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.

Which are yours?

Bakul-Library – it’s just awesome, that they used PledgeBank, that they got a 1000 people, and that they’re going to make a new library in India because of it.

deathpenalty – Not because it was effective, and not because I agree with it. But because I disagree with it, and because of the reaction it got from left-wingers not used to seeing other points of view. PledgeBank is for anyone.

walkout – PledgeBank offline. These school students got together to march against war (whatever or yippeee), but just LOOK at how many text message sign ups there were. Tom saw in London an illegally flyposted flyer.

First1000 – I mean, they may be crazy libertarians, but ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE are going to move house. OK loads won’t move. But hundreds will.

tunepiano – It’s about fun and joy, not just politics and worthiness (bit of a worthy example to make that point I know, but it is a piano!)

I’ve spent a bit of time in China, so it is particularly exciting for me to see the new Chinese translation of PledgeBank go live. Also new today, a Belarusian translation of PledgeBank.

Thank you to the translators – I’ll get Tim (our elite translation manager volunteer) to list their names in the comments.

Do you speak another language? If so, help us translate PledgeBank into it. Or even if there is already an existing translation, we often need people to update the translation for recent changes to the site.

Now they just all need marketing more in every country…

Whereas new sites are lovely, and I talk about Neighbourhood Fix-It improvements further down, there’s still quite a bit of work that needs to go into making sure our current sites are always up-to-date, working, and full of the joys of spring. Here’s a bit of what I’ve been up to recently, whilst everyone else chats about database upgrades, server memory, and statistics.

The elections last week meant much of WriteToThem has had to be switched off until we can add the new election results – that means the following aren’t currently contactable: the Scottish Parliament; the Welsh Assembly; every English metropolitan borough, unitary authority, and district council (bar seven); and every Scottish council. The fact that the electoral geography has changed a lot in Wales means there will almost certainly be complicated shenanigans for us in the near future so that our postcode lookup continues to return the correct results as much as possible.

Talking of postcode lookups, I also noticed yesterday that some Northern Ireland postcodes were returning incorrect results, which was caused by some out of date entries left lying around in our MaPit postcode-to-area database. Soon purged, but that led me to spot that Gerry Adams had been deleted from our database! Odd, I thought, and tracked it down to the fact our internal CSV file of MLAs had lost its header line, and so poor Mr Adams was heroically taking its place. He should be back now.

A Catalan news article about PledgeBank brought a couple of requests for new countries to be added to our list on PledgeBank. We’re sticking to the ISO 3166-1 list of country codes, but the requests led us to spot that Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man had been given full entry status in that list and so needed added to our own. I’m hoping the interest will lead to a Catalan translation of the site; we should hopefully also have Chinese and Belarussian soon, which will be great.

Neighbourhood Fix-It update

New features are still being added to Neighbourhood Fix-It.

Questionnaires are now being sent out to people who create problems four weeks after their problem is sent to the council, asking them to check the status of their problem and thereby keep the site up-to-date. Adding the questionnaire functionality threw up a number of bugs elsewhere – the worst of which was that we would be sending email alerts to people whether their alert had been confirmed or not. Thankfully, there hadn’t yet been any such alert, phew.

Lastly, the Fix-It RSS feeds now have GeoRSS too, which means you can easily plot them on a Google map.

Hello, all…this is Heather, PledgeBank evangelist in the U.S. Francis just hooked me up with the ability to post the the developers’ blog, so I thought I’d give it a whirl…

We’re starting to get a little momentum around PB…I sent out emails this week to folks working at state networks of volunteer centers across the country and have gotten quite a few responses. This isn’t huge press or anything, but it’s good to know that folks who work at volunteer centers full-time think there’s enough value to the site on first glance that they’ll give me a chance to chat with them. I’ll keep you updated on how those phone calls and meetings go, and might be asking for some more specific tech details behind the site as questions arise.

It might also be of interest to folks that I’m headed this afternoon to Georgia for a retreat with about 25 of the most prominent bloggers in the country and a handful of progressive funders…all talking about the state of and future of the blogosphere. You can see more about the meeting at http://neworganizing.com. I helped do a lot of the logistics for the retreat, and am looking forward to meeting some of these mysterious folks this weekend!

Lots has happened since I last posted, which was months ago, before Chris died.

Luckily for us, in the last few months Chris had only been working one day a week for us, so it hasn’t been as difficult in practical terms as it could have been. There were various mySociety things running in his flat, such as the WriteToThem fax server, which had to be set up quickly elsewhere.

We miss Chris’s expertise most days (only yesterday I was swearing at gnuplot). Matthew is twice as much for me to handle; he works so quickly, he has hard questions to ask at a ferocious rate that I can’t keep up with. I think before Chris used to handle most of them, so it was much easier for me.

I highly recommend Chris Lightfoot’s obituary by Martin Keegan. Also, Chris’s obituary on Last Word, which was on Radio 4 on 23rd March, is well worth listening to.

We have a few new members of staff.

Keith Garrett is working for us now, mainly tending our servers, but he’s also been working on the E Petitions site. He’s trying to bully us into documenting all our internal processes so it’s easier for new people.

Heather Cronk has started working for us in the US, evangelising PledgeBank. This is funded by the Omidyar Foundation. As well as getting the word out about PledgeBank in the states, this is extra good for us, as she’s forcing us to give PledgeBank the TLC that it deserves.

Deborah Kerr is now doing customer support for us part time. She’s been busy with Neighbourhood Fix-it which has had lots of traffic and attention the last few weeks.

OK, back to the present.

Last week Ben Campbell and I gave a seminar at Technology for a Small Nation in Llandudno. We split into two groups, I got people to add Google maps to an HTML page on their website, and Ben got people to call the TheyWorkForYou API from PHP. It went down well, very satisfying to do practical exercises, and answer all the niggling questions (how to install a testing webserver on Windows, how to use FTP) which are the real things that stop people doing what they want to do.

And Thursday? Just a reminder, unless you’re not apathetic, that there’s an election today.

So MPs have voted to raise a bit of cash to explain to constituents what’s going on in Parliament. mySociety partly exists to suggest how such things can be done imaginatively and successfully, and we have had the following thought.

MPs must pool at least a little of the money they’re getting to build shared tools and services, if they’re going to have any chance of using this cash effectively. Single tools that cover whole populations are generally much more effective and much better value for money than 646 duplicate, incompatible, technically inferior attempts.

So our modest proposal is this. We want an MP to use PledgeBank to make the following pledge:

“I will pool £2000 of my £10,000 into a competition pot for tools that will help MPs help constituents understand what’s going on, but only if 100 MPs will do the same.”

If it succeeds, individuals, companies, charities – whoever – could vie for slices of cash to build the sort of 21st civic infrastructure that we deserve, and a panel of MPs and advisors could pick the winners. It could be quick, effective and outside the deadening hand of official parliamentary processes.