Not many people realise that we fund a proportion of our charitable work by carrying our commercial development and consultancy work for a wide range of clients.

Last year, we scoped, developed and delivered a real variety of digital tools and projects. Some of the projects were surprising. Some of them made us gnash our teeth, a bit, as we grappled with new problems. But all of them (and call us geeks if you like) got us very excited.

Here are just twelve of our personal high points from last year. If you have a project that you think we might be able to help you with in 2015, we’d love to hear from you!

1. We Changed the Way in Which Parliament Does Digital

This time last year, a small team from mySociety was poring over analytics, interview content and assorted evidence from Parliament projects dating back last 2-3 years, to help us put together a simple set of recommendations to conclude our review.

11 months later, Parliament have announced their first Head of Digital, fulfilling one of our key recommendations.

2. We helped the MAS and the FCA protect financial consumers

Two of our projects helped people financially.

We built the Money Advice Service’s (MAS) first responsive web application, the Car Cost Calculator.

This tool takes one simple thing you know (the car you wish to buy) and tells you roughly how much it’ll cost to run that car against any others you might be interested in. It has been one of MAS’ most successful online tools in terms of traffic and conversion.

We also built the Financial Conduct Authority’s Scam Smart tool, aiming to prevent financial scams.

This tool helps users considering a financial investment to check a potential investment. Users enter information about the type of investment, how they heard about it and the details of the company offering it to them and get back tailored guidance and suggested next steps to help them ensure the investment is bona fide.

3. We Gave Power to the People of Panama (soon)

Working with the The National Authority for Transparency & Access to Information (ANTAI) and the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO), we set up our first government-backed instance of our Freedom of Information platform, Alaveteli, in Panama.

This project will ensure that Panama’s FOI legislation is promoted and used, but it will also shine a light on ANTAI, who are responsible for ensuring ministries and organisations publish their information, and handling case appeals.

4. We Mapped All the Public Services in Wales

After we extended the Mapumental API to produce data output suitable for GIS (geographical information systems), the Welsh Government were able to map public services in Wales for their Index of Multiple Deprivation calculations.

Over the course of the year they have calculated travel times for over seventy thousand points of interest.

5. We Launched a New Organisation in Four Weeks

Simply Secure approached us in dire need of a brand, an identity and a website to accompany the launch of their new organisation to help the world build user-friendly security tools and technologies.

Cue four weeks of very intense work for mySociety’s designer, supported by members of the commercial team. And we did it.

6. We Printed Stuff BIG (and found people jobs)

mySociety developer Dave Arter figured out how to generate A1 sized maps from Mapumental for every job centre in the UK – all 716 of them.

Xerox will be using these with the DWP to help job seekers find work that is within reach by public transport. As a byproduct, Mapumental now handles high-fidelity print based outputs: get in touch if that is of interest.

7. We Opened Up Planning Applications

With Hampshire County Council we had the opportunity to build a new application to help assist members of the public and business better understand what was happening around them. For us, it was also the first application in which we worked closely with a provider of a linked data store, in this case Swirrl.

When Open Planning goes live, it will look to help improve social engagement and the economy of Hampshire through better understanding and transparency of planning data.

8. We Proved (Again) That FixMyStreet Isn’t All About Potholes

After a spate of cyclists’ deaths in London last year, we felt that the moment was right to build something that would support cycle safety in the UK.

We launched Collideoscope on October the 7th with our first sponsor—Barts Charity, with the aim of generating data both on incidents involving cycles, and near misses.

9. We Helped Launch a Film

We built a tool for the British Museum, to go alongside the general release of Vikings Live. The Norse Names project brought a sense of context and personalisation to a dataset gathered by the University of Nottingham.

10. We Made Data More Exciting

In 2013, we built an interface to help people explore the data in the National Rail Passenger Survey (NRPS) data explorer  for Passenger Focus.

This year, they asked us to build something similar for bus users. We’re entering the final week of development now, and the finished product should be launched in March.

The main aim of this site? To take data that could be considered pretty dry, and make it a lot more engaging.

11. We Fixed Yet More Potholes

This year Warwickshire, East Sussex, Hart & Harrogate joined the list of councils using FixMyStreet as their main street fault reporting platform.

That means that residents of those places can now make their reports direct from their council’s website, or via FixMyStreet, and either way they’ll have all the benefits of FixMyStreet’s smooth report-making interface.

