Can you donate a few pounds toward the running of our UK sites?

FixMyStreet, WhatDoTheyKnow, WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou all provide an easy way for you, the public, to hold our elected representatives to account. They give you the power to get things changed.

You are the lifeblood of these sites: you make the reports that go off to the council; pen the letters to your representatives, request the information that our public authorities hold.

Today, we’re asking for a little more. When you visit one of our UK sites, you may notice a banner asking for a donation.

That’s because, as well as relying on your usage, these sites rely on your contributions to keep them running. In fact, our overheads are substantial: your donations help fund servers, maintenance, development, user support and all the other costs that come with running popular services and large archives.

If you’ve benefited from one of our sites, or you are glad that they are around for others, please consider setting up a regular contribution of a few pounds a month, or making a one-off donation. It will be very much appreciated.

Donate now

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Image: Dominic Alves (CC)

December 23rd

If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do,

If you haven’t got a ha’penny,

Then God bless you.

We wish you all a merry and prosperous Christmas – and for those of you who are already feeling quite prosperous enough, may we point you in the direction of our charitable donations page?

mySociety’s work is made possible by donations of all sizes and from all sorts of people. Those donations help fund all the online projects we create; projects that give easy access to your civic and democratic rights. If that’s important to you, show your appreciation, and we promise we’ll make the best use of every penny.

Thank you for sticking with us through this month-long post. We hope you’ve found it interesting and we wish you the very merriest of Christmases.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ – see our Contacts page to find individual projects’ social media links.

December 22nd

What’s behind the door? A letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

We think we’ve been pretty good this year. We’ve tried to keep our local neighbourhood clean, help with problems, and aid those in need, so we’re hoping there are a few presents coming our way.

If you can fit them down the chimney, here’s what we’re dreaming of:

More publicly available data Of course, we were delighted to hear in Mr Osborne’s autumn statement that all sorts of previously-inaccessible data will be opened up.

We’re wondering whether this new era will also answer any of our FixMyStreet geodata wishes. Santa, if you could allocate an elf to this one, we’d be ever so pleased.

Globalisation …in the nicest possible way, of course. This year has seen us work in places previously untouched by the hand of mySociety, including Kenya and the Philippines. And we continue to give help to those who wish to replicate our projects in their own countries, from FixMyStreet in Norway to WhatDoTheyKnow in Germany.

Santa, please could you fix it for us to continue working with dedicated and motivated people all around the world?

A mySociety Masters degree We’re lucky enough to have a team of talented and knowledgeable developers, and we hope we will be recruiting more in the coming year. It’s not always an easy task to find the kind of people we need – after all, mySociety is not your average workplace – so we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably easiest to make our own.

Back in February, Tom started thinking about a Masters in Public Technology. It’s still something we’re very much hoping for. Santa, is it true you have friends in academic circles?

FixMyTransport buy-in – from everyone! Regular users of FixMyTransport will have noticed that there are different kinds of response from the transport operators: lovely, fulsome, helpful ones, and formulaic ones. Or, worse still, complete refusal to engage.

Santa, if you get the chance, please could you tell the operators a little secret? Just tell them what those savvier ones already know – that FixMyTransport represents a chance to show off some fantastic customer service. And with 25,000 visitors to the site every week, that message is soon spread far and wide.

(more…)

I’m very pleased to announce that mySociety’s upgraded point and postcode lookup service, MaPit, is public and available to all. It can tell you about administrative areas, such as councils, Welsh Assembly constituencies, or civil parishes, by various different lookups including name, point, or postcode. It has a number of features not available elsewhere as far as I know, including:

• Full Northern Ireland coverage – we found a free and open dataset from the Office of National Statistics, called NSPD Open, available for a £200 data supply charge. We’ve paid that and uploaded it to our data mirror under the terms of the licence, so you don’t have to pay – if you feel like contributing to the charity that runs mySociety to cover our costs in this, please donate! 🙂
• Actual boundaries – for any specific area, you can get the co-ordinates of the boundary in either KML, JSON, or WKT – be warned, some can be rather big!
• Point lookup – given a point, in any geometry PostGIS knows about, it can tell you about all the areas containing that point, from parish and ward up to European electoral region.
• History – large scale boundary changes will be stored as new areas; as of now, this means the site contains the Westminster constituency boundaries from both before and after the 2010 general election, queryable just like current areas.

If you wish to use our service commercially or are considering high-volume usage, please get in touch to discuss options; the data and source code are available under their respective licences from the site. I hope this service may prove useful – we will slowly be migrating our own sites to use this service (FixMyStreet has already been done and already seems a bit nippier), so it should hopefully be quite reliable.

