Neighbourhood Fix-It makes it as easy as possible for citizens across the UKBritain to report local problems like fly tipping, broken lights, graffiti etc, whilst opening the problems up to browsing and public discussion of solutions.

The problem tackled

Councils across the UK do an excellent job of fixing local problems when they’re reported by citizens. However, the model for handling the information is a system of doctor-patient style confidentiality. A citizen who makes a report normally knows about a problem, and so does the council, but there is no general public way of finding out what has been reported or fixed.

Given that the nature of public problems being reported is that they are public, this seems a strange situation.

Neighbourhood Fix-It opens up and democratises the process of discovering and reporting problems, so people can see what other reports have been filed locally using the site, and can leave extra feedback and comments on the problems if they see fit.

Early successes

In quiet beta test for a few weeks prior to launch, several hundred problems have already been reported across the UK. Fixes by councils so far include:

• Fixed paving slabs
• Redundant estate agent signs removed
• Filled pot holes
• Removed graffiti

Funding and Partnership

The project was funded with £10,000 of support from the Department of Constitutional Affairs Innovations Fund, and is a partnership with the Young Foundation’s Transforming Neighbourhoods Programme, a consortium of 15 local authorities, government departments and community organisations working together on practical ways to give more powers to neighbourhoods.

Tom’s quote from the press release: “Neighbourhood Fix-It aims to change the act of reporting faults – turning it from a private one-to-one process into a public experience where residents can see if anyone else in the neighbourhood has already spotted and reported a problem, and to see how their council is acting on it. We hope the website will make the process of reporting faults more efficient, possibly reducing the number of individual reports that councils receive because people will be able to see that their neighbours have already made the call.”

We’re delighted to announce that mySociety has been generously awarded $100,000 by Omidyar Network, a mission-based investment group committed to enabling individual self-empowerment. The purpose of the investment, our largest to date from a philanthropic source, is to spread the use of PledgeBank.com to a host of community and grassroots groups in the US.

Omidyar Network invested in PledgeBank because it encourages collective effort by enabling users to rally the support of others through their own commitment to take action.

From starting new organizations, to giving blood, to volunteering to mentor others, Pledgebank has enabled people to do things they wouldn’t have done otherwise. Just this morning we were sent pictures of a protest in Brazil that was organised using PledgeBank.

What has been missing to date, though, has been any resource to spread the use of the tool to traditionally offline groups. Whether these are schools, community groups, NGOs, churches or neighbourhood watch groups, many could benefit from PledgeBank, but few have had the opportunity to hear about it. Therefore, PledgeBank is looking to hire an outreach coordinator who will travel around the US meeting groups, listening to their goals, and explaining how PledgeBank can help them, for free.

mySociety will be recruiting the outreach coordinator in the New Year. If you’d like to get in touch, perhaps to pre-book an appointment to meet or talk with the outreach coordinator, or because you know someone who could do the job well, please drop us a line to hello@mysociety.org.

Some super news just in. mySociety has been awarded funding by the JRSST Charitable Trust to build our Freedom of Information Filer and Archive(FOIFA), the winner of our 2006 call for proposals. This means that we will be able to start work relatively early in the New Year.

At £24,500 this is our largest ever donation from a philanthropic source of any kind. We’re very grateful to the good people at the various Rowntree trusts involved in supporting us in this way. Not only will it enable us to start relatively swiftly on the FOIFA project, but it also represents a mark of confidence in mySociety by a major player in the UK foundation world. Thank you to the JRSST, and thank you again to the developers and volunteers who have made mySociety a project worth trusting :).

We just had our irregular weekly meeting, which we do most Mondays using a conference call. I thought I’d just write up what we’re all up to this week.

• I’m continuing to test the ePetitions site for 10 Downing Street, and developing an interesting branded version of PledgeBank for CAFOD (more when it launches).
• Matthew is going to look at various things that need doing on PledgeBank and WriteTothem. For PledgeBank more chivvying emails, I think something like this ticket but not exactly. For WriteToThem, various bits of code to do with how we handle error cases.
• Chris is making more pretty maps for the Department for Transport.
• Tom is working out in detail how we’re doing to spend the money from DCLG which has finally come through. It’s mentioned in this post, look for “e-Innovations Product and Marketisation strand via Kirklees MBC”. Which means, we’re being paid to do proper marketing and sales of branded version of our services, such as WriteToThem, PledgeBank, and Neighbourhood Fixit. He’s also chasing up some interesting people met at a conference in Eastern Europe (Bratislava, I think?) last week.

