1. Unpicking code, for the good of the project

    Last year, when we were helping to develop YourNextMP, the candidate-crowdsourcing platform for the General Election, we made what seemed like an obvious decision.

    We decided to use PopIt as the site’s datastore — the place from which it could draw information about representatives: their names, positions, et cetera. We’d been developing PopIt as a solution for parliamentary monitoring sites, but we reckoned it would also be a good fit for YourNextMP.

    That turned out to be the wrong choice.

    YourNextMP was up and running in time for the election, but at the cost of many hours of intensive development as we tried to make PopIt do what was needed for the site.

    Once you’ve got an established site in production, changing the database it uses isn’t something you do lightly. But on returning to the codebase to develop it for international reuse, we had to admit that, in the words of mySociety developer Mark Longair, PopIt was “actually causing more problems than it was solving”. It was time to unpick the code and take a different approach.

    Mark explains just what it took to decide to change course in this way, over on his own blog.

    The post contains quite a bit of technical detail, but it’s also an interesting read for anyone who’s interested in when, and why, it’s sometimes best to question the decisions you’ve made.

     

    Image: Michelle (CC)

  2. Why We Do What We Do

    Why we do what we do. No, not the name of a wonderfully named new mySociety product, instead it’s an excuse for me to take stock of where we are and where we go next.

    Inevitably over the past decade we’ve tackled lots of issues and projects from lots of different angles. What we’re currently focused on is Freedom of Information, Parliaments and Elections, and Local Issue Reporting.

    What links all of our work is the creation of civic technology that enables greater access for citizens to the work of government and the democratic process:

    Lack of access to elected representatives amongst disadvantaged or underrepresented groups is a key driver of exclusion and inequality, yet governments tend only to become better at serving the needs of citizens when those citizens are capable of demanding better.

    Simply put, this is our cause.

     

    Our Theory Of Change

    Citizens will only demand better from governments if they have access to a mix of often scarce resources: from education, to wealth, to knowledge about government failings. At mySociety we are highly aware that we can’t give people most of these things: we can’t boost business in failing economies or bring teachers into schools that have none. These are the tasks of development funders, political leaders and well-regulated markets.

    Tremendous human suffering happens when governments fail to serve the needs of their citizens, and human welfare is dramatically increased when governments serve citizens’ needs well. Some governments are excellent at meeting some citizen needs, but weak at meeting others, harming a minority, often invisibly. Others make no attempt to meet any of their citizens’ needs, robbing, starving and failing them in every possible way.

    Our theory of change is based on a reading of political history, and specifically of the history of reform campaigns, such as those that drove the democratisation of nations from the 17th to the 20th century. We believe that governments tend only to get better at serving the needs of citizens when citizens are capable of demanding better, creating a virtuous circle that leads steadily to better government.

    Each of our services give citizens the skills, confidence and knowledge they need in order to be capable of demanding better.

     

    Freedom of Information

    FOI is a core plank of a healthy, transparent and accountable democracy. Every citizen should have the right to query and understand the workings of government and public bodies on their own terms.

    Alaveteli is our platform for FOI request websites. We currently support partners in over 20 countries, from Australia to Hungary, Nicaragua to Ukraine, as well as a pan-European site AskTheEU. Our most successful site is WhatDoTheyKnow in the UK, with almost 300,000 individual FOI requests alone – drawn from over 16,000 UK public bodies.

    Over the next year we will continue to refine and develop Alaveteli to better support the expansion and proper use of FOI around the world. At the same time, we’ll be actively campaigning to preserve FOI in the UK which is currently under threat from the Government’s FOI commission.

     

    Parliaments and Elections

    The activities of Government can often be opaque and difficult to interpret. We improve access to elected representatives, providing clarity, context and understanding to the decisions they make on our behalf.

    We tackle the workings of government at a variety of points throughout the electoral cycle; YourNextMP/Rep for candidate information, TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem allow people to query and explain the workings of government at all levels.

    Increasingly central to these efforts is EveryPolitician, our crowdsourcing effort to sustainably store and share a structured open data set of every national politician around the world. It currently holds data on more than 60,000 politicians from over 230 territories.

