We’re delighted to announce that mySociety has been generously awarded $100,000 by Omidyar Network, a mission-based investment group committed to enabling individual self-empowerment. The purpose of the investment, our largest to date from a philanthropic source, is to spread the use of PledgeBank.com to a host of community and grassroots groups in the US.

Omidyar Network invested in PledgeBank because it encourages collective effort by enabling users to rally the support of others through their own commitment to take action.

From starting new organizations, to giving blood, to volunteering to mentor others, Pledgebank has enabled people to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Just this morning we were sent pictures of a protest in Brazil that was organised using PledgeBank.

What has been missing to date, though, has been any resource to spread the use of the tool to traditionally offline groups. Whether these are schools, community groups, NGOs, churches or neighbourhood watch groups, many could benefit from PledgeBank, but few have had the opportunity to hear about it. Therefore, PledgeBank is looking to hire an outreach coordinator who will travel around the US meeting groups, listening to their goals, and explaining how PledgeBank can help them, for free.

mySociety will be recruiting the outreach coordinator in the New Year. If you’d like to get in touch, perhaps to pre-book an appointment to meet or talk with the outreach coordinator, or because you know someone who could do the job well, please drop us a line to hello@mysociety.org.

We just had our irregular weekly meeting, which we do most Mondays using a conference call. I thought I’d just write up what we’re all up to this week.

• I’m continuing to test the ePetitions site for 10 Downing Street, and developing an interesting branded version of PledgeBank for CAFOD (more when it launches).
• Matthew is going to look at various things that need doing on PledgeBank and WriteTothem. For PledgeBank more chivvying emails, I think something like this ticket but not exactly. For WriteToThem, various bits of code to do with how we handle error cases.
• Chris is making more pretty maps for the Department for Transport.
• Tom is working out in detail how we’re doing to spend the money from DCLG which has finally come through. It’s mentioned in this post, look for “e-Innovations Product and Marketisation strand via Kirklees MBC”. Which means, we’re being paid to do proper marketing and sales of branded version of our services, such as WriteToThem, PledgeBank, and Neighbourhood Fixit. He’s also chasing up some interesting people met at a conference in Eastern Europe (Bratislava, I think?) last week.

Please ask questions in the comments – for example, if you’d like us to post about particular things on this blog.

Much of my August seems to have been absorbed with maintenance tasks.

For example, Chris and I spent a few days tightening up WriteToThem’s privacy. I made sure the privacy statement correctly describes what happens with backup files, and failed messages. I reduced the timeouts on how long we keep the body of failed messages. I made sure we delete old backup files of the WriteToThem database. I wrote scripts to run periodically to check that no bugs in our queueing demon can accidentally mean we keep the body of messages for longer than we say. I added a cron job to delete Apache log files older than a month for all our sites. As AOL know to their cost, the only really private data is deleted data.

Earlier in the month, I handled some WriteToThem support email for the first time in ages. We get a couple of hundred messages a week, which Matthew mainly slogs through. It’s good for morale to do it, as we get quite a lot of praise mail. It is also hard work, as you realise how complicated even our simple site and the Internet are, and it leads to fixing bugs and improving text on the site. I made a few improvements to our administration tools, and things like the auto-responder if people reply to the questionnaire, to try and reduce the amount of support email, and make it easier to handle.

I did some more work on the geographically cascading pledges (like this prototype one), but I’m still not happy with them. In the end, I realised that it is the structure of wording of the pledge that is the key problem. Our format of “If will A but only if N others will B” just isn’t easily adapted to get across that the pledge applies separately in different geographically areas. Working out how to fix that is one of the things we’ll brainstorm about in the Lake District (see below).

The last couple of days I’ve been configuring one of our new servers who is called Balti, and getting the PledgeBank test harness working on it. Until now, it has only been run on my laptop. This is partly heading towards making a proper test harness for the ePetitions site, running on a server so we properly test nothing can be broken before deploying a new version.

Matthew has wrapped up the TheyWorkForYou API now, and is working on Neighbourhood Fixit next. Chris has been doing lots more performance work for the ePetitions site. And he’s been making some funky monitoring thing to detect PostgreSQL database lock conflicts, which we get occasionally and are hard to debug

Tom’s in Berlin at the moment, he gave a talk last night, and I think has been to see some people from Politik Digital. As we’ve been discussing on the mySociety email list, there’s an EU grant we’re likely to apply for in collaboration with them.

On Friday, we’re all going to the Lake district for a week, with some of the trustees and volunteers intermittently. We very conveniently and cheaply all work from home, so it’s good and necessary to meet up for a more sustained period of time at least once a year. Last year we were in Wales.

Have you searched for the name of an MP, or a phrase asking how to campaign, in the last few weeks? You might have noticed that there are adverts on Google for WriteToThem, HearFromYourMP, TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank. These only appear in the UK.

Google have donated these adverts for free via their Google Grants programme. Yay Google! Anna, one of our volunteers, is busy adding suitable keywords, and optimising advertisement text. Thank you, Anna.

Obviously, we want to use this to help people who are searching for services like ours, but don’t know it, find those services. We’ve got quite good Google juice, so for keywords like “write to your mp” WriteToThem is already the top hit. Ones like “mp” and “local mp” we’re in the top few hits anyway, so the adverts just make WriteToThem slightly more prominent.

