See you in Manchester

Edge Street Window by Duncan Hill

Yep, now it’s Manchester’s turn. We’ve been having mySociety meet-ups in towns all over the UK –  it’s been great to meet people for a friendly chat and a drink.

If you’re local to Manchester and you’d like to know more about what mySociety do, drop by. There’s no agenda, but we’re always happy to talk about open data, eDemocracy, and online civic stuff in general. And we hear that our chosen venue does excellent pancakes.

We’re in town ahead of the Capita Channel Shift conference. If you’re also attending, you’d be welcome to come and join us for a drink and a chat about digital tech for local government.

When: 7pm onwards, Weds 4th December
Where:  Home Sweet Home on Edge Street, M4 1HE. Map
How: Add your name to our Lanyrd page to let us know you’re coming.
Who: Anyone who fancies it.
Hashtag: #mysocial

NB: Look out for the mySociety hoodie (they look like this, only usually with a person inside). Watch our Twitter stream on @mySociety to check for last minute advice about where we are sitting or if we have moved venues for unforseen reasons.

5 Comments

  1. Damnit. I missed this. Always finding out about things after the occasion.

    Would anyone in Manchester be interested in building a Problems & Solutions platform of sorts?

    Simple, like Hacker News. People list problems. People list solutions. Upvote credible solutions. Downvote party-political-rhetoric. Simple???

  2. Hello mySociety. I’m hoping to come to your meet-up, and I also have a question.

    How hard would it be to feed the commons debate transcripts that you have stored as XML here http://ukparse.kforge.net/parlparse/ into a web forum package, eg. the open source ‘phpBB’ package found here http://www.phpbb.com/ so as to create an online forum that mirrors debates in the House of Commons, and allows forum users to hold parallel debates to these debates in a parallel set of threads?

    Does this make any kind of sense? And who would be a good person to ask? (assuming I can actually find this place on Wednesday evening of course)

    Thanks,
    Robin

    • Good to meet you last night Robin. As I said, I think the best place to start with this is to experiment by using that XML data or using the API (www.theyworkforyou.com/api/) if that’s more convenient, importing it into phpBB and seeing what it allows you to do and how it looks and feels to interact with.

      I guess the idea here is less about making the record of what was said in Parliament accessible and more about stimulating discussion about it. The task and all the effort in the long term then would really be about community management rather than any technical challenges.