Author: Tim Davies

What NEED does this meet?

There are a number of commercial ‘survey websites’ out there – but none which focus on supporting community groups and campaigning groups to carry out surveys or more in depth consultations in their local communities. Plus – when surveys and consultations are carried out – the results are often burried away in paper reports – or never made public at all – so that the rich information they hold gets woefully under-used.

By instigating local and rigorous consultations, community groups can gain both insight into how the problems they want to challenge are percieved and experienced – and the outcomes of their consultations – made public – can act to inspire community and local government / agency action.

What is the APPROACH?

Anyone who wants to consult on an issue can create a consultation. The website would step them through thinking about how to consult (e.g. collecting the right demographics, asking the right sorts of questions, making sure the sample is representative) and creating the basic questionairre for a consultation.

This is then made available online, and (optionally) printable (so that the consultation owner/organiser can circulate offline versions of the consultation and then gather in and input responses from paper records). Anyone registered to recieve information about local consultations near to them will be e-mailed with the change to respond – and the consultation can be mentioned on other areas of MySociety sites linked to the local area in question.

After a set period – the consultation will end – and the results (or a sub-set thereof if neccessary to maintain demographic anonimity) can be made publicly available for anyone to look at, analyse etc. Tools could be offered to help in their (e.g. comparing the demographics of the people surveyed with local demographic data to see if the sample is representative etc.)

The system would also create easy ways of giving feedback to consultation participants as to the results of the consultation – and what action might be taken as a result. (Failure to receive follow up information after taking part in consultations is a common complaint amongst the consulted…)

With the publicically visible consultation results (the particularly unique thing about this plan) – people can start pledges, write to their MP, create new action groups – based upon identification of real needs in their local community.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

If local authorities and other agencies could be encouraged to use such a platform for their consultations – then the increase in transparency could have a significant impact on holding authorities to account in their responses to consultation.

Further – if local community groups can consult a wide range of others in their area (not just those they are already in touch with) – they can operate on the basis of far better information – and can take action and campaign in far improved ways.

What is the COMPETITION?

There are a number of survey websites out there – but none that are focussed on local consultation – and none that offer the extra tools to support people in carrying out consultations which generate rigorous data that would stand up to criticisms. Most of these services also charge for surveys with any significant response rate (100+), are online only – and don’t offer enough tools for analysis.

This service would do two things:
1. Allow people to create local consultations for free
2. Allow people to find local consultations and engage in them (in could also link to other local consultations not being carried out through the system)

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

The build a site with all the features outlined above could take significant effort. Perhaps two developers and 6 months of development time to implement all the relevant features to make it really easy to build the surveys and to carry out analysis of the data.

However – once established the system should be relatively low maintainence – and branded versions of the system for local authorities, national organisations, and commercial organisations – could potentially generate revenue to cover the costs of building what is a relatively complex system.

It would be possible to develop a cut-down ‘consult your community’ which is essentially a public survey system linking surveys to local areas – and this could also have significant impacts… although I think the potential of the full system makes it worth investigation at least…. (all comments and thoughts welcome….)

What NEED does this meet?

Central place to look for information other people have uncovered via FOI. Will be well indexed by search engine, so information becomes more public in general. For people who make FOI requests, provides a convenient place to track the progress of the request, and to put responses so you can give people links to them.

What is the APPROACH?

Anyone can set up a Freedom of Information request. Website provides simple URLs for all requests and responses, and searching of them by free text or by department. When making a request, advice is given on how to write it, and the site sends it to the department/quango/authority. When you get a response, can upload it to the site – after the statutory 28 working days we would send an email to ask if a response was received. If responses are late or unsatisfactory, site offers guidance on taking to the Information Commissioner.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

A repository of useful government information, all of which somebody felt was important enough to actively ask for. Opens up government to people, making it more transparent. As well as letting people criticise government, it would also show the good things that government is doing.

What is the COMPETITION?

Friends of the Earth have a system for sending requests, but do not provide an archive of them, which is vital. Our site can also be easier to use, and they would probably collaborate with the project. The book “Your Right to Know” describes in detail how to make requests, but the site would complement that rather than compete with it. There’s also a similar FOI archive service to this in America which we could learn from.

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

The complex part is the uploading of responses to requests, which could be in numerous electronic document formats or on paper. We’d need lots of advice to people on how to OCR documents, or to give summaries if only image versions can be uploaded. Maybe let other people contribute OCR of images. Code to convert Word documents, PDFs etc. to text. Other than that it is a straightforward mySociety site. Say two people working for three months to make a reasonable version.

Author: Craig Nicol

What NEED does this meet?

A project for all the people who don’t think Westminster is for them – a virtual parliament where members can stand for election, debate issues and vote.

What is the APPROACH?

It’s like parliament, with all those long debates about the CAP and road tolls, but on-line and with real people instead of career politicians.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

You can debate any time, and discuss issues. Politics without the politicians 🙂

What is the COMPETITION?

Westminster is competition, but they can make laws and this one can’t. I’ll add that to the bug database.

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

Debates and issues could easily be built on a PledgeBank platform (“I will double income to the NHS if 2/3rds of elected members agree with me”) although you’d need to add a list of dissenters to the pledge. Could easily add other mysociety properties by redirecting the underlying search queries to the new platform.