Transcripts – the written records of who says what in a conversation – aren’t sexy.

However, they can be very important, or even historic. They can reveal big plans that will affect lots of people, and they are a basic requirement of political accountability.

But the way in which transcripts are made available online today doesn’t reflect this importance. They tend to be published as hundreds of PDFs, and look more or less like they were made in the 1950s.

We think that the people who are affected by the decisions and plans announced in transcribed meetings deserve better.

What is SayIt?

SayIt is an open source tool for publishing speeches, discussions and dialogues, simply and clearly, online. Search functionality is built in, you can link to any part of a transcript, and the whole thing works nicely on mobile devices.

SayIt can be used either as a hosted service, or it can be built directly into your own website, as a Django app. Here are some examples of what it looks like in its hosted, standalone form:

• The Leveson Inquiry – An investigation into press ethics (did you know Hugh Grant’s middle name?)

• The Charles Taylor trial – The former president of Liberia is tried for crimes against humanity in an epic seven year trial

• The complete works of Shakespeare – as a demonstration of SayIt’s flexibility in handling different kinds of transcript

However, SayIt’s main purpose is to be built into other sites and apps.  We don’t have a live demo of this today, but one of our international partners will soon be launching a new Parliamentary Monitoring site which uses SayIt to publish years of parliamentary transcripts.

SayIt is also 100% open data compatible, and we use a cut-down version of the Akoma Ntoso open standard for data import.

What isn’t SayIt?

SayIt is:

• Not a site full of data curated and uploaded by mySociety – it’s a tool for redeployment all over the net. We’ll host deployments where that’s helpful to people, though.

• Not primarily about Britain – whilst we’re a social enterprise based in the UK, SayIt has been built with an international perspective. We hope it will serve the needs of people watching politicians in places like Kenya and South Africa.

• Not solely a mySociety project – it’s actually an international collaboration, via the Poplus network (see more below).

• Not (yet) a tool to replace Microsoft Word as the way you write down transcripts in the first place. This is coming as we move from Alpha to Beta, though.

Why are we building SayIt?

SayIt is one of the Poplus Components. Poplus is a global collaboration of groups that believe it is currently too difficult and expensive to build effective new digital tools to help citizens exert power over institutions.

Poplus Components are loosely joined tools, mostly structured as web services, that can be used to radically decrease the development time of empowerment sites and apps.

SayIt is the newest component, and aims to reduce the difficulty and cost of launching services that contain transcripts – in particular websites that allow people to track the activities of politicians. Using SayIt or other Poplus components you can build your site in whatever language and framework suits your wishes, but save time by using the components to solve time-consuming problems for you.

The founders of Poplus are FCI in Chile, and mySociety in the UK – and we are hoping that the launch of SayIt will help grow the network. The project has been made possible by a grant from Google.org, while early iterations were aided by the Technology Strategy Board.

Interested in publishing transcripts via SayIt? Here’s what to do…

Having taken a look at the demos, we hope at least some of you are thinking ‘I know of some transcripts that would be better if published like this’.

If you are interested, then there are two approaches we’d recommend:

• If you’re a coder, or if you have access to technical skills, read about how to convert your data into the open standard we use. Then talk to us about how to get this data online.

• If you don’t have access to technical skills,  get in touch about what you’re interested in publishing, and we’ll explore the options with you.

Note to coders – We’ve not yet spent a lot of time making SayIt easy to deploy locally, so we know it may be a challenge. We’re here to help.

Where might SayIt help?

SayIt comes from a desire to publish the speeches of politicians. But we know that there are many other possible uses, which is why we built the Shakespeare demo.

We think SayIt could be useful for publishing and storing transcripts of:

• Local council meetings

• Court hearings

• Election hustings

• Academic research interviews and focus groups

• Academic seminars, lectures, etc

• Plays

• Market research focus groups

• Historic archives of events such as a coronation or key debate

These are just a few of our ideas, but we bet you have others – please do tell us in the comments below.

What’s coming next

At the moment, SayIt only covers publishing transcripts, not creating them. Needless to say, this lack of an authoring interface is a pretty big gap, but we are launching early (as an Alpha) because we want to know how you’ll use it, what features you want us to build, and what doesn’t work as well as we anticipated. We also want to see if we can attract other people to co-develop the code with us, which is the real spirit of the Poplus network.

We’ll also be adding the ability to subscribe to alerts so that you’ll get an email every time a keyword occurs (just as you can on our other websites, such as FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow). This feature will come into its own for ongoing series of transcripts such as council meetings.

Image by Columbia Phonograph Co. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons