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We’ve got updates from Julia on this Parliament’s first Register of Financial interests, showing what second jobs and gifts, etc, MPs have declared; and on the startlingly diminished list of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs).
Meanwhile, Gareth tells us how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, and we hear from AccessInfo about a new award – the winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work.
Alongside all of that, Myf explains how a WhatDoTheyKnow user harnessed the power of Reddit to verify the responses they were receiving to their FOI requests.
Enjoy!
Links
- Blog post on the Register of Financial Interests spreadsheet; and more details on what it contains
- Blog post about Reddit, WhatDoTheyKnow, and Physician Associates
- Blog post on the diminishing number of APPGs
- AccessInfo Impact Awards
- Full details on how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro by linking to your outcomes
- Our TikTok account
- Our Bluesky account
Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.
Transcript
[0:04] Myf: Hello. Thank you very much for tuning in.
[0:07] This is our second monthly collection of news and updates from mySociety, and my name is Myf Nixon. I’m mySociety’s Communications Manager.
[0:15] This month, I’m going to share with you five pieces of news — two from our democracy work, and three from our transparency side. (more…)
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WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit: bring them together, and amazing things can happen — as we’ve discovered from one of our users.
We’ve been talking to Yasmin Marsh, who, as part of a small collective of NHS doctors and staff named PA Project Watch group, is investigating concerns around the use of under-qualified medical staff in NHS hospitals and GP surgeries. With a combination of facts received through Freedom of Information requests, and on the ground experience from members of the r/DoctorsUK subreddit, they’ve created a change in policy in at least one NHS Trust.
What is a PA?
We asked Yasmin to explain the basics of PA Project Watch’s campaign to us, and anyone else who might not know the finer details of how the NHS functions. So first of all, what does the PA in the group’s name refer to?
“It’s ‘Physician Associate‘, a role previously known as a ‘Physician Assistant’,” she explained.
“A PA is a member of the healthcare team who works under the supervision of a senior doctor to help care for patients. You can train to become a PA with a 24 month MSc or PgDip.
“The role was originally designed so that PAs would always work under the supervision of senior doctors and assist the medical team in caring for patients.”
The trouble with PAs
OK, so what’s the issue with PAs?
“Because no official rules have been set around what they can or can’t do”, says Yasmin, “they’ve been used inappropriately by NHS hospitals and GP surgeries to replace doctors.”
In these stretched times, it’s perhaps inevitable that shortages are being addressed by any means possible? Yasmin agrees:
“You can see the temptation for NHS managers and GP surgeries — if there are doctor shortages, fill the gaps with PAs instead. They’re also cheaper than doctors!”
Yasmin told us that the General Medical Council are planning to introduce regulation later this year, but meanwhile, there are potential dangers around this situation.
“I’ve seen first-hand the problems of using PAs,” she said. “It comes back to the old saying ‘you don’t know what you don’t know’. As they’ve only done a 24 month course, they miss covering lots of important topics, and the topics they do cover are only covered in superficial depth, skimming over lots of important medical topics briefly. There’s a reason medical school is five to six years!
“So, for example, when looking at a patient’s blood tests, I’ve seen a PA miss a common critical abnormality because they simply lacked knowledge — they’d never been taught about that particular blood test abnormality or what it means. If you speak to doctors, these types of errors are happening through the use of PAs up and down the country.”
So how critical is it?
“There have been several deaths of patients due to mistakes made by PAs, which have been reported by the BBC1, the Manchester Evening News2, and in two stories from the Telegraph3.”
WhatDoTheyKnow and Reddit
So that certainly explains the groups’ concerns, and their desire to do something about it — now, how did WhatDoTheyKnow and Freedom of Information come into the picture?
Yasmin hadn’t been fully familiar with the concept before: “I had heard of FOI requests, but I never knew they could be submitted by anybody. I thought you had to be a journalist or an investigator to submit them. However, I found WhatDoTheyKnow through Google when looking for another topic about my local council, and then discovered that anyone could send them.”
And what about the link with Reddit? Yasmin’s shared FOI responses as the group has received them, allowing for vital scrutiny of the information provided, from those working in the settings in question, who are able to compare the responses with their own experiences.
