Fancy a pint?

We’ll be in the Banker pub in London for our regular pubmeet on Tuesday 29th May – come and have a chat!

Everyone’s welcome and there’s no agenda, other than having a good time and meeting nice people.

The Banker, Cousin Lane, London, EC4R 3TE

6.30 pm onwards (note, this is earlier than usual). Here’s the Lanyrd page if you want to sign up and spread the word.

At least one of us will be wearing a mySociety hoodie (black, with logo as at the top of this page).

The hashtag is #mySocial. It’s taken its first tentative steps on Twitter, and has been known to make an appearance on Instagram. Where next?

Image credit: Atilla Kefeli

Over 115,000 Freedom of Information requests.

Almost 225,000 FixMyStreet reports.

Close to 3,000 public transport problems.

Every word spoken in Parliament since 1935.

So, what would you like to know?

There’s no doubt about it, mySociety sites store a lot of data. And once you have that much data, you can start finding the answers to interesting questions. Questions like:

• Which public bodies receive the most FOI requests?
• Which county gets the most pothole reports?
• Which train routes are people complaining most about?
• Which MP has spoken for the longest cumulative time in the history of Parliament?

There are less obvious questions, too – how about:

• Which regions of the country are most likely to include bad language when submitting a form online?
• How many times does the Speaker have to interject, “Order, order!” in an average week?
• Which words are most spoken in Parliament, and which have only become popular in the last five years?
• What topics do people submit the most Freedom of Information requests about?
• Just how often does a UK citizen get so fed up about dog poop that they take action?

We reckon there are almost limitless stories in our data, waiting to be teased out. Some of them will be surprising, fascinating, or just plain funny. Some may even be potential front page news. So, we’ve invited journalists who have a particular interest in data, or indeed in any of the areas we work in, to come and have at it at our first ever mySociety Data Hackday.

Not a journalist?

Journalists aren’t the only ones with bright ideas, so if you’re reading this and there’s a burning question that springs to mind, leave a comment below. Given all these reams of data, what would you be looking for? We’ll add the best ideas to our list, and we’ll be reporting back on everything we find out.

Actually, I am a journalist!

There are still a few places, so if you’d like to attend, please drop us a line. Note: we will expect you to get stuck in! We will run the data, but you may be sifting through the results, looking for significant stories, and sharing your findings. Bring a laptop, and plenty of ideas.

If you can’t attend, but really wish you could, let us know what data you’d like us to run, and we’ll add it to the list.

ETA: Lanyrd page here.

Image credit: Johan Nilsson

Ah, summer: walks in the park, lazing in the long grass, and the sound of chirping crickets – all overlaid with the clatter of a thousand keyboards.

That may not be your idea of summer, but it’s certainly the ways ours is shaping up. We’re participating in Google’s Summer of Code, which aims to put bright young programmers in touch with Open Source organisations, for mutual benefit.

What do the students get from it? Apart from a small stipend, they have a mentored project to get their teeth into over the long summer hols, and hopefully learn a lot in the process. We, of course, see our code being used, improved and adapted – and a whole new perspective on our own work.

Candidates come from all over the world – they’re mentored remotely – so for an organisation like mySociety, this offers a great chance to get insight into the background, politics and technical landscape of another culture. Ideas for projects that may seem startlingly obvious in, say, Latin America or India would simply never have occurred to our UK-based team.

This year, mySociety were one of the 180 organisations participating. We had almost 100 enquiries, from countries including Lithuania, India, Peru, Georgia, and many other places. It’s a shame that we were only able to take on a couple of the many excellent applicants.

We made suggestions for several possible projects to whet the applicants’ appetite. Mobile apps were popular, in particular an app for FixMyTransport. Reworking WriteToThem, and creating components to complement MapIt and PopIt also ranked highly.

It was exciting to see so many ideas, and of course, hard to narrow them down.

In the end we chose two people who wanted to help improve our nascent PopIt service. PopIt will allow people to very quickly create a public database of politicians or other figures. No technical knowledge will be needed – where in the past our code has been “Just add developers”, this one is “Just add data”. We’ll host the sites for others to build on.

Our two successful applicants both had ideas for new websites that would use PopIt for their datastore, exactly the sort of advanced usage we hope to encourage. As well as making sure that PopIt actually works by using it they’ll both be creating transparency sites that will continue after their placements ends. They’ll also have the knowledge of how to set up such a site, and in our opinion that is a very good thing.

We hope to bring you more details as their projects progress, throughout the long, hot (or indeed short and wet) summer.

PS: There is a separate micro-blog where we’re currently noting some of the nitty gritty thoughts and decisions that go into building something like PopIt. If you want to see how the project goes please do subscribe! The Components mailing list is also a good way of staying in touch.

Top image by Elaine Millan, used with thanks under the Creative Commons licence.

mySociety’s sites are all open-source, which means that anyone can take our code and build their own sites with it. That’s been a core mySociety principle from the very beginning, but as time has passed, we’ve realised that we could have made the process easier.

Until recently, you had to be pretty techie to use our code. But now, under the banner DIY mySociety, we’re actively working to lower the bar. Firstly, and most importantly, we’re in the process of rewriting much of our code so that it’s nearer ‘plug and play’ status than previously. Then, we’re backing it up with documentation in the form of easy-to-read handbooks, and supportive communities.

If you’ve ever thought of replicating a mySociety-style site in your own neck of the woods, take a peek over at diy.mysociety.org. We’ll be regularly updating with news and advice.

Image by Kenny Louie, used with thanks under the Creative Commons licence.

Our regular informal meet-up will be on Wednesday 18th April. Like last month, we’ll be at the Somers Town Coffeehouse near Euston for drinks and chat.

As always, everyone is welcome. There’s no agenda – just a chance to have a talk with mySociety staff, volunteers, and the other interesting people that turn up. It’s also a good opportunity to find out about volunteering, or ask questions about our work.

