The Poplus community is spread all over the world—but that doesn’t stop us getting together whenever we can.

Poplus is a worldwide federation of people and organisations with an interest in civic tech. This Friday, we will be holding a virtual Show and Tell, hearing from two very different projects:

• Andrew Mandelbaum from SimSim in Morocco will be speaking about Nouabook. This is an application which enables anyone to contact their politicians in public, through Facebook. It uses the Poplus Component WriteIt.
• Matthew Landauer from OpenAustralia Foundation will be speaking about Cuttlefish, one of the latest pieces of software to be certified as a Poplus Component.

As well as hearing all about these projects, there’ll be a chance to catch up and have a chat about all things Poplus/civic tech. Everyone is welcome.

Where?

We’ll be using an online platform called QiqoChat to host this call: sign up here.

You can create a free account using Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Meetup/Twitter or a regular email address. Instructions for connecting by phone or computer microphone are available when you sign in and click “Participate”.

When?

This Friday, 12 June. Times are as follows:

• 5 AM – US Pacific
• 7 AM – US Eastern
• 8 AM – Chile/Argentina
• 12 PM – UK
• 7 PM – Taiwan and Malaysia
• 9 PM – Sydney
• 11 PM- New Zealand

—

Image: David Sim (CC)

 

 

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of this blog, YourNextMP crowd-sourced details of every candidate who stood in the UK general election.

But, just because our own election is over, doesn’t mean we’ll be letting YourNextMP gather dust. On the contrary—we want to see it being re-used wherever there are elections being held, and citizens needing information! We’re already seeing the first re-use case, and we’d love to see more.

Opening up data

YourNextMP’s main purpose was to provide a free, open database of candidates, so that anyone who wanted to could build their own tools on top of it, and it was very successful with that aim.

We heard of more than twenty projects which used the data, some small scale operations built by a single developer, some big names such as Google, and national newspapers like the Guardian.

The traditional source of candidate data for such projects has been through expensive private providers, not least because the official candidate lists are published just a few days before the election.

Thanks to YourNextMP’s wonderful crowd-sourcing and triple-checking volunteers, we reckon that we had the most complete, most accurate data, the earliest. And it was free.

Directly informing over a million citizens

YourNextMP also came into its own as a direct source of information for the UK’s electorate. This hadn’t been the priority when the project was launched, but it was helped greatly by the fact that constituency and candidate pages ranked very highly in search engines from early on, so anyone searching for their local candidates found the site easily.

Once they did so, they found a list of everyone standing in their constituency, together with contact details, links to their online profiles such as web pages, social media and party websites, and feeds from spin-off projects (themselves built on YourNextMP data) such as electionleaflets.org and electionmentions.com.

YourNextMP had more than a million unique users. In the weeks just prior to the UK general election, it was attracting approximately 20,000 visitors per day, and on the day before the election, May 6th, there was suddenly a massive surge: that day the site was visited by nearly 160,000 people.

So, in a nutshell: YourNextMP has not only enabled a bunch of projects which helped people become more informed before our election—it also directly informed over a million citizens.

A reusable codebase

YourNextMP was built on Poplus Components as a Democracy Club project: PopIt (for storing the candidates’ names) and MapIt (for matching users’ postcodes with their constituencies).

And, in the spirit of Poplus, the codebase is open for anyone to re-use in any country.

It’s already being pressed into use for the upcoming elections in Argentina, and we hope that developers in many other countries will use it to inform citizens, and inspire great web tools for the electorate, when their own elections come around.

If that’s something that interests you, please come and talk, ask questions and find out what’s involved, over on the Democracy Club mailing list.

—

Image: KayVee (CC)

The Knight Foundation’s News Challenge offers funding to innovative projects. We wonder whether they’ve ever had a bid whose collaborators span six different countries before.

Well, now they have: the plan to extend YourNextMP to work in Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Peru, Scotland, and Minnesota is a great example of the Poplus federation in action.

You can read more about the plans on the bid page—and please click the little pink heart to give us ‘applause’!

 

The bid

In short, we want to build on the success that the YourNextMP crowdsourcing platform has had here in the UK.

