1. Closing down SayIt

    We’re sad to have to announce that we’ve made the difficult decision to stop hosting SayIt and will close the site by the end of July.

    SayIt is an open source tool for making transcripts easy to read, search and share on the modern internet. It lays out transcripts so that the viewer can cut and dice them to best suit their needs. Want to see everything said by one speaker? Everything said on a specific date? Search for every instance of a particular word or phrase? SayIt can do all of this.

    Over the years SayIt has hosted transcripts of all kinds. Not only the Leveson Inquiry, the trial of Charles Taylor (former President of Liberia), speeches recovered from the online archives of the Conservative and Labour parties, but also many user-generated transcripts too.

    We’ve had to close down sites in the past in order to focus on current priorities and sadly that time has come for SayIt. Although we believe that the concept is a good one and that having searchable, web friendly transcripts is a good thing, we don’t have the resources to continue to maintain or develop it. This means that we’re no longer able to continue running the service itself.

    Many SayIt instances may have been preserved in archive.org’s Wayback Machine. Get in touch if you have any questions or concerns or have an interest in continuing to maintain the project. The code will remain open source and available on GitHub.

  2. Cyber Essentials Certified

    Cyber Essentials is a scheme backed by the UK government designed to help organisations demonstrate that they have taken steps to protect themselves against most common cyber attacks.

    There are two aspects to the scheme. Firstly, it provides information, guidance and best practice to organisations that may not have experts on-staff so that they can feel assured that they’ve got at least the basics of internet security covered.

    Secondly, it acts as an indication to an organisation’s stakeholders (its users and customers, employees, suppliers, etc) that they are committed to internet security and have taken steps to ensure that appropriate measures are in place to protect themselves and their stakeholders’ data. As such, Cyber Essentials Certification is often a requirement for government contracts that require handling personal data or providing technical services.

    mySociety is a technical organisation and we’ve always taken our security responsibilities seriously – we handle a lot of data across our services and ensuring this is secure and handled in a legal and ethical manner has always been central to our approach, so we are very pleased to say that earlier this year we became formally certified under the scheme – you can look up our certification details on the Cyber Essentials site.

    Image: James Sutton