We’ll be there from 7.30pm and there’ll be at least one mySociety hooded top in evidence, so that you can find us easily (logo as at the top of this page).

Here’s a map.

As usual, our dedicated hashtag is #mySocial. Hope to see you there!

FixMyStreet, our site for reporting things like potholes and broken street lights, has had something of a major redesign, kindly supported in part by Kasabi. With the help of Supercool, we have overhauled the look of the site, bringing it up to date and making the most of some lovely maps. And as with any mySociety project, we’d really appreciate your feedback on how we can make it ever more usable.

The biggest change to the new FixMyStreet is the use of responsive design, where the web site adapts to fit within the environment in which it’s being viewed. The main difference on FixMyStreet, besides the obvious navigation changes, is that in a small screen environment, the reporting process changes to have a full screen map and confirmation step, which we thought would be preferable on small touchscreens and other mobiles. There are some technical details at the end of this post.

Along with the design, we’ve made a number of other improvements along the way. For example, something that’s been requested for a long time, we now auto-rotate photos on upload, if we can, and we’re storing whatever is provided rather than only a shrunken version. It’s interesting that most photos include correct orientation information, but some clearly do not (e.g. the Blackberry 9800).

We have many things we’d still like to do, as a couple of items from our github repository show. Firstly, it would be good if the FixMyStreet alert page could have something similar to what we’ve done on http://planningalerts.barnet.gov.uk/, providing a configurable circle for the potential alert area. We also are going to be adding faceted search to the area pages, allowing you to see only reports in a particular category, or within a certain time period.

Regarding native phone apps – whilst the new design does hopefully work well on mobile phones, we understand that native apps are still useful for a number of reasons (not least, the fact photo upload is still not possible from a mobile web app on an iPhone). We have not had the time to update our apps, but will be doing so in the near future to bring them more in line with the redesign and hopefully improve them generally as well.

The redesign is not the only news about FixMyStreet today

As part of our new DIY mySociety project, we are today publishing an easy-to-read guide for people interested in using the FixMyStreet software to run versions of FixMyStreet outside of Britain. We are calling the newly upgraded, more re-usable open source code the FixMyStreet Platform.

This is the first milestone in a major effort to upgrade the FixMyStreet Platform code to make it easier and more flexible to run in other countries. This effort started last year, and today we are formally encouraging people to join our new mailing list at the new FixMyStreet Platform homepage.

Coming soon: a major upgrade to FixMyStreet for Councils

As part of our redesign work, we’ve spoken to a load of different councils about what they might want or need, too. We’re now taking that knowledge, combining it with this redesign, and preparing to relaunch a substantially upgraded FixMyStreet for Councils product. If you’re interested in that, drop us a line.

Kasabi: Our Data is now in the Datastore

Finally, we are also now pushing details of reports entered on FixMyStreet to Kasabi’s data store as open linked data; you can find details of this dataset on their site at http://kasabi.com/dataset/fixmystreet. Let us know if it’s useful to you, or if we can do anything differently to help you.

Technical details

For the web developers amongst you – we have a base stylesheet for everyone, and another stylesheet that is only included if your browser width is 48em or above (an em is a unit of measurement dependent on your font size), or if you’re running Internet Explorer 6-8 (as they don’t handle the modern CSS to do this properly, we assume they’ll want the larger styles) using a conditional comment. This second stylesheet has slight differences up to 61em and above 61em. Whilst everything should continue to work without JavaScript, as FixMyStreet has done with its map-based reporting since 2007, where it is enabled this allows us to provide the full screen map you can see at large screen sizes, and the adjusted process you see at smaller resolutions.

We originally used Modernizr.mq() in our JavaScript, but found that due to the way this works (adding content to the end of the document), this can cause issues with e.g. data() set on other elements, so we switched to detecting which CSS is being applied at the time.

On a mobile, you can see that the site navigation is at the end of the document, with a skip to navigation link at the top. On a desktop browser, you’ll note that visually the navigation is now at the top. In both cases, the HTML is the same, with the navigation placed after the main content, so that it hopefully loads and appears first. We are using display: table-caption and caption-side: top in the desktop stylesheet in order to rearrange the content visually (as explained by Jeremy Keith), a simple yet powerful technique.

From a performance point of view, on the front page of the site, we’re e.g. using yepnope (you can get it separately or as part of Modernizr) so that the map JavaScript is downloading in the background whilst you’re there, meaning the subsequent map page is hopefully quicker to load. I’m also adding a second tile server today – not because our current one isn’t coping, it is, but just in case something should happen to our main one – we already have redundancy in our postcode/area server MapIt and our population density service Gaze.

If you have any technical questions about the design, please do ask in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

This month’s informal gathering will be on Tuesday 20th March at the Somers Town Coffeehouse near Euston (yes, despite its name, it’s a pub).

As always, everyone is welcome. There’s no agenda – just a chance to have a chat with mySociety staff, volunteers, and the other interesting people that turn up. It’s also a good opportunity to find out about volunteering, or ask questions about our work.

We’ll be there from 7.30pm and there’ll be at least one mySociety hooded top in evidence, so that you can find us easily (logo as at the top of this page).

Here’s a map.

As usual, our dedicated hashtag is #mySocial. Hope to see you there!

At mySociety we take some pride in knowing that FixMyStreet has helped rid the world of thousands of potholes over the years, but of course our contribution to unbroken roads is merely the start of the process. Certainly, reporting a hole on FixMyStreet is easy (we’ve gone out of our way to make sure that is the case), but we do appreciate that a hole remains a hole until somebody takes the trouble to actually fill it in. So really it is all the inspectors, despatchers, logistic and supply teams, fleet mechanics, and repair crews who make the world a smoother, less perforated place.

We’re currently working on a pilot project in the city of Cebu (the “second city” of the Philippines) with the World Bank and transport experts ITP that will implement a FixMyStreet-based reporting service as part of the ongoing battle to keep its roads and streetlights in good repair. Later in the year we will have more to report, but for now—before anything is up and running—we can start by saluting the work of some of the remarkable people who fix the roads (and replace the bulbs) there.