Right now, YourNextMP offers open data on every candidate for the UK general election. That data is being used by major media companies and internet giants, and underlies several innovative online tools. On top of that, it’s getting thousands of visits every day from people who simply want more information about who’s standing in their area.

With some modification, other countries could use the same tech in advance of their own elections, giving their citizens the same opportunities to become more informed about those standing, and to develop still more useful online tools.

This is a ‘Yay for Poplus’ moment

Because Poplus is an international federation of organisations with similar needs, we can come together to forge plans that will benefit all of us, and then work together to make them a reality.

Our plans wouldn’t just benefit those six countries, either. Like every bit of Poplus tech, it’d be available as open source software for anyone to use, anywhere in the world. And that’s what Poplus is all about: maximum impact from every bit of code.

So now..

Join the Poplus mailing list to find out more about Poplus activities

Give some applause to our Knight Foundation News Challenge bid

The open federation for sharing civic tech, Poplus, is inviting YOU to get involved.

If you’re not sure what Poplus is, or how it works, there’s a great opportunity coming up to learn more.

On Wednesday February 18th there will be a Poplus live online Hangout which everyone is welcome to watch via Google Hangouts-on-Air. The specific aim of this Hangout is to invite new people and explain just what Poplus is. There will also be the opportunity to ask questions.

Steven Clift, Poplus’ Engagement Lead, writes:

Poplus is a global federation for the next generation of civic tech. We share knowledge and technology to help our organisations help citizens.

We do this through collaborative civic coding. We share reusable open source civic technology components. We leverage open government data or make our own across many countries.

This online video-based event specially invites those new to Poplus. Everyone is welcome.

RSVP here to watch live (13:00 UTC, see your local time) on Feb 18.

The presentation includes Tom Steinberg with mySociety and a few project participants from around the world on the Hangout-on-Air “stage.” Questions will be taken via comments on the Hangout event page. The video stream is one-way, commenting two-way.

About Poplus

Founded by CiudadnoInteligente.org based in Chile, and mySociety.org based in the UK, the international civic tech federation was launched at the first PoplusCon in April 2014.

Watch this short video to see civic tech collaboration in action! Visit Poplus.org (in English/en español) for full details.

How to get involved

• Share this event by forwarding this email or by sharing this hangout here.

• Join our friendly online group with 350+ members from over 60 nations and representing 200+ organisations.  Read the awesome participant introductions to see the amazing talent coming together. Add your introduction. Be part of what’s next with civic tech sharing.

• Check out the Poplus components – test them – explore the code  on GitHub – deploy them – enhance them – and learn about turning your open source code into a new Poplus Component for global sharing and impact.

• Follow the blog – Lightly follow this initiative and stay tuned for future events with occasional email updates.For questions about Poplus, post to our friendly online group or contact our engagement team.

Much of mySociety’s work is only possible thanks to generous funding from a number of philanthropic foundations.

Today, we are delighted to announce that we have been awarded a major strategic investment from Omidyar Network totalling up to $3.6m over three years.

This is the third time we’ve been supported by Omidyar Network, and this represents the biggest investment we’ve ever had. Alongside organisations like the Open Society Foundation, Google.org and the Indigo Trust, Omidyar has been central in our transformation from a tiny UK-focused non-profit, to a global social enterprise of nearly 30 staff.

Being supported by Omidyar Network means more than just vital financial support. It means access to their amazing networks of other investees, and advice and guidance from a range of sources. And, also crucial for an organisation that seeks technical excellence, it means the stamp of support from an organisation that ultimately traces its DNA back to the giant internet successes that are eBay and Paypal.

What is the money for?

mySociety’s main ambition, over the next three years, is to help a couple of dozen other organisations, spread around the world, to grow popular citizen empowerment tools that are big enough to really matter to the citizens of a wide range of countries. This means building and growing tools that help people to check up on politicians, demand information and answers, or report and track problems, in hugely varying contexts.

In addition to this, we will continue to maintain and grow the network of users of our technology and support the growing Poplus federation.

It’s a tough goal, and one that will require even more from the organisations we partner with, than from our own colleagues. But the very fact that we can even try to help groups at this scale, is because Omidyar Network enables us to imagine it.

