There’s a lot left to do, but Francis Irving’s brilliant new mySociety Freedom of Information site is now live. You can file requests to central government departments (most of the them), and browse what other people have been requesting (already fascinating). It doesn’t have a name yet, nor any slick design, nor half the features we want it to have, but it works and it gets things done.

And dammit, people, that’s what mySociety’s all about. Can we explain it any better?

I only met Harry Metcalfe a few weeks ago, when he was volunteering for the Open Rights Groups.

Since then he’s dazzled us with his completely single handed production of TellThemWhatYouThink, a site which draws most central government consultations into one site. The main citizen benefits from this is that you can get email or RSS alerts when a department decides to hold a consultation on an issue that you care about. As per usual it’s also starting with horrid nonstandard data in a zillion formats and turning it into nice structured data for everyone else to play with too.

It’s not a mySociety project, he’s just using our friends and family server, but he’s made it look more like a mySociety site than even we could manage. Kudos Harry!

PS Harry, along with both of the last two new volunteers to do major pieces of coding for mySociety, is in the third year of his PhD. I think I can see a pattern emerging…

Chris Lightoot died a year ago today (or yesterday, by a few minutes).

I’m just sitting here reading the very first emails I ever got from him, back in 2003. Within the first few mails he’s invented and hacked up the idea that is now Richard Pope’s PlanningAlerts.com, coded and developed the idea that persuaded YouGov to donate vast amounts of free polling data to form PoliticalSurvey2005.com (a wider understanding of which would greatly help in the US election if the methodology was only applied there) and in this post he’s foreseen the Google maps mashup craze and offered it on a plate to the Ordnance Survey to pioneer, two years before Google started.

The invention and brilliance comes so thick and fast reading these mails that I now realise that I’d persuaded myself over the year that I’d mis-remembered quite how insanely creative he was, trying to correct for rose-tinted lenses. But he was a proper, bona fide, no-holds-barred cantankerous genius. Most days I think about Chris at least once: I try to make sure we live up to his standards (he wouldn’t have tolerated my use of ‘But’ at the start of the last sentence, for example). Reading these mails tonight drives home the scale of what we all lost, amongst our friends, on the Internet and in society at large. It aches to contemplate.

This project became Mapumental. Please visit that site for details of our travel-time maps services.
The work was funded and supported by the Department for Transport.

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You may remember that back in 2006 mySociety published some maps showing how long it took to commute places via public transport.

We’ve just made some more which have some lovely new features we reckon you’ll probably like a lot.

If you’d like to see more maps like this in your area, please ask your local transport authority to get in touch with us, or nudge these people 🙂

PS As always, Francis Irving remains a genius.

On our servers we only install software from Debian packages, or our own software with install scripts from our own CVS. This at first seems a bit mad, especially to Ruby on Rails people who love their gems. But it’s a sane way of managing lots of servers (we’ve got 7 Debian servers, and 2 FreeBSD servers to run at the moment).

Of course, you could install packages on them from CPAN, from Ruby Gems, by compiling them yourself and putting them in /usr/local. But you’d have to have another system for each packages system to keep track of what you’d installed and what version, and to worry about security updates. And you’d lose some of the benefits of dependency checking.

Most of our servers are, inevitably, still running Debian Sarge (the latest and greatest when we started them a few years ago). We’re going to gradually upgrade them to Debian Etch, but it is going to take a while. In the fast moving world of Rails this isn’t particularly helpful, so you have to backport packages. I couldn’t find any, so have made some myself.

You can find packages for Rails 1.2.5-1 on Sarge in our Debian package repository. Yeah, still an old version for you people “living on the edge”, but it’s the one in Etch (the latest Debian stable), and is way better than 0.13.1-1 that we had before 🙂

This week has been quite bitty. I’ve been doing more work on the Freedom of Information site, have been getting into the swing of Ruby on Rails. Once you’ve learnt its conventions, it is quite (but not super) nice.