As the winter closed in here in the UK, we ran a “Fix Before the Freeze” campaign encouraging people to report potholes before the frost made things worse. Frost damage isn’t an issue in Cebu, but monsoon weather is, and during the wettest time of the the year it’s simply impractical for holes to be filled with the hot mix method (which is the best way to effect a long-term repair). Every day, the highway departments are faced with the unrelenting logistical problems that arise from marshalling a limited number of crews with a finite amount of asphalt to combat a cityful of holes. Add to this the churn of a thriving city: repairing the surfaces of busy urban roads is a hazardous occupation at the best of times, but especially so in a place like the Philippines where exuberant driving styles can make British traffic seem almost restful.

O don’t tell the mice, don’t tell the moles,
My father’s the chief inspector of HOLES
—Ted Hughes

Cebu’s large network of roads needs constant inspection in this war of material attrition. An inspector can perhaps hope to cover up to 30km of single-lane road in a day, but with a road network like Cebu’s this is never enough. We met Nicomedes, senior manager at DPWH, who long ago adopted the weekend practice of packing a lunch and spending each Saturday inspecting the “mountain barangay” routes that might otherwise never make it onto the schedule. He’s made it a matter of personal pride to be familiar with roads on the outskirts of Cebu city that many of its inhabitants may never even see.

The problems for road maintenance specific to an environment like Cebu include encroachment—where access to the road for repairs can be difficult because everyday life overspills its edges—and the often dense layout of narrow, unnamed alleys. Cebu is divided into barangays (somewhat similar to parishes or wards in the UK), each of which has a community centre and a team responsible for managing local issues. The FixMyStreet pilot project will be working with these enthusiastic barangay teams to run a system of local hole triage that would make local councils in the UK envious.

So next time you click on FixMyStreet to report a pothole—whether it’s a gaping chasm or a worrying case of alligator cracking*—remember that you are taking part in the international battle against unwanted holes.

* alligator cracking: technical term describing fragmented road surface; does not involve actual alligators

My friend and mySociety’s first developer Chris Lightfoot died five years ago today. He killed himself in his own flat for reasons that we will never really know, but which are doubtless linked to the depression which he’d been fighting for years. He was just 28, but had already achieved so much that The Times ran an obituary of him. He would have laughed mightily about the fact that this is now behind a paywall.

To mark this occasion I wanted to write something for mySociety staff and volunteers who never knew Chris, and for a wider audience of people who work in places like GDS, Code For America or indeed anyone with an interest in politics and governance. What Chris represented is too important to be lost in the grief at his passing.

The basic fact to understand about Chris was that he was a very specific kind of polymath – one perfectly suited to the internet age. What I mean by this is that he did much more than simply master varying disciplines:  he saw and drew connections between fields. He wouldn’t just master cartographic principles, engage in politics and, as Francis Irving put it, ‘write Perl like other people write English’: he invariably saw the connections and mixed them up in meaningful and often pioneering ways.

Moreover, this mixing of disciplines was conducted at a furious, restless pace, and knew absolutely no concept of ‘too hard’ – problems were either fundamentally impossible, or ‘trivially soluble’, to use one of his favourite and most gloriously under-stated phrases. Who else would build the technology to break a captcha, just to investigate what American truck rental costs tell us about internal migration in America, for fun?  The answer is trivial.

That he was a genius is not what I want you to understand. Telling you that someone you never met was smarter than you is not helpful, and doesn’t fulfil my promise to tell you why understanding Chris matters.

What is fundamentally valuable about Chris’ legacy (besides piles of code that power services still running today) is that his story signals how we all need to change our conception of what it means to be ‘wise enough to rule’. Let me explain.

Unlike most of us, Chris had the luxury of being able to pick any field of study that interested him, dig up some books and papers, and teach himself a graduate-level understanding in what felt like a few days. It is hard to express quite how fast he could consume and internalise complex new information, and how relentlessly he went at it. To note that he got six A grades at A-level is too puerile a précis, but it is indicative.*

Again, I am not telling you this to make you feel stupid: what matters is what he chose to do with this gift.  What he chose to do was built an ever-expanding palette of skills from which he could paint as he pleased. And what he chose to paint was a vision of a better, saner world.

This painting ranged across a huge expanse of topics and disciplines: nuclear engineering, political ideologies, constitutional law, military history, statistics, psephology, economics, security engineering, behavioural psychology, propaganda, intellectual propery law and more. His favourite brushes were Perl and a blog composed of prose so sharp and funny that George Bernard Shaw would not have been displeased by the comparison. I still wish I could write half as well as him.

What I want to communicate most is this: the disciplines he chose to study form a combined19th, 20th and 21st century curriculum of skills required by modern leaders, both leaders of political organisations and government bureaucracies.  Chris’s life was the invention of a massively expanded, far more up to date version of the traditional Politics, Philosophy and Economics course that this country still uses to educate its elites.

Some of these disciplines are timeless, like the understanding of ideologies or economics. Some represent vital new issues that emerged in the 20th century, like nuclear energy and world-scale warfare. But mixed in there are wholly new, alien group of skills that the recent SOPA, Wikileaks and ID cards debacles show that modern leaders haven’t got anywhere near to internalising: they include knowledge about security engineering, intellectual property and how new technologies clash with old laws and ideologies. They are skills that nobody used to think were political, but which are now centre stage in a polity that can’t keep up.

This doesn’t mean Chris would have made a perfect leader: I used to argue with him a lot about how he weighed up the costs and benefits of different issues. But what he fundamentally had right was the understanding that you could no longer run a country properly if the elites don’t understand technology in the same way they grasp economics or ideology or propaganda. His analysis and predictions about what would happens if elites couldn’t learn were savage and depressingly accurate.