    In the next few weeks we’ll complete work to integrate all of our existing Parliament services with EveryPolitician and continue to encourage more journalists, developers, and NGOs to create the tools they need in their own countries.

     

    Local Issue Reporting

    FixMyStreet gets right to the root of any disconnect between citizens and those who provide their local services. Literally dealing with street-level issues, FixMyStreet can help turn our everyday feelings of frustration into action.

    The original and much emulated FixMyStreet.com makes it easy to report street faults like broken street lights or potholes, raising over 650,000 reports in the last 8 years.

    We’ve extended the principle of issue – reporting – resolution, to create a generalised platform catering to a variety of interesting and practical new use cases; with projects as varied as empty home identification, or logging road collisions and near misses for cyclists.

    Citizens feel more in control. Local councils can target their efforts more effectively. Together this can contribute to better government.

     

    Scaling Up

    For the moment we’ll continue to consolidate our offer in these three areas.

    There’s ample scope for further development, refinement of concepts and of course directly increasing the impact of currently deployed sites.

    What gets really interesting is when we start to scale up the delivery of each of these in more countries, delivered to more people, ensuring we see more citizens gain greater influence over those with power.

    I’ll post again later this week about some of the practical changes that we are making to better encourage the take up of our services and how we’re improving the way we work with our partners.


    Image: Morgan Schmorgan (CC)

  3. 100 parliaments as open data, ready for you to use

    If you need data on the people who make up your parliament, another country’s parliament, or indeed all parliaments, you may be in luck.

    Every Politician, the latest Poplus project, aims to collect, store and share information about every parliament in the world, past and present—and it already contains 100 of them.

    What’s more, it’s all provided as Open Data to anyone who would like to use it to power a civic tech project. We’re thinking parliamentary monitoring organisations, journalists, groups who run access-to-democracy sites like our own WriteToThem, and especially researchers who want to do analysis across multiple countries.

    But isn’t that data already available?

    Yes and no. There’s no doubt that you can find details of most parliaments online, either on official government websites, on Wikipedia, or on a variety of other places online.

    But, as you might expect from data that’s coming from hundreds of different sources, it’s in a multitude of different formats. That makes it very hard to work with in any kind of consistent fashion.

    Every Politician standardises all of its data into the Popolo standard and then provides it in two simple downloadable formats:

    • csv, which contains basic data that’s easy to work with on spreadsheets
    • JSON which contains richer data on each person, and is ideal for developers

    This standardisation means that it should now be a lot easier to work on projects across multiple countries, or to compare one country’s data with another. It also means that data works well with other Poplus Components.

    What can I do with it?

    Need a specific example? Yesterday, we introduced Gender Balance, the game that gathers data about women in politics.

    As you’ll know if you’ve already given it a try, Gender Balance works by displaying politicians that make up one of the world’s legislatures, one by one.

    That data all comes from Every Politician, and it’s meant that the developers have been able to concentrate on making a smooth and functional interface, knowing that the data side of things has already been taken care of.

    That’s just one way to use Every Politician data, though. If you’d like to use it in your own site or app, you can find out more here.

    We still need more data

    As you may have noticed, there are more than 100 parliaments in the world. In fact, despite having reached what feels like a fairly substantial milestone, we’re still barely half way to getting some data for every parliament.

    So we could use your help in finding data for the parliaments we don’t yet cover, and historic information for the ones we do. Read more about how you can help out.

  4. Before the election: make sure you understand how your MP voted

    Polling Station (way in) by Paul AlbertellaRight about now you may be considering whether you’ll be voting your MP back into Parliament in the coming election.

    Has he or she reflected your interests? One key way of checking that is to look at their voting record.

    We’d like everyone to know exactly how their MP voted over the last parliament, so we’ve made some changes to TheyWorkForYou that make votes easier to understand.

    See an example here, or read on to find out how to check your own MP’s voting record.

    A complex matter

    TheyWorkForYou publishes activity from Parliament each day.

    This content includes parliamentary votes, along with the debates that they are part of. But it’s not always obvious to the lay reader exactly what’s being voted on.

