Excellent new consultations site from Harry Metcalfe

I only met Harry Metcalfe a few weeks ago, when he was volunteering for the Open Rights Groups.

Since then he’s dazzled us with his completely single handed production of TellThemWhatYouThink, a site which draws most central government consultations into one site. The main citizen benefits from this is that you can get email or RSS alerts when a department decides to hold a consultation on an issue that you care about. As per usual it’s also starting with horrid nonstandard data in a zillion formats and turning it into nice structured data for everyone else to play with too.

It’s not a mySociety project, he’s just using our friends and family server, but he’s made it look more like a mySociety site than even we could manage. Kudos Harry!

PS Harry, along with both of the last two new volunteers to do major pieces of coding for mySociety, is in the third year of his PhD. I think I can see a pattern emerging…