Please ask questions in the comments – for example, if you’d like us to post about particular things on this blog.

mySociety is pleased to announce the winner of our 2006 call for proposals, plus our thoughts on the best runners up, and various other lessons.

Winner

Our winner, and the next major site we are planning to build is the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive; a searchable, readable, googlable user-created archive of FOI requests and their responses. Think of a combined TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.com for FOI requests and their responses, and you’ll have our vision.

This idea was actually submitted twice, once by Phil Rodgers and once by Francis Irving (a mySociety coder).

We believe the idea is especially powerful in a form extended somewhat beyond that submitted. We think that the best way to build a top quality archive is to simultaniously build the best possible “File an FOI request” tool, and then publish both the requests and the responses made through it in the archive. From the private desire to easily file FOI requests we hope that we can generate the public benefit of an easy to use archive.

We asked our community of users and friends to list their top three projects, and the FOIFA was named more often than any other single project as the winner: 9 out of a total of 22 people who left a comment expressing their preferences. The core team, core volunteers and trustees agreed with the users, and so we have a winner.

Logistics

mySociety will start building the system in early 2007. We will try to fund it in two ways. First, we will approach donors, most probably foundations, to see if they are interested in supporting it. Secondly, we will see if we can set aside some surplus from contract work, such as branded versions of the other sites. And lastly, we’ll work with any volunteers who are willing to dig in.

Our initial estimate is that the site will take 120 full time developer days to design, build and launch to beta, for a total cost of about £25,000 including servers, management time, gathering of contact details, buying of sweets, motivational calendars and so on. The cost of running it thereafter are hard to gauge at this point, and will depend on usage patterns and the final spec we settle on.

In the run up to building and launching it we’ll gladly talk to anyone who wants to be involved, including public sector agencies who we hope might use this system to publish responses to requests made via other channels.

Runner Ups

In no particular order, these are some of the other ideas that had some legs. We’re putting them here to suggest to the world that there might be something well worth exploring here.

1. A to B travel, by Murray, is a sort of collaborative journey planner, where people share information on journeys that they’ve made. Unfortunately, too much of this site is already done by the big and expensively run government site Transportdirect.info , but it has nice ideas that are worth someone doing. In particular the idea of local knowledge and general comments on different journeys is an excellent, and Seat61.com shows that there is some considerable appetite for journeys explained in a human form. Often I don’t want the fastest journey from A to B, I might want the best view, or the most pleasant form of transport, or the one that can be broken somewhere notable.

We’ve also come up with a feature that this site could add. It is the idea of registering to express an interest not in a specific journey, but in a general journey: “I go from Manchester to London a few times a year, and I might want to share a car in future”.

2. Get Out! by Mary Reid. This proposal was about building a site that would contain a user build database of places to go in the UK that would contain something nice and easy to do if you had an hour or two to spare and wanted to get out of the house.

We’ve felt for a while that there is a great problem with knowledge of local activities being hopelessly fractured across the UK Internet, spread across a million different sites and so worth much less than the sum of its parts. A site that could become a reference place to store interesting things to see, and a reference place to find them could be excellent indeed. Maybe a rebuild and extension of our little back o’ the envelope site YourHistoryHere.com?

3. Write To Your Newspaper by Francis Irving (again)

This proposal was about a site that makes it much easier to write to local newspapers. It is undoubtedly a good thing, but it simply didn’t beat the FOI archive because we felt the demand and public benefit just wasn’t as great as for FOIFA. One of mySociety’s volunteers has actually already written some code in this area, and we certainly think it should go further.

4. TheyWantToWorkForYou by Seb Bacon – a site where people could find out prospective politicians rather than current ones was voted for by a few people. We think it would be a good idea for such a system to exist, but the scale problem is enormous. With 20,000 current councillors, just imagine how many candidates there are at each election, and the massive problem of trying to get them to give structured views. What is missing here really is a strong motivation for candidates to go to a certain site and enter info themselves – it just doesn’t exist, and probably couldn’t without the major backing of someone like a big newspaper,or the BBC. NB, we also feel strongly that such a site would have to be permanent, and not just run at elections.

Lessons Learned from Running the Call

Just some thoughts about the process, really here for anyone else who might be planning to run a call like this and who stumbles across us via Google.

1. First time round, in 2003, the call for proposals got 250+ proposals, whereas this time it had more like 100, even though mySociety has moved from completely unknown to somewhat better known. Clearly despite BBC and Guardian coverage, we did something not as well this time. This might simply have not been hammering every list and person we could with personally crafted emails, or it could have just been blind chance.