    Take a look at this debate, for example, on exemptions for smoke-free premises. By the time you’ve waded through the first clause,

    The appropriate national authority may make regulations providing for specified descriptions of premises, or specified areas within specified descriptions of premises, not to be smoke-free despite section 2

    – you may well be lost. And who would blame you?

    Making it nice and simple

    We don’t think you should have to be an expert to check your own MP’s voting record, and our new pages for each voting stance are here to help.

    For some time now we’ve given you summaries of how your MP voted on certain topics, with a link to the votes that helped us understand each MP’s position on that stance.

    Now we’ve created a page for each stance, and worded it in plain English so that anyone can understand exactly what it means.

    See for yourself

    Here’s how to see how your own MP voted (or we should say ‘previous MP’, since until the General Election, no MPs are now in office):

    Go to TheyWorkForYou.com and input your postcode on the homepage.

    twfy_votes_01

    You’ll be taken to the page of your (former) MP. Click on the ‘voting record’ tab.

    twfy_votes_02

    Choose a topic you’re interested in, and click the ‘Details’ link on the far right.

    twfy_votes_03

    You’ll see a plain English description of the stance, followed by descriptions of all the votes that were considered to contribute to it.

    twfy_votes_04_updated

    Want to see the context? Click on ‘show full debate’ and you’ll be taken to the full record of that vote.

    twfy_votes_05

    Let us know what you think

    These pages are still a work in progress, so we’ve included a feedback box at the top of each voting stance page. Do be sure to let us know if there’s anything else you’d like to see on them.

    If you have feedback about how your MP has voted, mind you, that’s another matter… one you might want to reflect at the ballot box.

    Image: Paul Albertella (CC)

  5. The People’s Assembly website launches – a one-stop parliamentary monitoring service for the people of South Africa

    People's Assembly website

    There was some excitement here at mySociety this week, as the People’s Assembly website launched in South Africa. It’s the result of a year’s partnership with PMG and a good test of some of our newest collaborative software.

    The site contains a vast amount of information, all available in the same place for the first time, and offering a simple way for South African citizens to keep an eye on what their representatives are doing. There are pages for each representative, Hansard and parliamentary Questions and Answers, records of members’ interests, and more.

    Locating, processing and displaying this data was quite a challenge: it has been taken from a wide range of sources, and came in an even greater range of formats, including PDF documents, Word documents, Excel files, CSV files and sometimes just e-mailed lists of information.

    But perhaps most significant is the site’s Representative Locator function. For the first time, South African citizens can now find out, with ease, who represents them – not as simple as it might seem at first.

    The Proportional Representative system means that members of the National Assembly and National Council of Provinces are not directly elected from constituencies.  Political parties are, however, funded to run constituency offices and to allocate representatives to those offices.  We believe that this is the first time this data has been consolidated and presented as a simple search tool.

    The software that runs the site

    As you’ll know if you read our recent blog post about SayIt, our recent focus has been reaching out to provide software for civic or democratic-focused websites anywhere in the world.

    The idea is that such groups no longer need worry about writing code from scratch, since we’ve already done it – and their energies can be better expended on gathering data or adjusting the software to work within the local governmental systems.

    People’s Assembly is a great example of this. It utilises two underpinning pieces of technology:

    Firstly, the Pombola platform, our software for running parliamentary monitoring websites.

    If you’re reading this in the UK, you may be familiar with our own parliamentary monitoring site, TheyWorkForYou. Pombola provides several tools that make it easy to do much of what TheyWorkForYou does: it provides a structured database of the names and positions of those in power; it allows people to look up their elected representatives by inputting their location, and to isolate and see what a specific MP has contributed to discussions in Parliament’s committees and plenaries; albeit, in the case of  Hansard,  after a six-month delay necessitated by South Africa’s own protocols.

    We first developed Pombola for Kenya’s Mzalendo.com, and it’s been re-used for ShineYourEye.org in Nigeria and Odekro.org in Ghana.  It’s superb to see this re-use, as it’s exactly what we set out to acheive.