As far as languages are concerned, Ruby seems identical in all interesting respects to Python. It’s like learning Spanish and Italian. Both are super languages. Ruby has nice conventions like exclamation marks at the end of function names to indicate they alter the object, rather than return the value (e.g. .reverse!). But then Python has a cleaner syntax for function parameters. It is swings and roundabouts.

Rails has lots of ways of doing things which we already have our own ways of doing for other sites. The advantage of relearning them, is that other people know them too. So Louise was able to easily download and run the FOI site, and make some patches to it. Which would have been much harder if it was done like our other sites. Making development easier is vital – for a long time I’ve wanted a web-based cleverly forking web application development wiki. But while I dream about that, Rails packaging everything you need to run the app in a standard way in one directory that quite a few people know how to use, helps.

Other things… I’ve been helping Richard set up GroupsNearYou on our live servers, it should be ready for you to play with soon. It looks super nice, and is easy to use. I’ve had some work to do with recruitment. And catching up on general customer support email for TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank. I’ve also been updating the systems administration documentation on our internal wiki, so others can work out how to run our servers.

This is the second in a short series of interviews with people building and running some of the most exciting internet and democracy projects in Europe.

Adrian Moraru from the IPP in Romania set the BerlinInAugust unconference abuzz with occasional gasps at the uncompromising relentlessness of their approach, which included suing to obtain the mobile phone numbers of all the politicians with handsets provided on the public purse. Below you can hopefully see why they got people excited…

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What is the organisation you work for?

Our organization, the Institute for Public Policy, is an independent think tank based in Bucharest. We have a permanent staff of 12 people plus a pool of external experts and part time collaborators that we work with on project based relationship. This external group may number as many as 50 in a year and range from former public officials, to politicians, independent experts, journalists, students, young researchers and academics. We work in numerous areas but we specialise in local government, parliament and the ministries.

What is the main purpose of the site(s) that you run?

The main purpose is to give people with a specialised, professional interest in politics an easy way to access facts and statistics about the way MPs are working & voting, as well providing information for the general public.

Can you tell us about some of the unusual ways you ensure that your vote attendance information is accurate?

Sure, it’s easy. In our parliament the attendance is recorded based on a attendance register at the entrance of the plenary hall. However, it is common for some MPs to sign on behalf of their colleagues and/or friends. So in order to expose the size of this phenomenon we decided to keep track of MP’s real attendance in a more accurate way.

Some politicians have legitimate exemptions, which we record, be we also wanted an accurate record of how many of them are present when votes happen. So lets say you have 20 votes in a day. If the name of the MP Mr. X shows up only in 14 of them then he is present only 70%. Furthermore, if, say, only 204 voted out of a possible 322, we deduce from our database the 118 who didn’t show up, and add that to their record.

We have used video cameras from time to time in order to combat the practice of multiple voting. This is happens because of our voting system in Parliament is based on electronic voting stations placed on your bench were MPs identify themselves with a smart card (aka voting card) before pushing a button corresponding with their voting choice.

Politicians have 10 seconds to do so once the vote is initiated. Some MPs use these 10 seconds to vote once with their own cards and then once with the cards of colleagues who are, for example, out at lunch. This is a widespread practice.

We have the plenary sessions broadcasted live and also available recorded on
the Parliament website. We suggested that the during voting that a camera record the activity int he whole chamber. We therefore exposed a few cases of this multiple voting, although not much has happened as a result yet.

You also collect information about politician’s travel. How did you get that? What does it tell your users?

We get it through our freedom of information laws. But is not that easy to get hold of. Sometimes we even have to go on court to get it, and sometimes even when we do it comes on paper, not in electronic formats, which is obviously harder to re-use.

What it shows is where an MP went, when, why, how much it cost, how long they stayed and so on. From this we can help people establish whether they think it was strictly necessary for an MP to visit French Guineau to see the launching of an Ariane V rocket, and we can provide the most popular country destination by political parties.

Do you ever face claims that the effects you have on politicians aren’t entirely positive? If so, how do you respond?

Well this is not a consolidated democracy, you know. MPs are not as nice as yours. So, yes large parts of the databases hurts a lot of them a great deal. Let’s just say we are not scared. But on the other hand we strive to get the best data and to present it in a non aggressive, non biased way using the best algorithms.

