1. Local e-Petitions – See if mySociety is providing your local system

    Councils all around England have been busy getting ready to comply with the new duty to provide e-Petitions which kicks in today, 15th December. This means that on council sites across England you should now be able to make petitions which will be formally considered by the councils, in accordance with their chosen policies.

    At mySociety we’ve spent a lot of time over the last twelve months helping councils to cope with this new duty by offering  them a commercial petitions service that is really good for users and easy to administer for councils. Some of the sites have been live for months, but many of the 35 council e-petitions sites we’re currently contracted to supply launch today.

    mySociety’s core developers Matthew Somerville and Dave Whiteland deserve huge credit for all the work they did re-purposing the No10 Petitions codebase and doing dozens of council customisations and rebrands. I’ve just seen one council officer email “Yippeee” at the prospect of launching, so I reckon they’ve done a pretty good job  – well done gents, everyone in mySociety owes you a debt of gratitude for a time consuming job well done.

    Here’s the current list of live local petitions sites. We’ll be adding more as they go up. Happy petitioning!

    Ashfield http://petitions.ashfield-dc.gov.uk/

    Barnet http://petitions.barnet.gov.uk

    Barrow http://petitions.barrowbc.gov.uk/

    Bassetlaw http://petitions.bassetlaw.gov.uk/

    Blackburn with Darwen http://petitions.blackburn.gov.uk/

    East Cambridgeshire http://petitions.eastcambs.gov.uk/

    East Northants http://petitions.east-northamptonshire.gov.uk

    Elmbridge http://petitions.elmbridge.gov.uk

    Forest Heath http://petitions.forest-heath.gov.uk

    Hounslow http://petitions.hounslow.gov.uk

    Ipswich http://petitions.ipswich.gov.uk

    Islington http://petitions.islington.gov.uk

    Lichfield http://petitions.lichfielddc.gov.uk

    Mansfield http://petitions.mansfield.gov.uk/

    Melton http://petitions.melton.gov.uk/

    New Forest http://petitions.newforest.gov.uk

    Nottinghamshire http://petitions.nottinghamshire.gov.uk

    Reigate & Banstead http://petitions.reigate-banstead.gov.uk

    Runnymede http://petitions.runnymede.gov.uk

    Rushcliffe http://petitions.rushcliffe.gov.uk/

    South Holland http://petitions.sholland.gov.uk

    Spelthorne http://petitions.spelthorne.gov.uk

    St Edmundsbury http://petitions.stedmundsbury.gov.uk

    Stevenage http://petitions.stevenage.gov.uk

    Suffolk Coastal http://petitions.suffolkcoastal.gov.uk/

    Surrey County Council http://petitions.surreycc.gov.uk

    Surrey Heath http://petitions.surreyheath.gov.uk

    Tandridge http://petitions.tandridge.gov.uk

    Waveney http://petitions.waveney.gov.uk

    Waverley http://petitions.waverley.gov.uk

    Wellingborough http://petitions.wellingborough.gov.uk

    Westminster http://petitions.westminster.gov.uk

    Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead http://petitions.rbwm.gov.uk

    Woking http://petitions.woking.gov.uk

  2. FixMyStreet RSS

    FixMyStreet has a lot of RSS feeds. There’s one for every one-tier council (170), one for every ward of every one-tier council (another 5,044), two for every two-tier (county and district) council (544), and two for every ward of every two-tier council (20,296) – two per two-tier council because you might want either problems reported to one council of a two-tier set-up in particular, or all reports within the council’s boundary.

    Then there’s an RSS feed every 162m across Great Britain in a big grid, returning all reports within a radius of that point, the radius by default being automatically determined by that point’s population density, but customisable to any distance if preferred. That’s, at a very rough approximation assuming Great Britain is a rectangle around its extremities, which it’s not, 19 million RSS feeds, lots of which will admittedly be very similar. 🙂

    Every single one of those feeds can be subscribed to by email instead if that’s preferable to you, and are all accessible through a simple interface at http://www.fixmystreet.com/alert.

    However, none of these RSS feeds was suitable for the person who emailed from a Neighbourhood Watch site and said that all they had was a postcode and they wanted to display a feed of reports from FixMyStreet. Given you could obviously look up a FixMyStreet map by postcode, it did seem odd that I hadn’t used the same code for the RSS feeds. Shortly thereafter, this anomaly was fixed, and if you now go to a URL of the form http://www.fixmystreet.com/rss/pc/postcode you will be redirected to the appropriate local reports feed for that postcode (I could say that adds another 1.7 million RSS feeds to our lot, but given they’re only redirects, that’s not strictly true). And after a couple more emails, I also added pubDate fields to the feeds which should make displaying in date order easier.

    It’s great to see our RSS feeds being used by other sites – other examples I’ve recently come across include Brent Council integrating FixMyStreet into their mapping portal (select Streets, then FixMyStreet), or the Albert Square and St Stephen’s Association listing the most recent Stockwell problems in their blog sidebar. If you’ve seen any notable examples, do leave them in the comments.

  3. 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.