    Secondly, People’s Assembly is the very first site to use SayIt, which is embedded as a Django app to power the Hansard, Questions and Committees content. SayIt is one of our Components, built under the Poplus project, and we’re truly delighted  to see it in place, proving its worth and being used as we first envisaged.

    Thanks are due

    The main work on the People’s Assembly has been funded by the Indigo Trust, and the SayIt component work was funded by Google.org as part of the Poplus Project. We also wish to thank Geoff Kilpin, who helped greatly with the scrapers and templating.

  6. KuvakaZim Launches!

    Transparency, accountability and open government are huge themes for African citizens as the number of internet and mobile phone users jump up across the continent. People are connecting and realising that the internet provides them with a quick and easy way to engage with politics, be that via social media or citizen engagement websites.

    One group have just launched a parliamentary monitoring platform for Zimbabwe using our Pombola platform. We helped them with the original set up, some small technical issues and some general platform advice, but KuvakaZim has only gotten to launch due to the huge dedication and work of its founders, Regina and Peter.

    The beginning

    “The KuvakaZim project was born from a general concern regarding the accountability and activities of Zimbabwean Members of parliament and their duties in regard of their representative role,” Regina Dumba, lead volunteer of the project, tells the world in her press release.

    “Many articles, books and studies have explored the issue of good governance in African countries and how it relates to transparency, accountability, and Government performance. Knowing the causes and effects of these plights, we believe it is now time for action in Africa and in Zimbabwe. Until we start putting words into action, only then can we rebuild our country.” She continues on the KuvakaZim blog.

    Creating the site.

    Regina, Cleopatra and Peter, who has been volunteering technical skills for the project, contacted mySociety in July after being inspired by Kenya’s Mzalendo. Since then they have been working tirelessly to gather MP data and information on constitutional rights, how democracy works in Zimbabwe, electoral law and political parties. The site now allows Zimbabweans to learn more about how their government works, as well as the duties of their MP and whether they are carrying these out. This has been especially timely because of the recent elections on July 31, 2013.

    That’s not to say that the site has got to this stage without any hitches however..

    It’s been difficult to find official boundary data for Zimbabwe, which means we haven’t yet managed to load an MP look up onto the site. The hope is that this will come in the future, along with other features such as Hansard and the potential to write to your politician.

    Despite this the team have managed to gain some on the ground volunteer support and launch the site this week. If you want to learn more about KuvakaZim the check out their blog and their twitter stream. We’ll be following their progress too!

    Image credits: Patola Connection by Whologwhy Hands up by Pim Geerts | Bend in the Road by Andrew Ashton | All Creative Commons licensed photographs. Thank you for making your content creative commons.

  7. What changes would you like to see on TheyWorkForYou?

    Kenya Electricity Corporation Suggestion Box by Lindsay Bremner

    mySociety is an organisation with many priorities, and they often compete for attention. Right now, we have some time and budget to lavish on TheyWorkForYou. We need your input to help us understand what development we should prioritise for the site.

    Note: if you don’t know much about TheyWorkForYou, your opinion still counts! See the foot of this blog post for an overview of the site and its aims.

     Some suggested improvements

    Below is a list of improvements that other users have suggested, or that we think are desirable. Which improvements would you most like to see – from this list, or based on your own needs?

    1. Easier sharing via social media If you see a debate you want to share with your Twitter or Facebook buddies, all you’d have to do is click a button. More details
    2. When your MP voted Letting you know, via email alerts, when your MP has taken part in a vote. More details
    3. Option to search just headings At the moment, search covers all content of debates, including everything anyone said. This option would allow you to only search headings, meaning that you could be sure the results were entirely focused on your topic. More details
    4. Tweeting debate headings or future business A Twitter account which would tweet, and link to, every debate in Parliament, or upcoming events. More details
    5. Signposting of big ‘events’ such as the Budget These are not always easy to find if you don’t know your way around, so we’d make sure the big events were always trumpeted on the site. More details

    Great ideas, or utter bunkum? Let us know. You can give us feedback via any of the following methods:

    1. Leave a comment under this blog post;

    2. Tweet at us on @TheyworkForYou, comment on our Facebook page, or drop us a mail;

    3. If you’d like to see the whole list of suggestions and issues, you can do so on our development list at Github (and the ‘more details’ links in the list above go to the issues on there). Note that anyone is welcome to add comments to these issues, or even to create your own (please search first to make sure you’re not duplicating an existing issue). Github may look complex, but it’s easy enough to use – you just need to set up a user account here.