“Reddit has been central to this campaign. I’d really emphasise the role of the /r/DoctorsUK community. Without them, this would not have been possible.”
A strong example comes from the FOI request sent to Torbay Hospital.
“We received a message from a Reddit user who said this hospital was using PAs inappropriately to replace doctors, often in the paediatric department, but also covering other gaps in the hospital rota like the surgery and medicine departments.
“After this message, I sent an FOI request to the hospital, asking them how many times doctors had been replaced by PAs. They replied:
None, physician associates are not permitted to cover doctor’s shifts.
“We then posted this on the r/DoctorsUK community asking if this was true, and for any evidence that PAs were replacing doctors. We received testimony from paediatric nursing staff and a rota, showing that PAs regularly replaced doctors in the paediatric department. This demonstrated that the hospital’s response was false.
“We then challenged the hospital’s response by requesting an internal review, which led to them admitting that PAs did cover rota gaps in paediatrics and other departments.
“Did they deliberately try to cover up the situation? Or was this an administrative mistake? We’ll never know. Without Reddit, we would have just accepted the original response and never pushed for the internal review.”
Real-life results
And as for whether the request has had any impact? Yasmin confirms that the Trust says they’ve now stopped substituting PAs for doctors.
PA Project Watch continue in their work. “We’re now asking other hospitals to see if they have been substituting doctors for PAs, and uncovered further evidence: for example, Royal Berkshire sent us a spreadsheet of shifts where PAs had covered for doctors. This story was featured in the Daily Mail, although unfortunately without a credit.”
And perhaps as a further effect of this campaigning, doctors are now taking legal action against the General Medical Council, because while the GMC is planning to regulate PAs as Yasmin points out, “they could still technically do anything a doctor could do.
“This is the central argument of the Anaesthetists United legal case — they want the GMC to create a clear set of limits on the tasks PAs can perform, to avoid them being used inappropriately.”
But Yasmin’s clear where the problem lies and it’s not with the PAs themselves. “They’ve been let down by their leadership at the Faculty of Physician Associates, taken advantage of by the NHS, and thrust into roles for which they are unqualified and underprepared.
“Unfortunately, the NHS culture makes it really difficult to speak up about these issues. We’re trying to shine a light on what’s happening, and FOI gives us the power to do this — but we’re finding many Trusts are now refusing to answer requests about PAs, and we’re having to involve the ICO more and more.”
Thanks so much to Yasmin for sharing this important campaign. It’s great to see the journey from FOI novice to FOI expert!
It’s clear that the group now has enough knowledge to request an internal review to challenge an erroneous response, and to appeal to the ICO when an authority hasn’t met their responsibilities under the FOI Act — and we’re glad that WhatDoTheyKnow has been part of that learning process, not to mention the results that have come from it.
Video summary:
1 BBC: Misdiagnosis: Bereaved mum calls for physician associate role clarity
2 Manchester Evening News: Gran died after ‘physician’s associate’ left treatment in place for 16 HOURS longer than allowed
3 The Telegraph: Man died from rare heart problem after being discharged from hospital
Family of film make-up artist call for inquest after treatment by physician associate—
Image: implusq
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Fundación Multitudes have created and delivered training for civic tech organisations in how to get stories about their projects and successes into the mainstream media. Funded by our fourth TICTeC Labs subgrant, the initial training took place from December 2022 to February 2023, with ten participants from Indonesia, Macedonia and the Philippines.
At our fourth Civic Tech Surgery, we discussed storytelling and reach — the challenges of amplifying our successes beyond the civic tech community —identifying that communications can be difficult for civic tech organisations. Organisations are often small, work is complex and full of jargon, and communications are sometimes seen as a luxury or an afterthought. One impactful solution suggested was training, and the Action Lab commissioned Fundación Multitudes to create this eight-week course.
The organisations joining the training wanted to:
- develop attractive campaigns for their organisations
- meet and share experiences with other organisations
- learn about storytelling tools and strategies
Their needs were met by modules on:
- Media mapping and media tracking
- Press kit and media management
- How do we elaborate our discourse, editorial line and expressions on contingency?