12. We Showed Parliament the Way

And so, we end where we began. While Parliament were busy interviewing candidates for their new ‘Head of Digital’ position, we were commissioned to demonstrate what Hansard might look like were a platform like SayIt used instead of the largely print-based publishing mechanisms used today.

The result was shared internally. While SayIt may not be the end solution for Parliament, it’s great to have had some input into what that solution might be.

And in 2015…?

Got a project that you’d like us to be involved in?

Get in touch and tell us about it.

Image credits:

Eggs: Craig Sunter; Parliament: Greg Dunlap; Bubble car: Allen Watkin; To the Trains: Nic McPhee; Potholes: Tup Wanders; Parliament Duncan Harris. All Creative Commons.

 

Residents of East Sussex County Council and Hart District Council can now report potholes, broken street lights, and other local issues, simply and speedily. The two local authorities are the latest to integrate FixMyStreet onto their own websites.

Whether reports – and subsequent updates – are made on the councils’ websites, or within their boundaries on FixMyStreet.com, they will be published on both the council site and FixMyStreet.

FixMyStreet is a proven aid to channel shift, moving report-making online, to save time and money for both residents and councils. Hart and East Sussex’s adoption of the software is just one strand of their ‘digital by default’ approach to transactional services.

If you’re from a council, and would like to find out more about FixMyStreet for Councils, everything you need to know is here.

Image: Dominic Alves (CC)

We’re pleased to announce new moderation features for clients of FixMyStreet for Councils.

This new functionality enables nominated members of staff to edit user reports from within the FixMyStreet front end.

It’s quick and easy, and allows you to react immediately to unwanted content on your site. Read on to find out more.

What’s wrong with this report?

So what is wrong with the report in the screenshot above?

If you run a site on the FixMyStreet platform, you’ll be familiar with this kind of report, and the chances are that you’ll already be twitching to edit it.

User-generated content is wonderful in many ways – but it can also present problems on a public-facing site. Let’s look at a few of the potential issues in the report above:

• The user has included his phone number in the report description, and now it’s available for anyone to see.
• The user’s name is also public. While this is the default option on FixMyStreet, users often get in touch to say that they meant to make their report anonymously (an option on FixMyStreet, but one which the user can only access at the point of submission).
• There’s an inappropriate photo. This one is a statue of Carl Jung, which obviously has nothing to do with the report. But even relevant photos can be problematic: imagine if it was a graphic depiction of a dead animal, or some rude graffiti.
• Profanity: in the example above, we’ll imagine that “pesky” is a mild profanity, but experience tells us that users don’t always hold back on their language.

There are other common problems too, not represented in this report. Users sometimes post potentially libellous information: naming someone they suspect of flytipping, for example, or giving an address where they believe planning permission has been flouted.

In the run-up to local election, councils have to be particularly sensitive to any content that might be construed as political – commonly they wish to remove any mention of any candidate.

Moderation in all things

Up until now, we’ve edited reports for our council clients, on request. However, this is clearly a long-winded way of getting sensitive material off the site, especially when time is of the essence.

So we’ll shortly be introducing the ability for client moderation of sites. Councils or other bodies who run FixMyStreet will be able to nominate trusted users and give them the ability to edit problematic reports from within the report page.

When logged in, these users will see a “moderate” button on every report – this feature will not be available to any user unless explicitly authorised.

As you can see, this panel provides the ability to:

• Hide the report completely
• Hide the name of the poster
• Hide or show a photo (if one was originally provided)
• Edit the title and body of the report.

For some reports, it might be necessary to make a number of edits, and finally submit the changes:

 

The moderator can also add a reason for the changes, so it’s recorded if a colleague needs to know the history of the report in the future.

This functionality gives a lot of power to admins to remove inappropriate information – but the user took the time to submit their report, and it’s only fair to let them know it’s been changed. So the system sends them an automatic email, as below:

 

Finally, the system automatically updates the report to show that it has been moderated. As well as a timestamp, it signals where any information has been removed in the title or body of the report.

 

Updates can be just as problematic as reports, so the same functionality will apply to them.

We’d welcome feedback on this mechanism, so please let us know if you think we’ve missed any features.

Note: These screenshots are from our work in progress and do not yet display the slick design that we habitually apply right at the end of the build process. Please regard them as preview shots only!