    We’re keen to understand whether we’re serving all kinds of users, so it’d also be helpful if you could tell us whether you consider yourself to be someone who knows a bit about Parliament (through work, interest, or experience) or a novice user.

    Noteyou can see what we’re currently working on here. Some changes were obvious – for example, we’re improving MPs’ individual pages.

    What is TheyWorkForYou for?

    TheyWorkForYou has been running since 2004. We know why we launched it, though the way you use it may be totally different – and if so, we want to hear about that. Its aim is to give a window into Parliament, for everyone, but including people who may never have previously thought that parliamentary proceedings had anything to do with them.

    TheyWorkForYou does a lot of things. It lets you find out who your MP is – if you don’t know – and then it tells you all about them.

    It publishes the written record of debates in Parliament, and lets you search it, and link to it easily.

    It allows you to set up alerts, so you get an email every your chosen words or phrases are mentioned in Parliament – or every time a particular person speaks.

    It publishes future business (there are alerts for that, too), written answers, Public Bill Committees, and more.

    So, it does a lot – but we know that it still doesn’t do everything our users request, and it doesn’t neccessarily do everything in the way that they want, either. Some changes are obvious, and we’re working on them – right now, for example, we are improving individual MPs’ pages. But we want your thoughts too.

    Photo by Lindsay Bremner (CC)

  8. Pombola, a new name for Mzalendo

    We’ve got some exciting news at mySociety.

    As you know we’ve been helping with the Kenyan Mzalendo website for a while now. And, we’ve been lucky enough to gather interest in Mzalendo‘s codebase from a number of other countries.  These range from Ghana to South Africa, and even as far afield as Paraguay. It’s amazing and humbling for us, but we’ve recently realised one thing: Mzalendo has a wealth of history in Kenya, and an amazingly complex political association. It’s also the name of the website there. So we needed a new name that would allow the code to be changed without the change being associated with the original Kenyan Mzalendo.

    Enter Pombola. This is the new name for the codebase which powers TheyWorkForYou, Mzalendo, Odekro, ShineYourEye, work-in-progress Kuvakazim and other parliamentary monitoring websites across Africa and the world.

    You may ask, “Why Pombola? What does it mean?”

    Well, it is a pretty easy word to remember.  And no one else is using it (possibly because we created it!). The word is a mix of the initials PMO (Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation) and Tombola.

    A Tombola?” I hear you cry in surprise. Well, in a Tombola, you are making a choice with no information at all – just selecting a ticket and hoping that you get lucky.  A Pombola site aims to be the opposite – you’ll get as much information as possible about your elected representatives, so that when you make a choice in future, you’ll have all the facts.

    If you’re interested in using the code you’ll find the repository here on github, along with some documentation.

    If you’re not technical but still want to use this then please contact me and we can discuss what we can do!

    And remember, this may monitor parliaments now, but you could use it for anything (*)

    (*) Disclaimer: please only use for good.

    [1] Girl with Balloons from Courtney
    [2] Air map from OpenFlights.org
  9. mySociety’s Components Strategy – Our take on Small Pieces Loosely Joined

    As you may already be aware, mySociety is putting considerable effort into making it super-easy to set up versions of our websites FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow in other countries.

    These ‘websites in a box’ are a key part of our strategy to help people develop more successful civic and democratic websites around the world, but they are only the first half of our plan. Today I wanted to talk about the other half.

    The Challenge

    There are some use-cases for software in which most people are entirely happy to take some software off the shelf, press ‘Go’, and start using it. WordPress is a good example, and so is Microsoft Office.

    However, there are some kinds of social issues that vary so much between different countries and regions that we believe one-size-fits-all tools for attacking them are impracticable.