 

Image: Hit ThatSwitch (CC)

We’re always quick to shout about it when we’ve added a major new feature to one of our projects, or we’re launching a whole new website.

All well and good, but mySociety’s developers don’t just roll out the big stuff. Smaller releases are happening all the time, and, as a bunch of them have all come at once, we’ve put together a round-up.

Oh – and it’s worth saying that your feedback helps us prioritise what we work on. If you’re using any of our software, either as an implementer or a front-end user, and there’s something you think could be better, we hope you’ll drop us a line.

Here’s what we’ve been doing lately:

MapIt

We’ve just released version 1.2 of our postcodes-to-boundaries software.

The new version adds Django 1.7 and Python 3 support, as well as other minor improvements.

For the UK, this version now includes October 2014 Boundary-Line support, new OpenStreetMap data, and, crucially for this time of year, Santa’s new postcode (yes, it’s changed, apparently).

Find MapIt 1.2 here.

SayIt

The latest version of our transcript-publishing software, 1.3, adds mainstream support for import from fellow component PopIt (or any Popolo data source). That’s key to making it a truly interoperable Poplus Component.

SayIt is now also available in Spanish. Additionally, there are improvements around Speakers and Sections, plus this release includes OpenGraph data.

Many thanks to James of Open North, who contributed improvements to our Akoma Ntoso import.

Find SayIt 1.3 here.

PopIt

Our software for storing, publishing and sharing lists of politicians now has multi-language support in the web-based editing interface as well at the API level.

We’ve also recently added API support for merging the records of two people, and the API can now be used over SSL/TLS.

Full details are on the Poplus mailing list.

Alaveteli

Release 0.20 of our Freedom of Information platform sees improvements both to the Admin interface and to the front-end user experience.

Administrators will be pleased to find easier ways to deal with spammy requests for new authorities, and manage the categories and headings that are used to distinguish different types of authority; users should enjoy a smoother path to making a new request.

Full details can be seen here.

FixMyStreet

Version 1.5 of the FixMyStreet platform fully supports the new Long Term Support (LTS) version of Ubuntu, Trusty Tahr 14.04.

Four new languages – Albanian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, and Ukranian – have been added. There are also some improvements across both admin and the front-end design, and a couple of bugs have been fixed.

Full details are here.

Feedback

Whatever mySociety or Poplus software you’re deploying, we hope these improvements make life easier. Please do stay in touch – your feedback is always useful, whether it’s via the Poplus mailing list (MapIt, PopIt, SayIt), the FixMyStreet community or the Alaveteli community.

Image: Niels Linneberg (CC)

We were at the Mozilla Festival again this year. In practice, this meant we had a table at the Friday night Science Fair, ran a session in the Build and Teach the Web track about “Reusable Civic Tech”, and spent a lot of time meeting old friends and making lots of new ones (technically, we call that “networking”). This blog post is a shout-out to all the fabulous people we talked to, demonstrated with, learnt from, and perhaps even drank a cheeky beer with. It was excellent to meet you all.

Because we’re based in the UK, we’re especially lucky that the Mozilla Foundation’s annual festival was once again held in London. It’s good for us because our friends from the London Mozilla Space are there, and also because this makes it easy for us to get to (unlike so many of the attendees, we didn’t need to travel all the way into the country first). In fact, the unique and lofty Ravensbourne venue is an excellent location for such an event — it’s easy to see what’s happening on the other floors, and it’s easy to wander up and down between them. There is a lot going on to see and do, and, just like last year, even the stairs are productive: we had some serendipitous encounters on our way between floors.

Our primary activity at the festival was spreading the word about the Poplus federation and its reusable civic tech components. If you bumped into any of us, or if what we were demonstrating tickled your fancy, or if you are even now wearing one of the T-shirts we generously gave out: do please remember to get involved!

Image credit: Mozilla in Europe CC BY-SA 2.0

In yesterday’s blog post we talked about using our free, Open Source software, SayIt, to create collections of statements, like our collections of Party speeches.

That’s one use of SayIt – but we actually built it with a slightly different aim in mind: the storing and publication of transcripts.

SayIt really does transform transcripts – so, if you regularly take minutes of meetings at work, or in another capacity, it’s worth a look.