You are good at using the law to obtain information. Can you tell us a bit about your approach, and what information you’ve obtained through the courts?

This is a very distinct topic. We always ask for information via our Freedom of Information act, using a special format of letter which cannot be completely ignored. We have lawyers following the flow of requests together with an office manager and we sue every time we do not get an answer, have our request denied or find that information we’ve been provided with is incomplete.

We ask for a lot. A lot! Usually we fight for data that exposes bad practices and most of the things involving expenses or money. It is here where there is a lot to hurt bad politicians by exposing how unwisely some of them are spending the money.

What other projects around the world excite you the most, and why?

Tough one. None. I like opensecrets.org and votesmart.org but that’s it. I do not believe in moving participatory democracy online in our life time. Instead I think we should be looking for ways to open up government and make it more transparent using the internet. In my opinion we are not even at 10% of the way to what we can ultimately do, either in Romania or elsewhere. We can think also about real interactivity in the future.

What’s next for you and IPP on the Internet?

Who knows?

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That’s it for the moment. Please post any questions for Adrian in the comments below, and I’ll see if I can update this accordingly.

At mySociety we’re always very lucky to meet and spend time with some extremely diverse and impressive people.

We thought it would be great to share a bit of that good fortune by holding some talks from some of our favourite thinkers, and to have an excuse to meet more people in the wider mySociety community face to face.

To that end, we’re holding four talks in London this autumn (location TBD but almost certainly a centralish pub). Each link below goes to an Upcoming page where you can sign up to let us keep track of numbers and how big a venue we need.

4/10/2007 – Stefan Magdalinski, net-political troublemaker extraordinaire

1/11/2007 – Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map

CANCELLED 29/11/2007 – Jason Kitcat, e-voting expert

12/12/2007 – Peter Wainman, IT-specialist solicitor and blogger

We look foward to seeing you there.

Hello, all. Just wanted to let you know about another podcast interview I did about PledgeBank…this time on the 501c3Cast. This podcast is geared toward folks in the nonprofit/philanthropic world (the tax code classification for many nonprofits in the U.S. is “501(c)3”) to spread the word about new tools, ideas, and conversations in the sector. You can find the podcast here (though, be forewarned, it’s a bit long…).

A few weeks ago mySociety and Politik Digital held a small unconference in Berlin. The idea was to get together some of the best practioners building and running democracy websites across Europe, regardless of their size or status.

I’ll try to write this up more fully soon, but for the moment I wanted to share some email interviews I did with some of the participants after the event. The first is with Guglielmo Celata from the Italian group D.E.P.P. We first came across them a couple of years ago when they borrowed some code from PublicWhip.org.uk (the independent volunteer vote analysis project run by Julian Todd and mySociety senior developer Francis Irving) for their website OpenPolis.

Anyway, enough for the context – D.E.P.P have some great, boundary-pushing work coming up and I thought people in the English speaking community would want to know.

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What is the organisation you work for?

The name of the Association is D.E.P.P., that stands for Electronic Democracy and Public Partecipation.
It’s a relatively small group of people (four) who work on e-partecipation projects with local administrations (the municipality of Rome and the Regione Lazio, for examples). We also have an self-financed project, named Openpolis, to map politicians, their charges, their declarations, both at a national and at a local level. More on this later.

What is the main purpose of the site(s) that you run?

We have a project named eDem 1.0 which has been so far installed twice: municipiopartecipato.it focuses in enabling e-participation of local communities on the “participatory budget”; and edem-regione on the budget of the Regione Lazio (the link points to an alpha version).

I think the participatory budget for the local community is far more interesting. The site shows a list of issues categorized by theme and territory. Registered users can vote up issues and make them emerge as important. Issues are created by the users. Users can also create proposals related to issues and vote them. The integration with Google Maps, allows user to see how issues and proposals distribute in their territory; it makes the user interface immediate (and of course makes the site sooo stylish).

The proposals emerging as the most voted are approved and follow a workflow to be actually financed and implemented.