The canon of Chris’s writings and projects embody the idea that what good governance and the good society look like is now inextricably linked to an understanding of the digital. He truly saw how complex and interesting the world was when you understood power as well as networking principles in a way that few have since.

There is, of course, much more to say about Chris’s life. His blog, built on software that foresaw Posterous, is wonderful, hilarious and utterly readable, so you can learn more yourself. Martin Keegan’s obituary is touching and a much better portrait of how much fun it was to be friends with Chris. I hope to memorialise what he represents to me, if I can. But for now, I’ll sign off with a quote from a blog commentor:

“Chris was kind enough to take the time to reply to me, an internet nobody whom he didn’t know from a bar of soap, on a fairly complex statistical question once. He took a lot of time and effort in his response, and he made sure I understood it properly. It’s not often you find knowledgeable people willing to take their own time to educate an unknown person. We need more people like him, not less.”

* For US readers, this is like having a GPA of 4.0, but achieved across twice as many subjects as you actually need to take.

What is a mySociety pubmeet? Just an informal evening when we guarantee that a few of us will be in a pub, happy to chat about anything at all.

If you have questions about any of our projects, ideas for new ones, or want to find out more about volunteering, then you’ll be very welcome.

Where? This month, we’ll be in the Prince Arthur, near Euston Station. Google map here.

When? Wednesday, 22nd February. Feel free to drop by, any time from 7.30 pm to 10.30 pm. Maybe let us know that you’re coming, by email or tweet, so that if numbers start looking large, we can book a space.

We’re easy to spot – at least one of us will be wearing a mySociety hooded top, complete with luminous green logo, as seen at the top of this page.

Tell your friends The more the merrier! If you like your social media, you can use the #mySocial hashtag.

But I don’t live in London… We are planning on having pubmeets in other UK cities soon. Watch this space!

When TheyWorkForYou was built by a group of volunteer activists, many years ago, it was a first-of-a-kind website. It was novel because it imported large amounts of parliamentary data into a database-driven website, and presented it clearly and simply, and didn’t supply newspaper-style partisan editorial.

These days dozens of such sites exist around the world. But today sees the launch of a rather-special new transparency site: Mzalendo, covering the Parliament of Kenya.

Mzalendo (which means ‘Patriot’ in Swahili) has been around for a few years too, as a blog and MP data website founded by volunteer activists Conrad and Ory. However, over the last few months mySociety’s team members Paul, Jessica and Edmund, plus the team at Supercool Design have been helping the original volunteers to rebuild the site from the ground up. We think that what’s launched today can stake a claim to being a true ‘second generation’ parliamentary monitoring site, for a few reasons:

• It is entirely responsively designed, so that it works on the simplest of mobile web browsers from day one.
• All the lessons we learned from storing political data wrongly have been baked into this site (i.e we can easily cope with people changing names, parties and jobs)
• Every organisation, position and place in the system is now a proper object in the database. So if you want to see all the politicians who went to Nairobi University, you can.
• There is lots of clear information on how parliament functions, what MPs and committees do, and so on.
• It synthesizes some very complex National Taxpayer’s Association data on missing or wasted money into a really clear ‘scorecard‘, turning large sums of money into numbers of teachers.

The codebase that Mzalendo is based on is free and open source, as always. It is a complete re-write, in a different language and framework from TheyWorkForYou, and we think it represents a great starting point for other projects. Over the next year we will be talking to people interested in using the code to run such sites in their own country. If this sounds like something of interest to you, get in touch.

Meanwhile, we wish Ory and Conrad the best of luck as the site grows, and we look forward to seeing what the first users demand.

Just a week after WhatDoTheyKnow’s big, round number, FixMyStreet also passed a significant milestone.

200,000 reports have been sent through FixMyStreet since its launch in February 2007. It currently sends an average of 250+ messages about potholes, broken streetlights, and other problems to local authorities each day. So far this month, we’ve processed just over 5,000 reports.

Those reports are the work of over 87,000 people, 52% of whom had never before reported an issue to the council. That statistic is important to us: we aim to make it easy to access civic rights, especially for people doing so for the first time.

FixMyStreet.com is a site with a simple premise, and it hasn’t changed greatly since 2007 – though it is currently undergoing a facelift, bringing it more in line with today’s design expectations. Last year we introduced user accounts and zoomable maps, along with a few tweaks here and there.

Like other mySociety projects, FixMyStreet is, of course, built on open code, so that it can be replicated by anyone with a little technical knowledge. The FixMyStreet interface is already up and running in Norway, and soon, the Philippines will see trials of their own version – proving that the model can work in very different infrastructures. Meanwhile, the basic FixMyStreet concept has been replicated in Brazil, New Zealand, and South Korea. Here in the UK, some councils have bought FixMyStreet to embed into their own websites.

FixMyStreet sends reports to the council, and also publishes them online – so each report is read by many people. This simple system helps them find out more about their local community, and what the council are doing to get things fixed.

Uneven paving stones and malfunctioning pelican crossings may not be the stuff of high drama, but against expectations, FixMyStreet does make for fascinating reading sometimes. Take a look at this page if you’d like to see some of the more unusual reports. And if you’d like some insight into some of the issues our developers deal with, you might like to read Matthew Somerville’s solution to the dog poo problem. It’s all glamour at the cutting edge of FixMyStreet.

Update: applications have now closed. Thanks for your interest!

As 2012 kicks off, we’re looking for talented, passionate and diversely skilled people to join our team.

This year we’ll be pushing out internationally, improving our core UK sites and doing more commercial business. To do this, we need some more lovely, dilligent people to help us.

We’ve set up this new jobs page, where you can see what we’re looking for.

Please tell your nicest friends!