Much more important are cases where we’re currently not listed at all. For example, if you search for “councillors” you don’t get WriteToThem, even though the word is quite prominent on WriteToThem’s front page. The first hit* is pretty good, but has a page title and text which don’t mean much in the Google search results. Hopefully the text “Who are my councillors?” in the WriteToThem advert will help more.

Anna is also playing with adverts for every MP’s name, linking to their TheyWorkForYou page. And we’ve got some interesting PledgeBank ones. For example, try searching for “residents association“. Let us know if you have more ideas for specific PledgeBank uses like that.

You can help out. If you spot a keyword which we ought to have an advert for, but don’t, then please let us know. This is a very important part of usability for a website. If people can’t find it, don’t even get to it when they are looking for it, then it isn’t a very usable site.

*ETA, 2013:  councillor dot gov dot uk – now a dead link

I mentioned the other day “a syndicated version of PledgeBank for someone’s large global warming campaign later in the year”. In the early hours of this morning, Global Cool soft launched.

The idea is that people can use the Global Cool website as a central place to manage reducing or offsetting their carbon emissions, and recording and competing for how much they have done so. There’ll be tools like carbon counters, systems to track when you change electricity company, and so on. PledgeBank comes into this as another set of actions Global Cool people can take, both making and signing pledges which reduce their CO2 footprint.

Global Cool Foundation UK, the new charity behind it, only got their funding recently, and so as Gavin explains have had to build the site in phenomenal time. We got login intergration with PledgeBank working in the early hours of this morning. It works, but there are some missing features, and it still needs lots of polishing. The integration is needed so later you can be credited for signing and doing a pledge on the main part of the Global Cool site.

The “microsites” file in the PledgeBank source code is even more complicated now, with authentication hooks. Basically, the PledgeBank part of Global Cool runs on a subdomain of their domain, being pledge.global-cool.com. This is so it can read the Global Cool cookies for authentication. The pledges themselves are in the same database, so they can be shared with the rest of the site later.

We can happily syndicate or theme PledgeBank in all sorts of ways for your site. We charge for this via our trading arm. Any profit (not really any yet!) going back into running the main PledgeBank service for free, and to run mySociety.

At the ceremony last night, mySociety amazingly managed to pick up two awards, the Contribution to Civic Society Award for WriteToThem, and the Advocacy Award for PledgeBank.

I’ve put them next to last year’s award for TheyWorkForYou; not sure we can keep the pace up for next year! 😉

Thank you to everyone involved with the evening, to the judges, and of course to everyone who has used our sites to get in touch with a representative through WriteToThem or used PledgeBank to do things they couldn’t do on their own.

No lolling about in the sun for us, as we follow an endless chain of projects through the hot months. Inured to hasslebot, we’ve not been posting to this blog much. Instead, busy working on, or soon about to work on:

• The ePetitions site for Number 10
• On a syndicated version of PledgeBank for someone’s large global warming campaign later in the year, and another for a fundraiser for a Brazilian NGO
• Making more maps (like these) for the Department for Transport
• Adding an API to TheyWorkForYou, paid for by an award from the Department for Constitutional Affairs
• Meetings endless meetings. I’ve given up trying to track Tom meeting people, and just assume at all times he is in an important meeting.
• Supporting all our existing sites – customer support emails, nursing parliament screen scrapers, fixing up WriteToThem contact details, making sure our servers don’t break.

And that’s without mentioning Neighbourhood Fix-it and the call for proposals. Later in the year. Have I missed anything?

Have a good weekend!

The mySociety call for proposals closed a few weeks ago. We’d love to know what you thought were the top three best proposals, or, if you don’t like any of them that much, the best ideas buried within the proposals.

So, please leave your thoughts in comments on this post, preferably arranged as a top 3. And even better, why not use this brand new experimental PledgeBank feature to meet with other people near you, so you can discuss the best ideas before posting here?

I haven’t posted here for a while – in late May / early June I was on holiday in China for a month. After 18 months of hectic mySociety with only a break for a week, I needed it!

Since I got back, I’ve been busy on the no. 10 petitions site, which in the tag-team coding way that we do, Matthew has now taken over for a bit. And I’m doing something I’m hesitatingly calling “geocascading pledges”.

I’m not quite sure what to call it yet. It lets you make one pledge, but whose target counts separately in different towns. When someone signs up, they also choose a place. Rather than having to make a separate pledge for everywhere in the world, you can just make one.

Here’s an example pledge, which is also real (more on that later), so do sign it if you like. And then post your thoughts in the comments – it needs a bit of polishing yet.

Last week PledgeBank had its first birthday. The basic figures, for those of you interested are:

1863 Pledges, of which

1272 Pledges have failed, and

295 Pledges have been successful.

There are 296 pledges open for signatures right now (and could succeed or fail), and there have been a total of 44585 signatures by 37775 signers.

The other thing we know is that we’ve seen new organisations founded, substantial protests and boycotts organised, and even hair dyed blonde. But it isn’t up to us to say how successful the project has really been: for that we need external evaluation. If you’re interested in producing an independent review of PledgeBank’s effectiveness and value for money, or if you know someone who might be, let us know.