2. We should have determined and published the judging process before the call for proposals was put out. Nobody seems to have been especially upset by our drawn out and ill-planned selection process, but it would have meant we would have made our decision much more quickly.

3. We should have set a timetable for all parts of the process.

4. We should have made some sort of web based voting gadget to engage people slightly more with the deciding process (despite knowing that online voting is mostly bunk, of course).

5. We could have made a shortlist and then asked the authors to do more work in polishing up their ideas.

If you’ve any further questions about the call for proposals, or the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive get in touch with us at hello@mysociety.org

Much of my August seems to have been absorbed with maintenance tasks.

For example, Chris and I spent a few days tightening up WriteToThem’s privacy. I made sure the privacy statement correctly describes what happens with backup files, and failed messages. I reduced the timeouts on how long we keep the body of failed messages. I made sure we delete old backup files of the WriteToThem database. I wrote scripts to run periodically to check that no bugs in our queueing demon can accidentally mean we keep the body of messages for longer than we say. I added a cron job to delete Apache log files older than a month for all our sites. As AOL know to their cost, the only really private data is deleted data.

Earlier in the month, I handled some WriteToThem support email for the first time in ages. We get a couple of hundred messages a week, which Matthew mainly slogs through. It’s good for morale to do it, as we get quite a lot of praise mail. It is also hard work, as you realise how complicated even our simple site and the Internet are, and it leads to fixing bugs and improving text on the site. I made a few improvements to our administration tools, and things like the auto-responder if people reply to the questionnaire, to try and reduce the amount of support email, and make it easier to handle.

I did some more work on the geographically cascading pledges (like this prototype one), but I’m still not happy with them. In the end, I realised that it is the structure of wording of the pledge that is the key problem. Our format of “If will A but only if N others will B” just isn’t easily adapted to get across that the pledge applies separately in different geographically areas. Working out how to fix that is one of the things we’ll brainstorm about in the Lake District (see below).

The last couple of days I’ve been configuring one of our new servers who is called Balti, and getting the PledgeBank test harness working on it. Until now, it has only been run on my laptop. This is partly heading towards making a proper test harness for the ePetitions site, running on a server so we properly test nothing can be broken before deploying a new version.

Matthew has wrapped up the TheyWorkForYou API now, and is working on Neighbourhood Fixit next. Chris has been doing lots more performance work for the ePetitions site. And he’s been making some funky monitoring thing to detect PostgreSQL database lock conflicts, which we get occasionally and are hard to debug

Tom’s in Berlin at the moment, he gave a talk last night, and I think has been to see some people from Politik Digital. As we’ve been discussing on the mySociety email list, there’s an EU grant we’re likely to apply for in collaboration with them.

On Friday, we’re all going to the Lake district for a week, with some of the trustees and volunteers intermittently. We very conveniently and cheaply all work from home, so it’s good and necessary to meet up for a more sustained period of time at least once a year. Last year we were in Wales.

On Friday September 29th mySociety will be holding a volunteers hacking day in Liverpool. Everyone is invited, and we can even cover some train fares, plus a round or three in the pub. To be eligible for the train fare support, though, you Must Live North of the Watford Gap.

The main theme will be to hack around with the new TheyWorkForYou API , and we’ve got a few hundred quid to cover costs from the day as part of the funding from the Department of Constitutional Affairs (the majority of the money has covered Matthew’s costs in building it from scratch).

The event is at Blue Fountain

The timing is 10AM to 7PM, followed by adjournment to some sort of public house. For those of you with work commitments, please consider coming in the evening.

Venue kindly provided by mySoc friend Aidan McGuire. The meeting will also be a chance to meet key TheyWorkForYou and Public Whip volunteer Julian Todd, whose reclusive Liverpudlian lifestyle means we don’t get to see him often 🙂

Have you searched for the name of an MP, or a phrase asking how to campaign, in the last few weeks? You might have noticed that there are adverts on Google for WriteToThem, HearFromYourMP, TheyWorkForYou and PledgeBank. These only appear in the UK.

Google have donated these adverts for free via their Google Grants programme. Yay Google! Anna, one of our volunteers, is busy adding suitable keywords, and optimising advertisement text. Thank you, Anna.

Obviously, we want to use this to help people who are searching for services like ours, but don’t know it, find those services. We’ve got quite good Google juice, so for keywords like “write to your mp” WriteToThem is already the top hit. Ones like “mp” and “local mp” we’re in the top few hits anyway, so the adverts just make WriteToThem slightly more prominent.