Some time in the middle of last night, our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow.com was used to send its 100,000th FOI request. It was a simple one, made to the Queen Victoria Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

WhatDoTheyKnow was launched in February 2008, with these aims: to make it easy to file a FOI request, and to keep a public archive of the requests and (more importantly) the responses received from public bodies. The Freedom of Information Act had been in force since 2005, but we wanted to make it fully accessible to people who were not journalists, lobbyists or professional operatives – it is a law that gives us all a right, not just those experts.

At base, mySociety is about giving people power to people who don’t believe that they have any way of affecting the world around them. Giving practical access to the right enshrined in this Act was and is a meaningful way of advancing that goal.

Then, thanks to a flash of inspiration from our late colleague Chris, we saw a great opportunity to increase the value created by the existence of the Act: we built a system that published the entire exchange of messages between users and public bodies online.

We believe that because of this decision to publish all exchanges with public bodies, WhatDoTheyKnow represents a very unusual phenomenon: a third-party web site that takes an existing piece of legislation and makes it better value for money for the taxpayer. Public money was already being spent answering FOI, but by running WhatDoTheyKnow we could magnify the value generated by each request by making it public, without requiring anyone who worked in a public sector to retrain, buy a new computer system or spend any new money.

And this theory turned out to be right. For every request made on the site, around twenty people come to read materials contained on WhatDoTheyKnow. The multiplier is remarkable, and one of the things that we think is most worth celebrating about this site.

WhatDoTheyKnow’s success is only possible because of a team of fantastically dedicated volunteers. These loyal enthusiasts have helped countless users, and do a simply amazing amount of maintenance work to keep the site friendly, helpful and effective. They are astonishingly talented, principled and knowledgeable, and mySociety owes them a debt of gratitude it will never really be able to pay back.

However, to give them a bit of the credit they deserve, and to highlight some of the countless uses of WhatDoTheyknow, we asked them to pick out some notable requests from the last four years.

Helen “The use of the site by campaign groups like the Campaign for Better Transport to find out about bus subsidy cuts as part of their save our buses campaign.”

John “There was the accidental release of how tax is applied to the Royal Family – which resulted in a Daily Mail front page story.”

Alex “This request about the Warmfront boiler installation scheme has a significant number of annotations. What makes it different is that the user patiently persisted with her original FOI requests, and then has carried on by continuing to help loads more people with details of how to complain and lobby for help and general warm encouragement.”

WhatDoTheyKnow is one of mySociety’s most visited sites, with one and a half million unique visitors in 2011. Like our other projects, it was built as an open source project. Thanks to the Open Society Foundation, we are in the process of making it much easier to re-deploy around the world, under the brand name ‘Alaveteli’.  As we speak, there are sites based on our code in places as far apart as New Zealand, Kosovo, Brazil, and the EU, and we’re looking forward to helping people from around the world create more grandchild sites in the years ahead.

Our 100,000 request milestone comes at an interesting time for the Freedom of Information Act. It’s currently under scrutiny by the Justice Select Committee, who are investigating whether it works effectively and in the way that it was intended.

As you might expect, at mySociety, we’re passionate about the right to information. We’ll be submitting evidence to the Justice Select Committee to show just how vital FOI is to good government and a good society. If FOI has touched your life, you might want to do the same.

December 23rd

Santa's Chocolate Coin Mint by Johnathan_W

If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do,

If you haven’t got a ha’penny,

Then God bless you.

We wish you all a merry and prosperous Christmas – and for those of you who are already feeling quite prosperous enough, may we point you in the direction of our charitable donations page?

mySociety’s work is made possible by donations of all sizes and from all sorts of people. Those donations help fund all the online projects we create; projects that give easy access to your civic and democratic rights. If that’s important to you, show your appreciation, and we promise we’ll make the best use of every penny.

Thank you for sticking with us through this month-long post. We hope you’ve found it interesting and we wish you the very merriest of Christmases.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ – see our Contacts page to find individual projects’ social media links.

December 22nd

What’s behind the door? A letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

We think we’ve been pretty good this year. We’ve tried to keep our local neighbourhood clean, help with problems, and aid those in need, so we’re hoping there are a few presents coming our way.

If you can fit them down the chimney, here’s what we’re dreaming of:

More publicly available data Of course, we were delighted to hear in Mr Osborne’s autumn statement that all sorts of previously-inaccessible data will be opened up.

We’re wondering whether this new era will also answer any of our FixMyStreet geodata wishes. Santa, if you could allocate an elf to this one, we’d be ever so pleased.

Globalisation …in the nicest possible way, of course. This year has seen us work in places previously untouched by the hand of mySociety, including Kenya and the Philippines. And we continue to give help to those who wish to replicate our projects in their own countries, from FixMyStreet in Norway to WhatDoTheyKnow in Germany.

Santa, please could you fix it for us to continue working with dedicated and motivated people all around the world?

A mySociety Masters degree We’re lucky enough to have a team of talented and knowledgeable developers, and we hope we will be recruiting more in the coming year. It’s not always an easy task to find the kind of people we need – after all, mySociety is not your average workplace – so we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably easiest to make our own.

Back in February, Tom started thinking about a Masters in Public Technology. It’s still something we’re very much hoping for. Santa, is it true you have friends in academic circles?

FixMyTransport buy-in - from everyone! Regular users of FixMyTransport will have noticed that there are different kinds of response from the transport operators: lovely, fulsome, helpful ones, and formulaic ones. Or, worse still, complete refusal to engage.

Santa, if you get the chance, please could you tell the operators a little secret? Just tell them what those savvier ones already know – that FixMyTransport represents a chance to show off some fantastic customer service. And with 25,000 visitors to the site every week, that message is soon spread far and wide.

December 21st

What’s behind the window? 10 red-faced novice joggers.

It’s not long now until you’ll be making your new year’s resolutions. But will motivation drop off by February? Time to acquaint yourself with one of mySociety’s clever little projects: Hassleme.

Hassleme sends you reminders to do whatever it is you want to do, whether that’s to go for a run, tell someone you love them, or write another chapter of your blockbuster novel. Think of it as benign nagging.