    This problem is particularly acute in the arena of sites and apps that allow people to track the activities of politicians. In this area there are several dozen different sites globally, almost all of which are powered by software that was written bespoke for that particular usage.

    What drives this pattern of people re-writing every site from scratch is that people in different places care about different aspects of politics. In some countries what really counts is how politicians vote, in others the crux is campaign finance contributions, in others it is information on who has criminal records, and in others still it is whether public money has been vanishing suspiciously.

    To build an off-the-shelf software platform that could handle all this data equally well in every country would be an immense coding task. And more important than that, we believe that it would create a codebase so huge and complex that most potential reusers would run away screaming. Or at least ignore it and start from scratch.

    In short – we don’t believe there can be a WordPress for sites that monitor politicians, nor for a variety of other purposes that relate to good governance and stronger democracies.

    The Waste

    We believe that the wrong answer to this challenge is to just say “Well then, everyone should build their own sites from scratch.” Over the years we at mySociety have been witness to the truly sad sight of people and organisations around the world wearing themselves out and blowing their budgets just trying to get the first version of a transparency website out the door. All too often they fail to create popular, long lasting sites because the birthing process is just so exhausting and resource-consuming that there’s nothing left to drive the sites to success. Often they don’t even get to launch.

    A painful aspect of this problem is that the people who work on such sites are genuine altruists who are trying to solve serious problems in their part of the world; too much of their passion and energy is used up on building tools, when there’s still so much work beyond that that’s needed to make such sites successful.  However, as we pointed out above, giving them a complete package on a plate isn’t an option.  So what can we do?

    Our Proposed Answer – The Components

    We start from the following observation: coders and non-coders like simple, minimal, attractive tools that help them achieve bigger goals. Simple tools don’t make anyone run away screaming – they encourage exploration and deliver little sparkles of satisfaction almost immediately. But simple tools have to be highly interoperable and reliable to form the foundation of complex systems.

    Our plan is to collaborate with international friends to build a series of components that deliver quite narrow little pieces of the functionality that make up bigger websites. These include:

    • PopIt – A Component to store and share the names of politicians, and the jobs they have.
    • MapIt – A Component to store and share information on the locations of administrative boundaries, like counties, regions or cities.
    • SayIt – A Component to store and share information on the words that public figures say or put out in writing.
    There will be more, possibly many more. Our goal is to radically collapse the time it takes to build new civic and democratic (and possibly governmental) websites and apps, without putting constraints on creativity.

    Characteristics of each Component

    There are some crucial architecture decisions that have been baked into the Components, to truly make them ‘small pieces loosely joined’.

    • Each Component is fundamentally a tool for storing and sharing one or two kinds of common data – they’re intentionally minimalist.
    • As a developer, you just use the Components that make sense for your goals – you simply don’t have to look at or learn about the Components that contain functionality that doesn’t matter to you.
    • You don’t have to install anything to get started – you can always begin by playing with a hosted Component.
    • We won’t impose our taste in programming languages on you. You can code your website in whatever language you want. The Components are not ‘modules’  – they don’t plug into some overarching framework like Drupal or WordPress. They are stand-alone tools which just present you data over REST APIs, and which you can write data into using REST APIs.
    • Each Component’s data structures will offer as much flexibility as makes sense given the goal of keeping each Component really good at one or two tasks. We’ll listen to feedback carefully to get this right.
    • Each Component has a clean, simple web front end so you can explore the data held in a store without having to write lots of SQL queries. Often you will be able to edit the data this way, too.
    • Get started in seconds – each Component offers at least some functionality which is available inside a minute after getting involved.
    • Non coders are welcome – we are building the Components so that non-coders can start gathering,  editing and sharing data straight away, possibly long before they are in a position to launch a ‘real site’.
    • Data can be added to the Components both through write APIs and through manual editing interfaces, suitable for non-coders.
    • Learn from our mistakes – it is really easy to get the wrong data structure for civic, democratic or governmental data. Good practice data structures are baked into the Components, to save you pain later.
    • Use our hosted versions, or install open source code locally. It will normally be quicker to get started in using the Components in a hosted environment, but if you want to run them locally, you’re entirely welcome. The code will be open source, and we’ll work hard to make sure it’s attractive and easy to install.
    • The Components will talk to each other, and to the rest of the web using simple open schemas which will evolve as they are built. Where possible we’ll pick up popular data standards and re-use those, rather than building anything ourselves.