Thanks must go to the bodies releasing this open data that we can build upon and provide these useful services, and everyone involved in working towards the release of the data. Thanks also to everyone behind GeoDjango and PostGIS, making working with polygons and shapefiles a much nicer experience than it was back in 2004.

mySociety is lucky enough to have a number of small donors who give us monthly donations, normally ranging from £5-£20 (if you like our work and want to support us, please do join them!). Today we’re announcing a change to TheyWorkForYou which is supported by these donations.

One of the most popular features on TheyWorkForYou is the vote analysis – the bit that tells you that your MP “voted strongly against introducing a smoking ban” and so on. These voting analyses cut through a massive wall of parliamentary opacity whilst still allowing visitors to examine the details first hand. Despite each analysis resulting in just a single line on TheyWorkForYou, each one is rather time-consuming to construct, and TheyWorkForYou has not updated them as much as our users deserve.

Thanks to our small donors we’ve now been able to commission two part time researchers, Marcus Fergusson and Stephen Young, to help add new vote analyses more regularly. We’re pleased to say that we’ve just rolled out the first new policies, covering issues relating to schools, inquests and the House of Lords. We aim to add a couple of new vote analyses a month for the foreseeable future.

We take the business of authoring analyses that are scrupulously fair and neutrally worded extremely seriously. To this end we have replaced our previously ad-hoc approach with a newly instituted process designed to ensure the maximum rigour and balance, and to ensure we focus on issues which MPs thought were important even if they were not so well covered by the media.

TheyWorkForYou’s analysis of MP’s voting positions relies on The Public Whip, a project run by Julian Todd which tracks which way MPs vote.

The new process for analysing MP’s positions works like this:

1. A list of votes in the current Parliament, ordered with the highest turnout at the top, is taken as a starting point. The turnout figure used is corrected to account for party abstentions.
2. mySociety’s researchers work down that list writing explanations in easy to read terms describing what the vote was about; they also identify other related votes on the same issue and research those too.
3. A “policy position on the issue” is then chosen against which MP’s votes are compared to determine to what extent they agree or disagree with it. Policy positions are written to be intelligible and interesting to a wide range of users and in such a way that votes to change the status quo are ultimately described on TheyWorkForYou MP pages as votes “for” that change.

We hope you find these analyses useful. Thanks to Richard Taylor for his divisions list and help with this post.

Bob Spink has written an Early Day Motion (EDM) that asks mySociety to add Early Day Motions to TheyWorkForYou. You can read it here.

TheyWorkForYou doesn’t currently include EDMs for a couple of reasons:

1. They’re clearly less important to what Parliament does than Bills and committees, and are way down the priorities list as a consequence. We’ve nearly finished the process of adding bill committees, but we need the help of everyone who can lend a hand to overcome the opposition of senior unelected officials to get Bills published in a way we and others can use. If you haven’t already, please join the Free Our Bills campaign.

2. We are very tightly constrained by the amount of money we have, and we barely have enough to keep the site running, let alone add every new feature requested.

3. We’re a bit wary about EDMs in general because they’re not tied to any actual power. But that’s a reason to warn and educate readers, not exclude them from the account of Parliament.

So, if you really want EDMs on TheyWorkForYou, then, there are two things you can do. The first is donate to our parent charity, UKCOD. The second is to push in every way you can to get Bills published in the way we’ve asked for. That means writing to your MP, or if you are an MP, asking the modernisation committee and the Leader’s office what they’re doing to push past internal opposition to get Bills done right.

NB. Interestingly, the internal opposition is so ill-informed that we have it in writing they they think that TheyWorkForYou already includes EDMs – doh!

Some lovely new volunteers have been working their socks off to add the Scottish Parliament to TheyWorkForYou. Yay!

Unfortunately, the server that TheyWorkForYou sits on is almost full, so we can’t launch their hard work. Boo!

TheyWorkForYou isn’t an externally funded project, and we need funding from other sources to keep it growing and improving. So if the season has filled you with generosity of spirit, why not drop us a few pennies to pay for some upgrades? Any extra beyond what we need will go into the general pot to keep mySociety running and the developers from starving.

For a few years people have been saying “Do you accept donations?” At first we didn’t because we were so small that we feared the effort put into setting up donations might not be worth the cost of accepting them. But we’ve just hit our third birthday and people seem to like what we do. So if you want mySociety to keep doing democratically useful new things, or if you’d like to show your appreciation for the work done by the amazing developers and volunteers, please drop us a few pennies.