Yes, you could set up your Google calendar to do just the same, but here’s the clever bit – Hassleme sends reminders at “semi-unpredictable intervals” . You can set a rough time period, such as every three days or every year – but you’ll never know precisely when that reminder will drop into your inbox.

You can even make a joint resolution, as a family, perhaps, or even in the office. Input multiple email addresses and we’ll randomise who gets each reminder – ideal for allocating tasks fairly.

Or use it to send a message to yourself ten years hence. Here are some examples from people who have done just that.

December 20th

What’s behind the door? Santa’s little helpers.

mySociety runs some pretty ambitious projects. There’s TheyWorkForYou, which publishes all parliamentary activity since 1935, as well as representatives’ voting records. Then there’s WhatDoTheyKnow, which has sent, and archived, over 30,000 freedom of information requests.

FixMyStreet maps all of Great Britain and sends your reports to the correct council contact. And now we also run FixMyTransport, with its details of over 300,000 public transport routes and stops.

None of these projects runs itself. mySociety’s core team only consists of a few people, so we rely on dedicated volunteers to help us manage the day-to-day maintenance of these sites. Our volunteers have been key to forging a community around each site, and to helping us understand exactly what we want the sites to be.

For example, our FixMyTransport volunteers (aka Anoraks) spend a lot of time leaving helpful comments on users’ problems, often before the operators can get around to answering themselves. Leading by example, they’re making FixMyTransport into a friendly and useful community, encouraging other users to make very constructive contributions, too.

The TheyWorkForYou volunteer team spent quite a bit of time analysing voting records earlier this year, allowing us to add more policy lines to each MP’s page, and providing a snapshot of their affiliations.

And, although WhatDoTheyKnow has been around for three years, the team still find themselves actively debating site policy.

We’re always delighted to welcome new volunteers. If you’re interested, drop us a line at hello@mysociety.org, or come along to one of our pub-meets. There’s one tomorrow! See the Dec 16th advent calendar entry, below, or watch this blog for details of the next one.

December 19th

What’s behind the door? A little donkey.

If you’re using public transport this Christmas, make sure you pack all the essentials: good food, presents – and the web address for FixMyTransport.com.

We hope you have a smooth journey, but if not FixMyTransport will allow you to report overcrowding, delays, or freezing cold carriages – and all on-the-go, if you have a smartphone.

Christmas is for giving, so share that URL with family, friends, and even your fellow passengers, should you find yourself in a coach or train that’s going nowhere. The power to contact the nation’s transport operators directly may just be the greatest gift you’ll ever give.

Well, ok, maybe that’s putting it a bit strongly, but when we see new bus stops being installed, new ticket machines, and longer trains being commissioned, we do start to hear angels sing.

Start your report here, or click on issues near you to see what’s irking passengers in your area. Transport all running smoothly? Lucky you – but the recent issues page is always an interesting read.

December 16th

What’s behind the door? A cup of good cheer.

Our last pub-meet of the year will be the usual chance to come and have a chat with the mySociety team and volunteers. Reindeer antlers and Santa hats are optional, but welcome. Mulled wine may be in evidence. Mince pies could well be found on the premises.

If you’ve been wanting to ask more about any of our projects, to find out about volunteering – or if you would just like a chat and a drink with friendly people – please do pop by.

When? This Wednesday, the 21st of December, from about 6pm and into the evening.

Where? We’ll be at the Prince Arthur, near Euston station in London (map). One or more of us will be wearing a mySociety hooded top, to help you identify us.

One of our New Year’s resolutions is to have meet-ups in places other than London, so if you live outside the capital, watch this space.

Spread the word Because we’re one of those new-fangled digital-type organisations, we encourage use of a hashtag: #mySocial. And you can let us know you’re coming by dropping us a tweet on @mySociety.

December 15th

What’s behind the door? A half-dead Christmas tree.

Christmas comes but once a year… and in its wake, the inevitable slew of dumped Christmas trees and uncollected bins.

In Swindon last year, household bins weren’t collected for three weeks. In Canterbury, a puzzled American tourist mistook the dead fir trees on every street for some kind of crazy English tradition.

Perhaps worse (certainly when it comes to timing), Midnight Mass was made considerably less pleasant for this church-goer in Appledore when he stepped in some dog poop.

We know councils are doing their best to clear things up in the new year, up and down the country – but if those browning Christmas trees, overflowing bins and bottle-littered streets are getting you down, don’t forget FixMyStreet.com.

December 14th

What’s behind the door? A steaming Christmas pudding.

TheyWorkForYou.com keeps a complete record of parliamentary business as far back as 1935. So not only does it  help  you stay up to date with the latest business in Parliament, it also acts as a fascinating, searchable archive.

Consider, for example:

• Why was an American actress refused permission to act in the pantomime Mother Goose? (More details in this 1936 newspaper)
• Just two months after WW2 broke out, which German goods were found on British shelves?
• How many Christmas cards did Tony Blair send in 2004?
• If church bells could only be rung as a signal of invasion, would ringing them on Xmas day cause confusion?
• Was Aberdeen worse hit than the rest of the country when it came to making Christmas puddings?
• Who played Father Christmas at the Westminster party this year?

You can search for any word or phrase on TheyWorkForYou.com. Click on ‘more options’, and you can also restrict the dates you search within.

December 13th

What’s behind the door? An icy pothole.

Does it count as bleak mid-winter yet? After the mild start to the season, in some parts of the country it still feels as if the really cold weather is yet to come.

And yet, the freeze won’t be long in coming. Uneven pavements and potholes turn from a mild inconvenience to a real hazard in the ice – and you will certainly have already noticed if your streetlights aren’t coming on, now that the dark evenings are here.

So here’s for one last big push on our Fix Before the Freeze campaign. Make sure you report all those pesky potholes, uneven pavements, and broken street lights before the snow and ice get here in earnest, and help make your local community a safer place this winter.