Online activities and offline physical assemblies (which exist), are linked together by a group of paid people, called enablers. They take care of moderating both offline and online activities, too.

The other project has almost the same features, but applied to the budget document of the Regione Lazio. Of course, the issues here are not created by the citizens, being the chapters (or sections) of the official budget document. The citizens can create and rate proposals, but such proposals are never going to be implemented.

This happens a lot, administrators are intersted in e-participation projects, but they want to reduce the possibility of issues emerging directly from citizens, and€ of course they try to change the nature of the project from a participative one, into a consultative one. A kind of Poll 2.0, if one wants to be cynical.

Can you tell us about your next site, the one you showed us in Berlin?

Openpolis is a project to gather informations on our political class and make them transparent. How they vote once elected, what laws they propose, their charges in institution, political parties and private organisations, public declarations, financial interests, judicial positions etc. The aim of the project is to revive the bond between the citizens and their representatives. We would like to give individuals or organized group of citizens, a set of tools to enable them to perform lobbying activities.

We want to work both at a national level and at a very local level, and to do this we plan to allow users to create part of the content on the site, and hope this way to create communities, wiki-style.
However, the site is not a wiki, since content has to be well-structured; we want to export statistics and make analysis on data added by users.

You are planning to combine information gathered from formal sources, and submitted by users. Can you tell us where you’re getting the formal information from, and how you are going to handle the information submitted by users?

We have different levels, and correspondingly different sources. At a national level, we are harvesting the official web sites of the Camera and Senato (the two houses of national representatives) and the web site of European Parliament. At local levels we rely on official biographical data from the Ministero degli Interni (Interior Ministry). We double check politician’s data for the 20 major cities in italy, but of course can’t possibly dream of doing that for the 109 provinces and 8100 municipalities.

For data on charges, declarations, financial interests and judicial positions, and for a complete double check on details and biographical data, we plan to leverage the community of users. The more users, the more data and verification.

Of course, data inserted by the users must be always connected to sources (i.e a web link, a reference to a book, an article in a newspaper, or a radio or television program). Data will be verified by moderators, and the community of moderators will grow on trust basis (using a karma-based system, so that when a subscribed user reach a certain treshold of trust, he is proposed as moderator to the board of administrators). We all know that this part is a real challenge and that handling a community online is a daunting task, but, hey, let’s try.

Users can be banned and content can be censored (after publishing), but any banning or censorship will be performed transparently, so that anyone, in any moment will be able to know the reason why a user was banned.

Do you ever face claims that the effects you have on politicians aren’t entirely positive? If so, how do you respond?

We actually have not yet started, but we do plan on receiving a lot of such claims. Of course we are trying to create something that the politicians should use, as well, so the most interested and active users should be the politician themselves.

Are there any other features of your site that you think are unusual or unique?

We plan to release an API, in order to make integration of our data and analysis possible directly from other web applications. Starting from RSS feed, to a proper API, it should be possible to integrate pieces of our applications directly into people’s blog or other similar applications.

What other projects around the world excite you the most, and why?

Well, of course the TheyWorkForYou project was a real kick off, we just thought: “wow, we have to do that here in Italy!” Then I really appreciate the work at GovTrack.us, especially from the technical standpoint, for the innovative way of using RDF and the Semantic Web approach.
Here in Italy, a project I forgot to mention in Berlin is: http://fainotizia.radioradicale.it.

FaiNotizia means Make Your Own News, it’s a project by Radio Radicale, an historical radio broadcast of the Italian Radical Party. It provides one of the first citizens journalism website in Italy and we plan to integrate with them in the future.

Do you use the law to help you get information? If so, how have you gone about it, and what have you obtained?

We haven’t so far, every information that we gathered was publicly available, we just wrote tons of parser code.

We plan to push the release of data on financial interests and judicial positions, though. Those data are public, but poorly accessible (no electronic format, no scanning, phtos or copies possible). This will require some legal actions or some fantasy to get them. We’ll see.

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So there we are. If you’ve any further questions or clarifications, just post a comment here and I’ll update this post with Guglielmo’s help.