That’s easy for us to say, we know. But if you play with it for half an hour, we think you’ll see the benefits.

Making online transcripts better for your readers

Traditionally, transcripts of meetings are published as PDFs or Microsoft Word documents. The information is there; you’ve done your duty in making it available – but do you ever wonder if it’s really working for your readers?

For example, let’s say you are a clerk in the local council, and you routinely publish transcripts from council meetings online.

The chances are that residents access your transcripts when they have an interest in one specific topic. Typically your meetings cover many subjects, and readers have to wade through pages to find the part they want. On SayIt, searching is very easy, even for people who are not very familiar with internet technology.

Or suppose that you are a member of a pressure group, and you’ve transcribed a local community meeting to share on your website. You might want to highlight particular parts of the meeting. With SayIt, you can link to individual statements, so it’s simple to share them by email, social media, or on your website.

 

See some examples

If you’d like to see how your meeting transcripts will look, once they’ve been published on SayIt, have a browse through these two examples:

• Philadelphia City Council meetings
• The Leveson Inquiry

 

Getting started

Ready to have a go? Here’s how to start your own SayIt site:

1. Go to this page and sign up.

We’ll ask you for:

• Part of the URL (web address) for your site – for example, if you choose “TotnesCouncil”, your new URL will be http://TotnesCouncil.sayit.mysociety.org. Note that URLs can’t contain spaces or non-regular characters.
• A title: this will appear in the top bar of your website. Don’t sweat too much: you can always change this later. In this example we might choose “Totnes Council meetings”.
• A description (optional): this is a good place to explain the purpose of your site at a little more length. You might write something like “Transcripts from local council meetings in Totnes, UK, 2014 onwards”. Again, you will have the chance to change this later if you like.

2. Confirm your email address

If this is the first time you have used SayIt, you will need to input your email address, then go to your email and find our automated message so you can click on the confirmation link.

Keep a note of your password, as you will need it whenever you want to edit your site.

Inputting transcripts

SayIt is currently in Beta – that’s to say, it’s functional and live, but we’re still developing it.

In this phase, you can manually type (or copy and paste) each statement of your transcript in. Soon, it will also be possible to import a document of the entire meeting, as long as it’s in the required format – if you have a lot of existing transcripts and you’d like to try this, get in touch and we may be able to help.

In this post, we’ll look at the manual input of speeches.

Manual input

You will need either a copy of your transcript, or a recording of the meeting you wish to transcribe.

Here’s how to begin:

1. Click on the ‘add your first statement’ button.

 2. You can paste, or type, your content directly into the box marked “text”.

In the fields below the text box, you have the option to add more details about this piece of text. None of these fields are mandatory, but all of them add functionality or information to your transcript:

• Date and time If you know these, they are useful because they will help SayIt to order your speeches chronologically. Don’t worry if you don’t know them, though – SayIt automatically arranges speeches in the order that you input them, unless the timestamps tell it otherwise.

• Event and location What sort of meeting was it, and where did it happen? For our example, we might input “Totnes Town Council Meeting” and “Guildhall, Totnes”.

• Speaker Enter a name, and then click on the underlined text to add it to your database. As with all text fields on SayIt, once you have added it, it will be offered as an auto-fill option for subsequent speeches. Attaching names to your speeches also means that SayIt can do clever things, like display everything said by one speaker.

If you are not sure who spoke, don’t worry – you can leave this field blank, or enter a name such as ‘Unknown’.

• Section Meetings often have distinct sections: an introductory period, apologies for absences, following up on agreed actions, etc. Or you might use Section to identify items on the agenda. If you use the Section field, SayIt will automatically arrange your transcript into groups of associated content.

• Source URL If you are taking speeches from a source such as a news report or another website, you can add the web address so that interested people can see it in context.

• Title and tags: These enable you to tag your content – for example, you might want to tag everything to do with road-building, and everything to do with tourism, et cetera. That means that your readers will be able to find the sections of the content they are most interested in.

When you’ve added everything you want to for this part of speech, click “Save speech”.

Well done! You’ve just added your first speech to SayIt.

You can go back and edit it at any time – and that applies to every field.

