your MP’s public forum.

    Anyway just a suggestion, it’s a very excellent idea but I think should be phrased very consciously as a carrot rather than a stick to encourage MPs to enagage.