mySociety’s Next 12 months – Part 1

Over the last weekend of November 2009 a group of 21 mySociety staff, volunteers and trustees went to a house outside of Bristol to wrestle with the question of what mySociety should build over the next 12 months. This was the fourth time we’ve done it, and these meetings have become a crucial part of our planning.  This year, we were talking not just about what new features to add to our current sites, but also about the possibility of building an entirely new website for the first time in a couple of years. The discussions were lively and passionate because we know we have a lot to live up to: not only is our last major new site (WhatDoTheyKnow) likely to cross the 1 million unique visitors threshold this year, but we understood that there were people and organisations who weren’t there who would be counting on us to set the bar high.

A chunk of the weekend involved vetting the 227 project ideas that were proposed via our Call for Proposals. I’m going to write a separate post on our thoughts about that process, but if you look at the list below you may spot things that were submitted in that call.

One nice innovation that helped us whittle down our ideas from unmanageable to manageable numbers was a pairwise comparison game to help us prioritise ideas, build custom for the occasion by the wonderful and statistically talented Mark Longair.  In other words, we used the technique that powers  KittenWar.com to help decide our key strategic priorities for the next year: after all , if we don’t, who will?

game-with-previous-answers-no-statssml

Screenshot from the pairwise comparison game that Mark Longair coded

By the end of the weekend we had not battened everything down – there are too many uncertainties around how much time we will have, and some key ideas that need more speccing.  However, we were able to put various things into different buckets, marked according to size and degree of certainty.  So here goes:

1. Things which were decided at the last retreat, which we are definitely building,  and which (mostly) need doing before next year’s stuff starts getting built

  • A top level page for each bill on TheyWorkForYou
  • Future business (ie the calendar) for events in the House of Commons, including a full set of alerting options.
  • Video clips on MP pages on TheyWorkForYou
  • Epicly ambitious election data gathering and quiz building with the lovely volunteers at DemocracyClub

2. Small new things that we are very probably doing because there was lots of consensus

  • Publish a standard that councils can use to post problems like potholes in their databases to FixMyStreet and other similiar sites.
  • Template requests in WhatDoTheyKnow so that users are strongly encouraged to put in requests that are well structured.
  • After the next general election, email new MPs with various bits of info of interest to them including their new login to HearFromYourMP, their page on TheyWorkForYou, explanation of how WriteToThem protects them from spam and abuse, a double check that their contact details are correct, and a introduction to the fact that we record their correspondance responsiveness and voting records.
  • Add to WhatDoTheyKnow descriptions about what kind of public authority a specific entity is (ie ‘school’, ‘council’) and the information they are likely to hold if FOIed.
  • Show divisions (parliamentary votes) properly on debate pages on TheyWorkForYou, ie show the results of a vote on the same page as the debate where the issue was discussed, with full party breakdowns on each division.
  • Add “How to benefit from this site” page on TheyWorkForYou, inspired by OpenCongress.org
  • Help Google index TheyWorkForYou faster by creating a sitemap.xml file that is dynamically updated.
  • Using the data we expect to have from DemocracyClub’s volunteers, send a press release about every new MP and to all relevent local newspapers
  • Incorporate a council GeoRSS problem feed into FMS

3. Slighty more time consuming things we are very probably doing because there was lots of consensus

  • 1 day per month developer time that customer support guru Debbie Kerr gets to allocate as she see fit.
  • Premium account feature on WhatDoTheyKnow to hide requests so that journalists and bloggers can still get scoops and then share their correspondance later.
  • Add Select Committees to TheyWorkForYou, including email alerts on calls for evidence.
  • Take professional advice on how to handle PR around the election

4. Much more time consuming things and things around which there is less consensus. NB – We do not currently have the resources to do everything on this list next year – it is an ambitious target list.

  • Primary New site: TBA in a new post
  • Add a new queue feature to WhatDoTheyKnow so that users can write requests, then table them for comments from other users and expert volunteers before they are sent to the public authority
  • Relaunch our Volunteer tasks page on our sites, keep it populated with new tasks, specifically allocate resources to handhold potential volunteers. Allocate time to see if any of the ideas that we didn’t build could be parcelled into volunteer tasks.
  • Secondary New site (if we have a lot more time than we expect): Exploit extraordinary richness of Audit Comission local government target data in a TheyWorkForYou-like fashion.
  • FixMyStreet to become international with  a) maps for most of the world b)  easy to follow instructions explaining how to supply mySociety with the required data to us to enable us to turn on FixMyStreet in non UK countries or areas. This data would includ  ie gettext powered text translation files,  shapefiles of administrative boundaries, and lists of contact data.
  • Add votes and proceedings to TheyWorkForYou (where they reveal statutory instrument titles that are not debated but where the law gets changed anyway)
  • Carry out usability testing on TheyWorkForYou with then help of volunteer Joe Lanman – then implement changes recommended during a development process taking up to 10 days.
  • Add to TheyWorkForYou questions that have been tabled in the house of commons but which haven’t been answered yet.
  • Add a new interface for just councils so that they can say if a problem on FixMyStreet has changed status.

Phew. And that’s not even counting the projects we hope to help with in Central and Eastern Europe, our substantial commercial work, or the primary new site idea, which will be blogged in Part 2.

2 Comments

  1. I’m planning on incorporating the Audit Commission data into OpenlyLocal.com in the not too distant future (ONS integration is coming in steps over the next month, Audit Comm stuff after that), so you can prob strike that off the list unless you particularly want to do it yourself. Keen to here ideas on how the UI to this should look.

  2. Im a huge fan of WDTK. I fully support the ideas for developing the site!

    I look forward to seeing them reach fruition!