I’ve been working on PledgeBank quite a bit recently. As well as adding survey emails asking whether signers have done their pledge, and a feature for people to contact a pledge’s creator, I’ve been fixing numerous bugs that have sprung up along the way. For starters, people on the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands now get a much more helpful error if they try and enter their postcode anywhere on the site, rather than the confusing postcode not recognised they were getting previously.

Other errors I found turned out not to be with our code. The PledgeBank test suite (that we run before deploying the site to check it all still works) was throwing lots of warnings about “Parsing of undecoded UTF-8 will give garbage” when it got to the testing of our other language pages. Our code wasn’t doing anything special, and there were multiple places the warning came from – upgrading our libwww-perl removed one, and I’ve submitted bug reports to CPAN for the rest (having patched our copies locally – hooray for open source).

The Perl warnings were at least understandable, though. While tracking down why the site was having trouble sending a couple of emails, I discovered that we had a helper function splitting very long words up to help with word-wrapping – which when applied to some Chinese text was cutting a UTF-8 multibyte character in two and invalidating the text. No problem, I think, I simply have to add the “/u” modifier to PHP’s regular expression so that it matches characters and not bytes. This didn’t work, and after much playing had to submit a bug report to PHP – apparently in PHP “non-space character followed by non-space character” isn’t the same as “two non-space characters in a row”…

The “um’s” and “uh’s” on the interview are embarrassing, to say the least, but PledgeBank just got its first podcast coverage. Check out my NetSquared interview here. I’m hoping this gets us a bit of exposure in the U.S.

And I’ll do better next time with all the incidental sounds… 🙂

I’m still busy beavering away at the Facebook / PledgeBank integration. It all works now, but will take a bit more polishing to get just right. Matthew is, I think adding surveys to PledgeBank. So it finds out later if people have or have not done their pledge. Or is he updating to a new version of BoundaryLine at the moment, so our postcode lookup on WriteToThem and everywhere else gets better? Hard to keep track when he does so much at once.

Keith is upgrading our internal documentation, so new people at mySociety can learn how to keep things going. Heather is stalking all of America, finding people to use and promote PledgeBank. Tom is on a much deserved holiday, after seemingly a zillion meetings per day for months.

There’s lots of ongoing maintenance for all our sites. We’re lucky that large chunks of our customer support email are done by volunteers (thanks Anna, Louise, Tim and Tomski/James) and by Debbi (yay Debbi!). Much of this is routine – changing pledge text, updating council email addresses, giving MPs posting links for HearFromYourMP, putting new MP photos up on TheyWorkForYou etc. A lot of it is unique – handling new translations, answering questions from MPs and Lords about their voting record. I’ll let the others give some more examples of the kind of thing we answer.

Speaking of which, do you know any good web developers who would like to work for mySociety? If so, put them in touch.

A couple of weekends ago when it was still sunny, a group of 20 or so mySociety developers, trustees, and volunteers went away together to a farmhouse in Warwickshire (thanks to everyone especially Tim Morley and Tom Loosemore for their help). This was not only an opportunity for people like me to finally meet all those I’ve been emailing for months if not years, but also to discuss various things about mySociety.

It was an excellent weekend – we learnt lots of new things, like how UKCOD and mySociety have developed over the last 10 years(!), Rob’s excellent NZ TheyWorkForYou, and Richard’s PlanningAlerts.com. We also discussed what mySociety’s core aims and principles should be – here are some thoughts:

Aims

1) Build sites that build civic value, using the internet natively as a medium and that scale elegantly
2) Build sites that are easy to use for those without experience
3) Build sites that are focused on meeting one simple need
4) mySociety should become self-sustaining, financially and staff-wise

Principles for developing mySociety services and products

1) Build things that meet people’s needs, and that they can’t express yet
2) Do one thing really, really, really well (brand on one thing)
3) Treat the entire world as a creative canvas (plug-ins, widgets, etc.)
4) Do not attempt to do everything yourself; use other people’s content
5) Back success, get rid of failure
6) The web is a conversation; join in
7) Any website is only as good as its worst page
8) Make sure your content can be linked to forever
9) Your granny will never use Second Life
10) Maximize roots to content; optimize your site to run high on Google
11) One size does not fit all – users should know they’re on your site
12) Accessibility is not an optional extra
13) Let people paste their content on their own sites
14) Link to discussions on the web, not necessarily host them
15) Personalization should be unobtrusive and coherent

And some more thoughts:

1) Only use html and CSS
2) Ensure accessibility
3) Ensure usability
4) Make it work across the spectrum – screen readers to mobile phones
5) Build things that don’t require key “stick in the muds?? to do anything
6) Don’t ever build anything that might become an empty cupboard, or if you do, make it very easy for people to fill that cupboard.
7) Don’t rely on network effect, but do seek out network effect
8) Engineer serendipity
9) Help users connect with other users
10) Set the bar high for privacy

However, we still have some challenges ahead: we need to think about how to make the most of our existing sites, and had a very good session on how to improve PledgeBank’s outreach; we also need to engage better with both our current and potential volunteers; and, of course, move towards becoming financially self-sustaining to keep up our good work without always relying on grants.

And finally, because we like tangible actions, we launched the UKCOD site on Saturday night too.

So what happens next? Well some of the things have already happened, like Matthew and others transforming FixMyStreet and Francis developing some widgets. We’ll also see what the new PM wants to do with e-petitions (keep it, apparently, which is good), and how the e-democracy landscape is changing. And, soon we hope, we’ll give this site a bit of a facelift.