December 12th

What’s behind the door? An angelic host, complete with shiny halos.

Our website Pledgebank has been used for some good causes around Christmas time. It’s based on the simple idea of promising that you will do something if other people promise to, too. It’s an effective way of taking an action and multiplying its impact.

In previous years, we’ve seen a pledge to visit people who may be alone at Christmas, and another to walk for an hour on Christmas day, among others.

If you’ve got plans this Christmas – say, donating to charity, giving gifts to the poor, or even organising a party,  Pledgebank could be the tool that tips the balance and helps you get the people-power you need.

Pledgebank isn’t just for individuals: Barnet council have been innovative in their usage of the Pledgebank software for the good of their community. Check out how they are using it to arrange a collection of gifts for the needy, and gritting.

December 9th

What’s behind the door? Frosty the headless snowman.

FixMyStreet is our website for reporting problems such as potholes or broken streetlights, but last January, one user in Brighton and Hove wanted to express his outrage about something else.

Unfortunately, the council have rather less control over the kicking down of snowmen. Much as we sympathise with the frustrated anonymous reporter, we can’t really blame the council for not responding to this particular complaint.

Meanwhile, in Midlothian, we see nature doing the fixing but the council apparently taking the credit, much to our user’s displeasure.

If your neighbourhood suffers from uncleared snow, by all means use FixMyStreet.com to report it this year. If you feel the gritting could have been better, report it. If your snowman suffers an injury, however, maybe keep it to yourself.

December 8th

What’s behind the door? A boring old bauble again.

What is a “Christmas Tree bill”?

A search through Hansard reveals that this is a commonly-used term in Parliament, and it refers to a bill which, as it passes through its various stages, has all sorts of “baubles” hung on it – that is to say, small, unrelated issues which are added to the main legislation.

The term apparently originated in the States, but has become commonplace in UK parliamentary discourse – and indeed provides an opportunity for some florid extemporising, as David Burrowes, Private Secretary, demonstrated recently in a debate about knife crime:

“As we look forward to Christmas and see today the Third Reading of a criminal justice Bill, I am reminded of previous Government Bills that ended up as Christmas tree Bills with baubles being hung on them at any given opportunity as they went through Parliament. I am sure that as this Bill goes to the other place, Ministers will want to ensure that further baubles are not hung on it in the form of extra pieces of law that take the fancy of noble Lords, as well as any little elves.”

Did you know that you can subscribe to any word or phrase on TheyWorkForYou? It’s very handy for making sure you know whenever your pet topic is debated. Set up your alert here.

December 7th

What’s behind the door? A kindly Santa Claus

Our website WriteToThem.com allows you to contact your elected representatives – even if you don’t know who they are.

When you input your postcode, you’re given a list of your local councillors, MPs, MEPs and anyone else who represents you in any of our governmental bodies. The site then allows you to contact them directly.

That’s all very well, but what about the highest administration of them all – the one who decides if you’ve been naughty or nice? Sadly, WriteToThem.com does not cover Lapland, but we do have a helpful page providing Santa’s postal address in full.

Meanwhile, it’s just a thought – but you might find that putting your wishlist in front of your local representatives actually has more effect than a letter sent up the chimney, especially if it concerns your civic or community rights. Start here.

December 6th

What’s behind the door? A fizzling, blinking neon light

Our parents always told us that if decorations weren’t removed by Twelfth Night, terrible things would happen – but it seems that some councils are not so superstitious. Users of our website FixMyStreet reveal the occasionally erratic handling of this tradition.

7th of January was already too late for a resident of Durham. How would he have felt had he lived in Thatcham, where decorations were still up on the 18th of January?

It gets worse. In Birmingham, one lonely decoration was spotted on the 31st of January. In Consett, not only were the decorations taken down after Epiphany had passed, but they had been on 24 hours a day for the entire Xmas period. In the village of Cark, the Christmas tree was blocking access to a car park in early February. But we think Bournemouth takes the prize, with a Christmas decoration reported as still being in place on the 15th of March.

People are always complaining that Christmas starts too early – and now it seems it’s also dragging on too late. If you’d like to report council decorations that have outstayed their welcome, don’t forget FixMyStreet.com this January.

The 5th of January, in fact, if you’d like to adhere to Twelfth Night superstition. We’ll be looking out for the spike in users on that day.

December 5th

What’s behind the door? An inn, with no vacancies over the Christmas period

It’s more than 2,000 years since a heavily pregnant Mary was told there was no room at the inn. With zoning restrictions a thing of the far-distant future, an empty stable was repurposed for her use, and… well, you know the rest.

Today, if there’s an empty stable (or, more likely, a house) near you, Channel 4 want to know about it. They are broadcasting the first in their Great British Property Scandal series tonight, examining the causes behind homelessness.

Key to the campaign is the fact that there are over a million empty properties in the UK, while two million families need a home. On their site you’ll find an empty property spotter tool, which allows you to report any vacant buildings to your council. There’s also an app.

Those tools have been built by a crack team of mySociety developers, drawing on our extensive experience of mashing up postcode and constituency data, and sending reports off to the right council contacts. If you’re wondering where we honed such skills, look no further than FixMyStreet, WriteToThem, and TheyWorkForYou, among other mySociety projects.

Not everyone knows that mySociety are available for contracting. All revenue from our commercial activities goes towards funding our not-for-profit projects. It’d really make our Christmas special if you were to spread the word, next time you hear of someone in need of innovative and really rather well-priced development work.

December 2nd

What’s behind the door? Ten Lords a-tweeting

Why is a Christmas card better than a tweet? It turns out not to be the start of a bad joke…

As Roger Gale MP revealed in a debate on the use of electronic devices (including mobile phones) in the Chamber of the House of Commons, “multi-tasking and a dual use of time” means that in the six weeks before Christmas “committee tables will suddenly be piled with Christmas cards being signed while Members are also participating in Committee business”.