- Design of a micro action plan for a specific programme or campaign
Participants really valued the opportunity to share experiences and learn how other organisations had met the challenges of sharing their stories. They are continuing to engage with the programme via a mailing list which connects them so they can exchange information, share experiences and build partnerships, plus a follow-up newsletter with relevant information on storytelling and reach, grant opportunities and success stories.
Fundación Multitudes plan to continue to develop and deliver this training – view the course content here (PDF). -
On 21st November we will host a seminar at the House of Lords exploring how digital tools are being used in Sub-Saharan Africa to bring parliaments and citizens closer together.
During the seminar, we will be launching our Parliaments and the People: Digital Democracy in Sub-Saharan Africa report, which presents the findings from an extensive and in-depth research study into digital democracy across Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa and Uganda. This research explores the use of digital channels and platforms in communicating political information in the region, and considers the implications for future development in digital and institution-building.
The report analyses the breadth of digital political engagement in the countries studied, and identifies key structural and cultural considerations that influence whether digital solutions to improving democratic engagement, transparency and accountability in governing institutions will be successful.
The findings of this report are more relevant than ever to those interested and involved in international development and institution-building, through which policy implementations digital solutions are being increasingly embedded.
The seminar will bring together researchers, policy makers and practitioners to discuss how the insights from this and other work can be integrated into policy, engagement and future development work.
Speakers:
- Hosted by Lord Purvis of Tweed & Mark Cridge, CEO mySociety
- Dr Rebecca Rumbul, Head of Research, mySociety (Report author)
- Gemma Moulder, Partnership Development Manager, mySociety (Report author)
- Paul Lenz, Trust Executive, Indigo Trust
- Julia Keutgen, Parliamentary Development Advisor, Westminster Foundation for Democracy
- Two further speakers will be announced soon.
Date/time: 21st November 4pm – 6pm.
As capacity is limited, attendance to the event is by invitation only. If you’re interested in attending please email to request an invite and we’ll let you know full details.
Research Mailing List
Sign up below to hear when this report is published.
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Millions of people reached for their phone on June 9, and checked Facebook for the result of the UK General Election.
Now, you may or may not be one of those people yourself, but there’s no disputing that many of us turn to social media as our primary source for big news. Through the night, Facebook was a place where we could express feelings about the results as they came in, share news stories and ask questions: it gives us a rounded view of an event like an election, quite unlike any you’ll receive from traditional media.
And the morning after, those logging in to Facebook may have seen something like this — an invitation to follow your newly-elected or re-elected MP and other elected representatives, from local councillors to MEPs:
We’re glad to say that mySociety has been working alongside Facebook to help make this happen.
Reaching people where they are
mySociety has a mission to make democracy more accessible for everyone, and via our websites TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem, we serve and inform more than 400,000 UK citizens per month.
That figure has, as we’d expect, spiked in the last few weeks as people rush to check their MPs’ track records, all the better to cast an informed vote; but all the same, we’re well aware that 400,000 users is only a small proportion of the country’s electorate.
What’s more, our research has consistently shown that our services don’t adequately reach the people that need them most: our typical user is male, reasonably affluent, well-educated, older and white — I mean, we’re glad to be there for everyone, but generally speaking this is a demographic that can inform itself quite readily without any extra help.
That’s not a problem Facebook has, though, with their 32 million UK users. 75% of them log in on a daily basis, and almost half are under the age of 30*.
That’s why we were so keen to join forces with the Facebook Civic Engagement team, to help this large online audience see who their representatives are today.
Facebook for engagement
You may not have been aware that Facebook has a dedicated political engagement team — unless you came to TICTeC this year, of course, in which case you’d have seen a walkthrough of the extensive research that’s gone into their election offerings globally — but if you use Facebook at all, and if you’re in a country that has recently had an election, you’ve probably seen some of their work.
Over the last few weeks in the UK, people on Facebook were alerted to each stage of the electoral process. They were invited to check who their candidates were and what they stood for; offered a reminder to vote and provided information on where and how to do so; and finally, encouraged to share the fact that they had voted, tapping into the proven peer encouragement effect.
mySociety behind the scenes
Thanks to our experience running TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem, plus the support we receive from Commercial Evaluations and their Locator Online service and our involvement with Democracy Club’s WhoCanIVoteFor.co.uk, we have access to accurate and up-to-date data on candidates and representatives at every level, from local councillors up to MEPs, and including MPs — all linked to the relevant constituencies.
