Things have been quiet here recently, but are now getting busy again. Tom’s back from America, Chris is back from holiday, I’m better after being ill for most of last week.

Earlier in the week we finally managed to load new county boundaries into MaPit. So WriteToThem once again has county councils working. Please try it out with your postcode. Let us know of any problems.

This required lots of work from Chris, because a new version of BoundaryLine (from Ordnance Survey) has not yet been released with the updated boundaries. He’s done it using lists of the district council wards which make up the county electoral divisions.
These lists were taken from the Statutory Instruments. This has covered most postcodes, but there are still some where the boundaries were specificed in text (walk along this river etc.) rather than wards. And we don’t have those.

The last couple of days I’ve been turning on lots of things to automate updating of WriteToThem. A cron job now grabs new data on councillors from GovEval once a day, and merges their changes with any changes we’ve made.

It’s automatically emailing GovEval with user submitted corrections to councillor data (the “Have you spotted a mistake in the above list?” link on WriteToThem). Hopefully this will create a virtuous feedback loop of ever improving data quality goodness. Or at least let us keep up with council by-elections without having to lift a finger.

Finally I’ve made it send a mail once a week to the mailing list where WriteToThem admins (mostly volunteers) hang out. This describes what needs doing – such as missing contact details to gather, or messages in the queue which need human attention.

Next up, wiring up the new screenscrapers Richard and Jonathan contributed last week, so the Welsh and London Assemblies automatically update…