But we still have much to do, and the weekend wasn’t long enough to get through everything we wanted. So here are a few more things to chew over.

• Have you wanted to volunteer for mySociety but found it difficult, e.g. the tasks were too technical, or didn’t really know where to start?
• Is there something you want to know about mySociety, or our sites, but not been able to find?
• How can we improve our existing sites?
• Do you know any nice millionaires with some spare cash burning a hole in their pockets, and they just don’t know what to do with it?

Let us know why and we’ll try to do something about it.

The last batch of councillor data arrived this morning, thanks very much to GovEval, so pratically every council (bar all Scottish councils and the 17 English councils that had boundary changes, for which we’re just awaiting a new version of Boundary-Line, Ordnance Survey’s product that says where constituency boundaries are) should now be contactable again through WriteToThem.

I’ve been doing some work on helping people promote our sites and the things on them – spurred by a request from a user who was holding a street party, we’ve made some posters and flyers for FixMyStreet (thanks to volunteer Ayesha Garrett for designing them), and we’ve started providing online tools to promote pledges on PledgeBank, including an up-to-date status image or text of a particular pledge, alongside the established, more offline, flyers.

We’ve renamed NeighbourhoodFix-It to FixMyStreet! Everything will continue to work the same, so get reporting those abandoned fridges and uncleaned up dog poo. Old links should redirect to the new domain.

Matthew explains why we did this in the FAQ:

Wasn’t this site called Neighbourhood Fix-It?

Yes, we changed the name mid June 2007. We decided Neighbourhood Fix-It was a bit of a mouthful, hard to spell, and hard to publicise (does the URL have a dash in it or not?). The domain FixMyStreet became available recently, and everyone liked the name.

Thanks to Tom Loosemore for telling us that the old name was just too cumbersome, and Matthew for reworking it (and improving the front page to boot!) in what felt like 3 seconds flat.

Last weekend was an away weekend for the paid and voluntary group of hardworking souls that makes up mySociety.

One of the many, many things that came out of it was the need for a couple of extra paid people, at least on an experimental basis.

1. A world class open source web developer who can hold his own with the Irvings and Somervilles of this world. Design skills a big bonus.

2. Someone who can help mySociety generate cash for its charitable works through helping us sell spinoffs of our sites to companies or organisations who can benefit from them.

This is just an informal ask, not a recruiting round, so if either of these things interests you at all, or might interest people you know, please drop an email to me at tom@mysociety.org.

The last few weeks, I’ve been breaking our normal tradition of launching things the minute they are made (Matthew usually does this in 5 minute long release cycles). This hasn’t been deliberate, just the two things were quite hard to actual check properly and get out the door.

The first was the new UKCOD site (the parent charity that runs mySociety). It took a while to finish after I set up the infrastructure, while the trustees wrote and approved all the content. Thanks very much to Ayesha and Sym for the design brilliance. Also thanks to Mediawiki (the Wikipedia software) which the site is based on – although it isn’t a wiki, it is configured so only UKCOD people can edit it. You can see just how much Mediawiki can be skinned and made to look like a normal site. It is a useful, simple CMS that lots of people already know how to use.

I’m really pleased the UKCOD site is now there. I (speaking personally) think it is super important that mySociety and UKCOD are transparent organisations, and that we should demonstrate openness by being open ourselves. If there is anything else you’d like to know, please do ask – and we’ll either tell you, or explain why we can’t or won’t do so.

The second is the WriteToThem 2006 statistics. Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone we’ve put them live yet – we’ll be doing publicity for it later in the week. Meanwhile have a look and send us any comments. This took ages to get out the door because I wanted to make sure the statistics were accurate, and presented in a way that wouldn’t be misleading. Let me know where I’ve failed.

Right, now off to singing…

UK Citizens Online Democracy (UKCOD) is the charity that runs mySociety. Shockingly for an organisation that works on online projects, its own website has not been high on its priority list.

Thanks to the prodding and work of the mySociety developers and volunteers this embarrassing deficiency has now been rectified, and UKCOD is today proud to announce the launch of its own simple but hopefully informative website at http://www.ukcod.org.uk/. We aim to provide transparent and clear information on our organisation’s structure, its history, projects, finances, and the people involved.

We expect this to generate as many questions as it answers. Do please let us know if we’ve missed anything, or if there’s anything else you would like to know.

Bests,

James Cronin,
Chairman, UK Citizens Online Democracy

The first new councillor details have begun to automatically arrive in our database, thanks to GovEval. 34 councils were reactiviated on WriteToThem today, from Alnwick to Wokingham. It would have been 38 but the other 4 councils have had boundary changes that we don’t have the data for yet.

16 of the 40 Welsh Assembly constituencies did not change their boundaries at the election (this took some time to work out, as the Press Association said it was 18, and the official report from the Boundary Commission for Wales said it was 17 🙂 ). Those 16 Assembly Members are now also reactiviated on WriteToThem, along with their regional AMs.

Other than that, I’ve continued tweaking Neighbourhood Fix-It and started some work on TheyWorkForYou – the first step of which is to deal with the large backlog of mail that’s accumulated, leading to a number of bugfixes. Apologies to anyone who was trying to look at Brian Wilson MLA‘s page and found themselves stuck in an infinite loop of being told there were two Brian Wilsons. We also had a couple of emails asking us why Gordon Brown didn’t have a voting record on equal gay rights like other MPs. This was easy to answer – he’s never voted in any division that is included by that PublicWhip policy – and so an MP’s page now states if they’ve been absent from every vote on a particular policy.