3. Continue adding speeches.

As you do so, SayIt will be making connections and organising things neatly.

Tip: If you click ‘add another speech like this’ then fields such as ‘event and location’ will automatically be filled for you – you can overwrite them if they are incorrect for your next speech.

Click on ‘Speakers’ to see an icon for everyone you’ve added:

– and click on any one of those icons to see just their speeches:

Clicking on ‘Speeches’ in the top bar will show you every speech you’ve input; if you used Sections, they will be divided up neatly:

Click on any of those sections to see its content:

You’ve done it

So there you are, now you’ve seen what SayIt can do – we hope you liked it enough to consider using it in the future. Remember, it’s completely free.

Let us know if you hit any problems, or if there are features you’d like us to add. SayIt is in active development at the moment, so your feedback will help shape it. We’d also love to hear if you are using it.

Importing content

Manual inputting is clearly only practical for shorter meetings (or people who have plenty of time on their hands!). As mentioned above, we’ll be adding the ability to import your transcripts.

They will need to be in the format that SayIt accepts, which is Akoma Ntoso, a schema for Parliamentary document types – you can read more about that here.

If you already have documents in Akoma Ntoso, get in touch and we can get them imported for you.

Hosting

You can host SayIt on your own servers, but for beginner users it’s quicker and easier to start by creating a version that we host, as described in the steps above.

If you decide later on that you want to host the content yourself, and perhaps embed it on your own website, that option will remain open to you.

SayIt is a Poplus Component – open-source software that is designed to underpin digital democracy projects. It can stand alone, or work with other Poplus Components. The source code is also available for developers to modify and improve, so if you are already imagining more ambitious ways that you might use SayIt on your website, let us know.

Other ways to use SayIt

We’ve recently written about:

– Using SayIt to make collections of statements.

– Using SayIt to store interviews from your research project

We’ll also be looking at the following soon:

– Collaborating with other users on SayIt transcripts

Image: A scribe from the Book of Hours (public domain)

Party Conference season is upon us again, and, with it, a new set of fine promises and rhetorical flourishes, as each party’s top dogs take the podium. But what happens to those pledges, vows and forecasts once the banners are taken down and the party faithful turn for home?

Cast your mind back to November 2013, and you may recall that there was bit of a fuss about the fact that the Conservative party had removed old speeches from their website.

Not just that, but they’d also effectively erased them from the places where you can commonly find retired internet content… unless you really know where to look.

Was it a sinister rewriting of history, or a simple spring clean of elderly content? Well, that depends who you believe – but here at mySociety, we do think that you should be able to hold political parties to account for promises they made in the past.

Not only that, but we happen to have a splendid tool for publishing the spoken word: SayIt.

So we thought we’d track down that missing content and put it online for anyone to search and browse. And because we are a wholly non-partisan organisation, we did the same for Labour.

Take a look at that content: Conservative speeches and Labour speeches – and do let us know if you find anything particularly interesting!

Note: we’re not intending to update these collections regularly – it’s a one-off initiative, designed to fill a gap in the public archive. And within the confines of this project, we’ve only published Labour and Conservative speeches.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in setting up similar sites for the other parties, or even taking over these ones, SayIt is very simple for anyone to use: just get in touch.

Image by Klaus Riesner (CC)

Poplus Components are interdependent, Open Source pieces of code for civic and democratic websites. Find out more on the Poplus website.

Do you have an idea for a new Poplus Component? Or would you like to add features to an existing one?

We’re currently inviting groups and individuals to apply for grants. You may apply for up to USD $5,000 to help you with development work on creating or improving a Poplus Component.

• Priority will be given to proposals for the development of new Poplus Components, or new features for existing Components.
• We will also consider grants for those planning to implement existing Poplus Components into wider projects.

How to apply

Please complete this form before 10th September 2014.

We hope to inform successful applicants by 17th September. If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Help us fund more projects

This funding will be the final expenditure from the original Poplus start-up grant.

If you represent a funding organisation, and might be interested in helping support the growth of Poplus through funding micro-grants, please do let us know! Poplus Components represent great ‘bang for your buck’, since they are re-usable across the entire eDemocracy worldwide community.