1. mySociety’s Next 12 Months: FixMyTransport and Project Fosbury

    FixMyTransport wouldnt have helped Hugh Armstrong Robinson (who survived)

    FixMyTransport probably wouldn't have helped Mr Robinson (who survived)

    I must admit that I’m pretty happy to announce mySociety’s  plans to build our first major new non-comercial website since WhatDoTheyKnow.com launched in 2008. Late in 2010 we plan to launch FixMyTransport , a site focussed on connecting and empowering people who share transport problems of different kinds. The fantabulous Louise Crow will be lead developer.

    Crucially, we at mySociety are under no illusions that it is an order of magnitude more difficult to get a new ticket machine in your station than it is to get your local council to fill a pothole (FixMyStreet surveys report 2371 problems fixed in the last month alone). The difficulty of achieving even minor changes to transport services and infrastructure is why we are simultaneously announcing our plan to build FixMyTransport on top of a major new back end system called Project Fosbury.

    Project Fosbury is about helping people get over difficult obstacles.  It is a modular platform for breaking down a complicated civic task into pieces which can then be allocated to one or more people. So someone asking their council to change the timing on some traffic lights might be allocated the tasks of:

    • Writing to their councillors
    • Obtaining local policy on traffic light timings from the council
    • Getting people to join a mini-campaign group
    • Videoing the problem
    • Sending a letter to a local newspaper

    Each task will ultimately be carried out entirely within a joined up infrastructure, each module being built to mySociety’s habitually stringent rule that “it must be easy and satisfying to someone who’s never engaged politically before”. We will work to create incentive structures, peer pressure, and hopefully a sense of fun. There will be a single public home page for each mini campaign, showing recent activities on the site, as well as integrating with external social media.  We hope to repeat the FixMyStreet phenomena where some  ‘insoluble’ problems suddenly become soluble once they’re in the public domain.

    Now for the credit where it is due. mySociety’s sysadmin Keith Garrett suggested FixMyTransport back in January 2008.

    The actual mechanics of breaking the problem into pieces (the idea that became Project Fosbury) came from a wide discussion at our retreat, with excellent suggestions coming particularly from Richard Pope. But the more general idea that the Internet hasn’t yet produced a really good system for bringing people together to solve everyday problems (as opposed to chat, or win the US presidency) came from numerous Call for Proposals submissions, including ones from Mark W, Rob Shorrock, Peter Silverman, Mahmood Choudhury and more.

    mySociety will be building this site using money donated by people like you, profits from commercial projects, and any specific funding we can raise around it. If you know of anyone or any organisation that you think might like to support FixMyTransport or Project Fosbury, please do get in touch.

  2. So you want to start an organisation like mySociety? Some tips for aspirants.

    One of the nicest things about being involved with mySociety is seeing people in other countries starting similar organisations and building similar websites. After a Skype conversation with another eager hopeful last night, I thought I’d blog a bit about the things I think are most important to know if you’re just starting up. Here goes.

    1. Absolutely the most totally essential thing is to be an organisation of amazing, politically minded coders, not an organization employing or contracting good coders*. Their skills are your lifeblood, their ideas your bread and butter, and finding the best civic hackers in your country and building your organization around them is the only path to success. And that means they should be making most of the day to day decisions, not you, you ignorant, arts-degree-clutching clot.

    2.Ask the public what they think you should build. Not only will that give you access to more ideas than you have yourselves, it’ll engage people with you. Also, it’ll help you focus on the vital business of building sites that users want, not that YOU want.

    3. Keep your cost base low, and put all the money you have into looking after your core staff and being nice to volunteers. Work on building a community of volunteers, even if most of them are really just friends rather than people putting in lots of time. Avoid renting offices, avoid non-essential non-coder staff, get people to donate serving infrastructure and bandwidth. Because building and running democratic websites is a fundamentally new area of human endeavor (not like blogging which at least has an analogy in journalism) there are basically no pre-existing funding streams for the type of work you’re about to do. You will have to create the buzz around yourselves that will lead to people wanting to fund you, and it will probably take years, if you get there at all (mySociety hasn’t quite done this yet, even at 5).

    4. Ensure that the core of what you build can struggle on by even if your whole organization collapses. That means being open source, putting energy into sites that are as automated as possible, and making people excited about being volunteers.

    5. If you aren’t pissing off at least some people all the time, you’ve probably been captured by the establishment.

    6. Take whatever your first website plan is and remove 90% of the features you want. Then build it and launch it and your users will tell you which features they actually wanted instead. Build them and bask in the warm glow of appreciation.

    *yes, yes I know I can’t code for toffee, and I’ve got an arts degree, but I’m still a geek, honest. (Proudest moment, working out that a batch of PCI network cards were unreliable because they’d come from the factory flashed with the EPROMs for the wrong hardware, and fixed it.)

  3. Time shifting

    So, we’ve been a bit quiet on this blog, but naturally busy. I just did my invoice and timesheet for last month, and remembered how bitty it has been. In one day I often do things to 3 websites, and that is just CVS commit messages – no doubt I handled emails for more. This makes it quite hard to summarise what has been happening, and also quite hard to measure how much time we spend maintaining each website.

    We’ve recently made a London version of PledgeBank, which I’ll remind Tom to explain about on the main news blog. It is a PledgeBank “microsite”, with a special query for the front page and all pledges page that shows only pledges in Greater London. Which is conveniently almost exactly a circle radius 25km with centre at 51.5N -0.1166667E. I worked that out by dividing the area (found on the Greater London Wikipedia page) by pi and taking the square root And rounding up a bit.

    Yesterday we launched a new call for proposals – head on over, and tell us your ideas for new civic websites. It is another WordPress modification, but this time to the very blog that you’re reading now. The form for submitting proposals I made anew, It creates a new WordPress low-privileged user by directly inserting into the database, and then calls the function wp_insert_post to create a post by them in a special category. The rest of the blogging software then trivially does comments, RSS, search, email alerts and archiving.

    Meanwhile, Chris has written some monitoring software for our servers, to alert us of problems and potential problems. Perl modules do the tests, things like enough disk space and that web servers that are up. I’ve been tweaking it a bit, for example adding a test to watch for long-running PostgreSQL queries which indicate a deadlock. We’ve got a problem in the PledgeBank SMS code which causes deadlocks sometimes, which we’re still debugging.

  4. Phew!

    It’s very quiet today. I’ve been updating the projects page now that HearFromYourMP is truly launched. This means we’ve built all the original launch projects, except GiveItAway (more about what is happening with that another time). And it’s over a year since mySociety began. I feel exhausted, and definitely need to take some holiday – I was going to go to Egypt last month, but moved house instead.

    This week was usability week. Or was that last week, I’ve got confused. Anyway, Tom made about a million tickets with little usability tweaks to all the sites. Most of these have been put in now, but there’s still lots to do. Good software is about polish polish polish polish, and more polish. I could spend another few years just polishing these sites without making any more.

    I’ve also been doing a bit of work on “cobranding”. An ugly marketing term, but there you go. We’ve had a Cheltenham version of WriteToThem for some time. As well as local government, we’re also looking at campaigns groups. So we’ve done a version for AnimalAid, which they’ll be using from their website soon. Apart from the logo and colours, cobranding has some benefits for the user. It’ll make them think they haven’t changed website, and be less disconcerting. In particular, it’ll take them back to other campaigns actions when they’re done.