We decided to be particularly careful about the new WriteToThem statistics, and did lots of checks on the data. In particular, we wanted to make sure we didn’t unfairly impugn MPs whom we had had bad contact details for. It is possible that for a period of time we thought we had their details but we got them wrong, that we were sending messages to an incorrect address, and their constituents were (unknowingly unfairly) reporting them as unresponsive in the questionnaire.

So, I wrote a script which generates the statistics, and triest to spot such cases. During the 2005 period, it breaks each MPs time up into intervals according to when we changed our contact details for them. We can do this, because every change we make to contact details is recorded in dadem’s database (see the representatives_edited table).

I’m going to sound a bit like Donald Rumsfield here, but keep with me. For each interval, we either have good or bad contact details, and we either know or we don’t know that they are good or bad. If we know that they’re bad (e.g. we have no details at all), then that interval isn’t a problem. No messages will have been sent, WriteToThem will have apologised to constituents trying to send messages, and no questionnaires will have been sent out. Any questionnaire results we have from good intervals can still be used and will be fine.

The case when we think we have contact details is harder. The script does some simple checks to work out if they were really valid. For example, if there have been at least a couple of questionnaire responses, and none were affirmative, then it is a bit suspicious. The script a threshold of length of time of suspicious intervals, and outputs as “unknown” MPs which it thinks there may have been a problem with for long enough for it to matter.

Tom then heroically checked all those MPs. Some we’ve marked as “WriteToThem had possibly bad contact details for this MP” in the league table. For others, we managed to verify that the questionable email or fax that we had (either via the MPs own website, or by ringing up their office) was actually good. The script then spits out, of all things, PHP file, which you might find useful on your own websites. It contains the complete detailed results. Make sure you look at the “category” for each MP. That indicates if we had too little data, or bad contact details, amongst other things.

Why PHP? And why not update the stats in real time? We’ve decided to make new statistics just once a year. Firstly, this is much easier to describe, we can say for example on TheyWorkForYou (where the responsiveness data also appears) that it is for the ‘year 2005’. Secondly, it lets us do the manual checking, so we are more confident about our data. Thirdly, it’s good for publicity to announce the new statistics as a news story. And finally, it is much easier to manage an unchanging text file (e.g. the PHP file), stored forerver in CVS, than it would be an ephemeral table in a database somewhere.

After all that, we mailed or faxed all the still sitting MPs who scored 100% responsiveness, to congratulate them on a job well done. Greg Pope, Richard Page, Fraser Kemp, Thomas McAvoy, Bob Laxton, Mark Simmonds, Paul Stinchcombe, Dennis Turner, Nick Ainger, Alan Meale, Adrian Sanders, Tom Cox, Andrew Hunter, Robert Key, Andrew Selous, John Wilkinson, Paul Goodman, Gwyneth Dunwoody, David Evennett, Peter Atkinson, Andrew Bennett, George Young, Terry Lewis, Douglas Hogg, Patrick Cormack, Andrew Robathan, David Stewart, Colin Challen, Harry Barnes MPs and all your staff, congratulations! (That list includes ones who are no longer MPs, for example stood down at the General Election)