    What the Components Aren’t

    Sometimes in life it can be easier to describe things by what they aren’t:

    • The Components are definitively not modules in a framework or platform. Each one is totally independent, and they will frequently be written in different languages – partly to force us to ensure that the APIs are truly excellent.
    • The Components aren’t either Hosted or Local, they’re both. We’ll always offer a hosted version and a downloadable version, and you’ll always be able to move any data you have stored on the hosted versions down to your local copies.
    • The Components aren’t all about mySociety. We’re planning to build the first ones in conjunction with some friends, and we’ll be announcing more about this soon. We want the family of Components to be jointly owned by a group of loving parents.

     When can I see some of the Components in Action?

    We’ll be blogging more about that tomorrow…

     

    Footnote – To see the provenance of the extremely useful  ‘small pieces loosely joined’ concept, see this.

  10. Sites built on mySociety’s code

    Lovely Resistors by Windell Oskay

    DIY mySociety is all about making our code – and our experience – available to people who want to build similar websites in their own countries. We thought it would be helpful to list some examples of sites already using mySociety code, so you can see the variety of different possible outcomes.

    It might seem like a simple task, but identifying sites in this way isn’t as straightforward as you might think – we don’t always know when people pick up our open source code! If we’ve missed any, please do comment below and we’ll add them.

    There are also many sites around the world which were directly, or indirectly, “inspired by” ours. In these cases, the site’s owners have written their own code from scratch. That’s a subject – and a list – for another post. For now, here are all the international sites using mySociety’s code that we know about.

    Alaveteli: our Right-to-Know Platform

    WhatDoTheyKnow.com – our original Freedom of Information site
    FYI.org.nz  – New Zealand Freedom of Information site
    Pravodaznam – Bosnia and Herzegovina Freedom of Information site
    Queremossaber.br – Brazil Freedom of Information site
    Informatazyrtare.org – Albania Freedom of Information site
    Tuderechoasaber.es – Spain Freedom of Information site
    AskTheEU – Europe Freedom of Information site

    Get the Alaveteli code here.

    FixMyStreet: our fault-reporting Platform

    FixMyStreet.com – our original fault-reporting site
    Fiksgatami – Norway FixMyStreet
    FixOurCity – Chennai FixMyStreet
    FixMyStreet.br – Brazil FixMyStreet, based on both our code and FixMyStreet.ca from Canada

    Get the FixMyStreet code here

    Parliamentary monitoring and access to elected representatives

    TheyWorkForYou – our original parliamentary monitoring site
    WriteToThem – our original ‘contact your representative’ site
    Mzalendo – Kenya parliamentary monitoring site
    Open Australia – Australia parliamentary monitoring site
    Kildare Street – Ireland parliamentary monitoring site
    Parlamany – Egypt parliamentary monitoring site
    Mejlis – Tunisia parliamentary monitoring site

     

    A community of people, waiting to help

    Inspired by the examples above? If you’re thinking of going ahead and building your own site, we’re here to support you with our easy-to-understand guidebooks and our friendly mailing lists. In our online communities you’ll find many of the people who built the sites listed here. There’s no-one better to ask questions, because they’ve been through the process themselves, from early conception right up to completion.

    If you are one of those people who has been through the whole process of building, launching and running a site like these (with or without our codebase), and lived to tell the tale, please shout in the comments below. And especially if you’re open to people approaching with questions. Perhaps add a note to say where you prefer to have those conversations – whether that’s via your favourite mailing lists, Twitter, email or simply in the comments to this post.

     

    One last thought – it’s interesting to see that our code can be used for areas as small as a single city (FixMyStreet Chennai) or as large as a confederation of states (AskTheEU.org). In short, it’s scalable! How will you use it?

     

    Image by Windell Oskay, used with thanks under the Creative Commons licence.