In all, this totaled around 23,000 people. What we needed to discover was how many of them were on Facebook — and could we accurately link our records to their Facebook pages?
Working together with Facebook, we built an admin tool that displayed likely pages to our team, on the basis of names, locations and the really giveaway information, such as ‘Councillor’, ‘MP’ or the constituency name in the page title. Some representatives didn’t have individual pages, but ran a party page; those counted too (and of course, a fair proportion of representatives have no Facebook presence at all).
While our tool filtered the results reasonably well, it was still necessary to make a manual check of every record to ensure that we were linking to the correct representative, and not, say, someone who happened to have the same name and live in the same town. We needed to link, of course, only to ‘official’ pages; not representatives’ personal pages full of all those things we use Facebook for on a day-to-day basis. Those holiday snaps, Candy Crush results and cat memes won’t help constituents much: what we were looking for was the kind of page where constituents could message their reps, find out about surgery times, and get the latest news from their constituency.
Now of course, until the results came in, no-one knew precisely which candidates would be MPs! So a small crack team of mySociety people worked through Thursday night to do the final matching. It was a very long night, but we hope that the result will be an awful lot more people following their representatives, and so quite effortlessly becoming more politically engaged, thanks to a platform which they already visit on a regular basis.
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*Figures based on this post.
Image: Sarah R (CC by-nc-nd/2.0) -
In order to make debates and votes a bit easier to find, understand and share, we’ve recently introduced some new features on TheyWorkForYou.
What am I looking for?
Our users frequently write to us to say that they can’t find a specific vote on TheyWorkForYou — and that’s often because descriptions of votes in the media, or in conversation, don’t reflect the way they are referred to in Parliament.
The official record, for example, will not bring you a vote titled ‘Snooper’s Charter’, ‘Bedroom Tax’ or ‘Brexit’: you’ll have to know enough to search for the ‘Investigatory Powers Bill’, ‘Social Tenants Deemed to Have Excess Bedrooms’, or ‘Exiting the European Union’.
So we’ve put in place a few different ways to find the content that matters to you.
Recent votes
99% of the time when people ask us where to find a particular vote, it’s something that happened in the last few days, or at most, weeks.
So now, you’ll see a new ‘Recent Votes‘ tab in the main TheyWorkForYou menu, which leads to a page listing the last 30 votes:
If you’ve entered your postcode on the homepage (or your browser cookies remember you from previous visits), you’ll also see your own MP’s stance under each vote, like this:
There’s one important point about this page: it only contains those votes for which we currently have policy lines — that is to say, the votes we include on MPs’ pages. That’s because they are the ones for which we already have a plain English description. Fortunately, these are almost always the ones that people are most interested in.
If you want to find a vote that isn’t on this page, you can always look on Public Whip, which is where the raw voting data that feeds TheyWorkForYou comes from.
Individual votes
If you click through from any of those listings, you’ll get a page dedicated to that particular vote.
Here you’ll see something that we know is important to many of our users, set out nice and clearly: the ‘division’, ie which MPs voted for and against, who was absent and who abstained.
Again, if you’ve entered your postcode on the site, you’ll also see how your own MP voted, in the top section of the page:
But even better, if what you’re most interested in is your own MP’s position in a specific vote, you’ll get this version of the page when you click through from their voting record — as clear as we can make it:
Topics pages
So that’s all fine and dandy for people who think in terms of MPs and votes. But for a long time, we’ve wanted to explore ways to make parliamentary content more welcoming for complete political newbies.
We’ve been meeting with groups of young people around the UK to find out more about how they access politics, and one finding is that they think in terms of issues. Politics comes through the lens of topics like ‘the NHS’, ‘the environment’ or ‘Brexit’.
For that reason, we’ve created topic pages like this one, which gather together a lot of relevant and immediate content, showing how your MP voted, how all relevant votes went, debates and a chance to sign up for email alerts:
We’ll be adding more of these as time goes on.
Easier to share
The final feature we’ve introduced was a direct result of observing the way that you, our users, share our content on Facebook and Twitter.