Much more important are cases where we’re currently not listed at all. For example, if you search for “councillors” you don’t get WriteToThem, even though the word is quite prominent on WriteToThem’s front page. The first hit* is pretty good, but has a page title and text which don’t mean much in the Google search results. Hopefully the text “Who are my councillors?” in the WriteToThem advert will help more.

Anna is also playing with adverts for every MP’s name, linking to their TheyWorkForYou page. And we’ve got some interesting PledgeBank ones. For example, try searching for “residents association“. Let us know if you have more ideas for specific PledgeBank uses like that.

You can help out. If you spot a keyword which we ought to have an advert for, but don’t, then please let us know. This is a very important part of usability for a website. If people can’t find it, don’t even get to it when they are looking for it, then it isn’t a very usable site.

*ETA, 2013:  councillor dot gov dot uk – now a dead link

No lolling about in the sun for us, as we follow an endless chain of projects through the hot months. Inured to hasslebot, we’ve not been posting to this blog much. Instead, busy working on, or soon about to work on:

• The ePetitions site for Number 10
• On a syndicated version of PledgeBank for someone’s large global warming campaign later in the year, and another for a fundraiser for a Brazilian NGO
• Making more maps (like these) for the Department for Transport
• Adding an API to TheyWorkForYou, paid for by an award from the Department for Constitutional Affairs
• Meetings endless meetings. I’ve given up trying to track Tom meeting people, and just assume at all times he is in an important meeting.
• Supporting all our existing sites – customer support emails, nursing parliament screen scrapers, fixing up WriteToThem contact details, making sure our servers don’t break.

And that’s without mentioning Neighbourhood Fix-it and the call for proposals. Later in the year. Have I missed anything?

Have a good weekend!

We recently got the following email requesting details of our financial affairs from someone in the House of Commons Library, doing some research for an unnamed MP. We’ve always tried to be transparent about the funding of mySociety, so putting the relevent bits in the middle of the homepage seems a reasonable way of carrying on with that tradition. Enjoy it, transparency fans.

I work in the House of Commons Library where we provide a non-partisan research service for MPs. It is this that has led me to contact you. I’ve been asked by an MP, whose name I cannot disclose, to provide some research on MySociety.

Glad to help. Just as a side thought, isn’t it interesting that MPs can use you to ask about us, but we can’t know who has commissioned the work? Why the aspect of privacy I wonder? Nevermind, we’re pretty sure we know who’s asking anyway…

They have asked for information on funding supplied to MySociety. I understand that a grant of £250,000 was allocated to West Sussex county council under the Local e-Government e-Innovations Round 1 Programme in 2004-05 for My Society

Yes, although it is worth noting that West Sussex took £54,000 of that – mySociety billed for £196,000 in various chunks. mySociety is still
functioning off the surplus (ie charity profit) made from this funding which ended formally in November 2005.

and £163,150 was made available to the organisation through the e-Innovations Product and Marketisation strand via Kirklees MBC who were grant aided to carry out this role on behalf of the Local e-Government Programme.

Yes, that sounds right (although I’ve never seen that exact figure before, I thought it was going to be £150,000, so good news I guess). We haven’t actually invoiced for ths funding yet. The condition of this final bit of e-innovations funding is that we are to use it to help develop spin-off services aimed at the local government and voluntary sectors. These are services that will both provide those sectors with useful products whilst generating revenue streams to help sustain all the sites we’ve built so far. You can see what sort of things we’ll be offering at mySociety.co.uk.

And from the blog on the website that the Pears Foundation provided some assistance.

Yes, although we haven’t invoiced for this either yet because we’re still trying to decide how much would be appropriate to charge. It won’t be more than £6000 though.

Would you be able to tell me if any other sources of funding have been provided to MySociety and how much the Pears Foundation provided?

We got an initial £10,000 from a private philanthroper who’s asked to remain anonymous. I personally was supported with another £10,000 by UnLTD, the Millenium Commision funding group who plug a vital gap in the UK charitable sector by supporting individuals, not organisations.

More recently, we won two grants from the Department of Constitutional Affairs, one in conjunction with the Young Foundation. One is for the development of Neighbourhood Fix It, a map based tool to turn the process of reporting public problems from private to public. The other is for an API and spin-off site from TheyWorkForYou.com.

update

I’ve just realised I missed a couple of things. First, the sums for the two pieces of DCA work mentioned above are £10,000 and £6000, and second those much-linked-to maps were £4500 from the Department for Transport.