We started collecting examples of where people had made a screenshot of voter records in order to make a political point, and we soon saw that this was a very common thing to do, especially at key points like the current run-up to the General Election, or a party leadership campaign.
To save you the bother of making and saving a screenshot, we’ve now added these share buttons at the foot of each section of votes on MPs’ pages:
That’s it for now, but this is all part of a rolling program of improvements, so do feel free to feed back with any related features you’d like to see.
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Image: A Currell (CC by-nc/2.0) -
FixMyTransport was launched a month ago. It is now well on its way to listing 1,000 individual complaints, suggestions and requests to the public transport operators of Great Britain.
As the sample size grows, we’re able to see just what provokes the country’s mild-mannered passengers into action. There are the diurnal irritations – the leaky station roof, constant announcements, smelly trains; there is the discomfort of overcrowding and overheated buses.
All of which are important, of course. And in this, FixMyTransport is achieving its aim of allowing people to make their reports to the operators, while at the same time creating small bunches of people who read those reports and think, ‘Hey, me too!’.
But FixMyTransport is not just for the little gripes. It’s uncovering some pretty big issues, too. Prime among these is the issue of accessibility: reports have come in of buses driving away rather than let a wheelchair user on; a disabled passenger who has surmised that it’s easier to invite friends to come to him rather than try to navigate London’s public transport system; a station from which those with restricted mobility can only travel in one direction.
What next?
The big question for us is, what happens now? Are these reports making anything better? In some cases, yes.
There is the train that will now stop at intermediate stations, and the pedestrian crossings that are no longer blocked by buses. Little things that’ll make a big difference to the people who reported them. But the pay-off is not always so immediate. Bigger issues are obviously not going to be fixed overnight. And some problems won’t be fixed, for a multitude of reasons – they don’t fit in with the operators’ plans, or they’re not budgeted for, or they just aren’t seen as sufficiently important.
How is FixMyTransport going to crack those? Well, it was set up so that you can show your operator that there is demand, that budgets need to be massaged, or that plans should change. If you’ve used the site, you may well have been on the receiving end of a comment from one of the team, nudging you to spread the word of your campaign, among friends, family, and fellow-passengers.
The fact that people can sign up to your page helps make FixMyTransport different from just contacting the operator directly. We also reckon it’ll make a difference when it comes to getting changes. Consider, for example, the campaign to get increased cycle parking at Cambridge station – with 176 supporters (and still growing every day), our biggest yet. It’s been picked up by local press, talked about on Twitter – and eventually, National Express won’t be able to ignore the public demonstration of a palpable need.
Well, that’s the plan. We know it’s early days, and that FixMyTransport represents a massive sea change for some operators who are not used to interacting openly and online.
If you’ve written an impassioned, well-reasoned request, gathered supporters and spread the word far and wide, and still hit a brick wall, we have other suggestions. FixMyTransport allows us to get you writing to your local councillor, to the local paper, or to relevant groups like Passenger Focus, Transport for All, and the Campaign for Better Transport. These groups have been bashing away at the big problems like accessibility for far longer than we have, and it makes sense to tap into their expertise.
We know that for some issues, it’ll be a long game – just as it’ll be a long game trying to get every operator fully signed-up to the notion of transparent online interaction. But we’ll keep trying, and we hope you will too.
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So. Yesterday we officially launched FixMyTransport, a site that has been in ‘quiet beta’ for a few weeks. Not such a big event, you might think – after all, the site has been open for public use; the only difference was that we were announcing it.
I think we’ve all been gratifyingly taken aback by just how much use the site has seen in the last 24 hours. Thanks to mentions in some of the mainstream press, but equally because of a veritable outpouring of tweets and retweets, word spread quickly. We experienced a 550% rise in visitor numbers (the servers took it in their stride, we are glad to say). Over the course of the day, the number of reports on the site doubled, with more than 70 totally new campaigns being created and many more problems being sent to operators. With each report came more tweets, more blog posts and more users signing up to campaigns.
We’re seeing the idea we worked on become a reality, and that’s both exciting and full of surprises. We knew what we would use such a site for, but we had no idea which issues would most motivate our users (at the latest reckoning, it’s poor air conditioning, delays, and, above all, a lack of decent information).
If you haven’t had a chance to see what FixMyTransport is all about yet, take a look at some of these examples:
- A passenger who has to travel west when she wants to go east
- What sounds like a complete no-brainer of a suggestion
- A sensible placatory move Virgin could extend to delayed passengers
- A call for longer commuter trains
Many of these examples see users (not just the operators, but ordinary people) who know a lot more than we do about public transport in this country weighing in with useful insights, which is fantastic.
Don’t forget you can search your local region for reports. If you find one you agree with, lending your support is as easy as clicking a single button, and then spreading the word with a tweet, a Facebook status or however you see fit.
Excuse the puns – they are hard to avoid – but we have the sense that we’re at the beginning of a very exciting journey here. And we’re sure we’re going to enjoy the ride. Thanks to everyone who’s come on board so far.
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Everyone at mySociety is quite bubbling with excitement at the news that we’re today officially launching FixMyTransport.com , mySociety’s first new core charitable website since WhatDoTheyKnow launched in 2008. We’ve never before launched a site that took so much work to build, or that contained so much data.
What is it for?
FixMyTransport has two goals – one in your face, and the other more subtle.
The first goal, as the site’s name suggests, is to help people get common public transport problems resolved. We’re talking broken ticket machines, gates that should be open and stations without stair-free access. We’ll help by dramatically lowering the barrier to working out who’s responsible, and getting a problem report sent to them – a task that would have been impossible without the help of volunteers who gathered a huge number of operator email addresses for us. Consequently the service works everywhere in Great Britain, our database has over 300,000 stops and routes for train, tube, tram, bus, coach and ferry.
The second goal – the subtle one – is to see if it is possible to use the internet to coax non-activist, non-political people into their first taste of micro-activism. Whilst the site intentionally doesn’t contain any language about campaigning or democracy, we encourage and provide tools to facilitate the gathering of supporters, the emailing of local media, the posting of photos of problems, and the general application of pressure where it is needed. We also make problem reports and correspondence between operators and users public, which we have frequently seen create positive pressure when used on sister sites FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow.
Who made it?
FixMyTransport was largely built by one remarkable coder – Louise Crow, who started as a volunteer and who is now one of our longest serving core developers. She spent 18 months coding the site almost entirely by herself, wrestling with truly tortuous data problems and collaborating with Birmingham’s fantastic SuperCool design to make it look lovely (you should hire them, they’re great). She also tolerated my ‘aspirational scattergun’ school of project management with remarkable good humour. She really is the king of transport coding.
Credit must also go to mySociety core dev Dave Whiteland, who made the Facebook integration work, despite not having an account himself!
Why is it dedicated to Angie Martin?
Angie Martin was a mySociety coder for an all-too-brief period before she succumbed to cancer at a devastatingly early age. We’re dedicating this site to her in remembrance of a great, self taught perl monger who should still be here.
We’ll be posting further blog posts about the development process, the data challenges, and the overall project philosophy. In the mean time, please keep arms and legs inside the carriage – FixMyTransport is just about to depart.
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UPDATE: If you approve of what we did this week, and what to help make sure we can still do it in the future, please pledge to support us: http://www.pledgebank.com/supportmysociety
The vote on concealing MPs’ expenses has been cancelled by the government!
In other words – we won!
This is a huge victory not just for transparency, it’s a bellwether for a change in the way politics works. There’s no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.
Over 7000 people joined a Facebook group, they sent thousands of emails to over 90% of all MPs. Hundreds of thousands of people found out about the story by visiting TheyWorkForYou to find something they wanted to know, reading an email alert, or simply discovered what was going on whilst checking their Facebook or Twitter pages. Almost all of this happened, from nowhere, within 48 hours, putting enough pressure on Parliament to force change.
Make no mistake. This is new, and it reflects the fact that the Internet generation expects information to be made available, and they expect to be able to make up their own minds, not be spoon fed the views of others. This campaign was always about more than receipts, it was about changing the direction of travel, away from secrecy and towards openness.
Today we stopped moving in the wrong direction. Tomorrow we start moving the right way. Sign up to our news mailing list (box on the right) to get updates on what mySociety gets up to.