Gale’s point is that such behaviour is excusable, but that having MPs updating their Twitter and Facebook statuses in the Chamber would be a bridge too far. What do you reckon? Personally we’d rather have a stream of useful comment, accessible from our phones or desktop computers, than a hastily-signed Christmas card.

Whether you’re a social media junkie, or agree that such things are unwelcome in the workplace, the entire debate is worth a read – along with hundreds of thousands of other speeches and statements from Lords and MPs, available on mySociety’s TheyWorkForYou.com.

December 1st

Children everywhere open the first door of their Advent calendars today – and we’re digging deep into the mySociety vat of Christmas spirit and presenting our very own countdown to the 25th. Didn’t think a civic and democratic charity had much in common with Christmas? Well, we’re here to prove otherwise.

Between now and the 25th, we’ll be updating this post each weekday with a Christmassy nugget from our archives. Enjoy them, and here’s hoping that Santa brings you whatever your heart desires, whether it’s the reply to that FOI request you put in on WhatDoTheyKnow.com, or the improved bus service you asked for on FixMyTransport.com.

What’s behind the door? A string of flashing lights

As Christmas lights go on in towns and cities across the country, your inner Scrooge might be prompted to ask just how much they’re costing the public purse.

Never fear, Bah Humbuggers, for this is a topic that has been thoroughly explored by the users of our Freedom of Information request website WhatDoTheyKnow.com. See, for example, how Manchester cannily bartered for free celebrity appearances last year, while Lewisham puts importance on low-energy lightbulbs.

You can also check Westminster, Lewes, and Cardiff’s costs – and plenty more besides. We think that Leeds has the highest expenditure mentioned, at £477,600 for this year, but leave us a comment if you find a higher one.

Don’t forget that if you want to know how much your own council spent on Christmas decorations – or indeed anything else – you have the right to submit an  FOI request. Just remember to check that the information isn’t already available online before you do.

In the nine days our Fix Before the Freeze campaign has been running, there’s been a 47% increase in reports on FixMyStreet.com. Thank you to everyone who has spread the word or remembered to use the site to get something fixed.

As you may remember, the campaign encourages you to report problems such as broken streetlights or potholes before winter comes. It’s great to see this start to happen, and we hope you’ll experience the benefits once the cold weather takes grip. Hey, you might even find that the warm glow of community spirit cuts a few quid from your fuel bills…

Meanwhile, we’re sure there are still plenty of pavements, roads and amenities that could do with a patch-up before winter. So if there’s a gap on a notice board near you, don’t forget our print-outs and resources here. How about printing out a few and leaving them in your local library, cafe, or community centre?

You may already be aware of our website FixMyStreet.com, which helps you report common street problems – such as potholes and uneven pavements – to the relevant local council. This year, we thought we’d give people a gentle nudge before winter comes.

Many of the 1,000  issues which the site deals with every week are of the sort which are far better seen to before the big freeze. Potholes only worsen with the frost, and no-one wants a dodgy streetlight once the long dark nights are here.

How to join Fix Before the Freeze

• Check for problems Will your walk home from work tonight be in the dark? Look out for areas that could be better lit or paths that might cause people to stumble in the dark.

• Report it If you see something that is better fixed before the freeze, now’s the time to let your council know. It only take a minute at FixMyStreet.com.

• Spread the word We’ve created the image above as a website icon, flier, and poster. Follow the links at the foot of this post to download them, or use the code if you’d prefer to link back. Why not put one on your blog, hand them out at work, or stick one in your window? Please spread the word among friends and family too.

• Spread the word further We’d be grateful for mentions on your preferred social media hang-out (you can use the #FB4TF hashtag).

• Keep in touch You can ‘like’ us on Facebook here, or follow us on Twitter here.

Let’s get our local communities as safe as they can be, before the cold weather hits.

Downloads

Click on each thumbnail to be taken to the actual-size resource, then right click or ctrl+click to save a copy to your hard drive.

A4 sheet of fliers to print out:

Poster to print out:

Badge for your blog or website (165×165 pixels):

(If you’d like a larger image, feel free to save the one at the top of this post).

HTML for inserting the badge onto your site without downloading – just copy and paste the below into your HTML editor:

<a href=”http://www.mysociety.org/?p=4790″ title=”Find out more about Fix Before the Freeze from FixMyStreet.com”><Img alt=”Fix Before the Freeze – report those dangerous potholes and  broken streetlights before winter hits” src=”http://www.mysociety.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/fixbeforethefreezebadge165.gif”></a>

FixMyStreet, is, as its name suggests, a system that reports street problems to the relevant local council. But at heart, it’s a problem-reporting system that could be adapted for a multitude of different uses.

For example, with just a few modifications, large institutions such as hospitals could use it for everyone – staff, visitors, patients – to report maintenance issues. Same for universities, especially those spread over large campuses. Supermarket chains could adapt it so that people could report abandoned trolleys – in fact we’ve been admiring an Aussie site that’s way ahead of us on that idea.

We’ve been enjoying thinking of new possible uses, from the practical to the frankly rather ridiculous, but we’re also keen to hear any ideas we might not have thought of. Is there an area in your life – personal or professional – that would be made much easier if you had an easy way to report it on-the-go? What challenges do you see, and why hasn’t it been done  before? Ideas below, please.

After several years of hosting, mySociety has migrated out of Easynet’s Brick Lane Data Center, and we now live on virtual machines hosted at a top secret location in the north of England. Most of our old hardware is no longer in use. It’s redundant. We don’t need it any more. But we don’t want to throw it all in a skip, that would be terrible.

Sooo… we’d like to find a lovely new home for it all. And this unique opportunity to own a piece of mySociety may be of interest to YOU.

Here are the technical details of the various machines we are getting rid of – check it out for what’s currently available.

Update: all gone!

The Rules:

1. The servers don’t come with disks: as part of our privacy procedures, all disks have been removed and destroyed to protect our and our users’ data.

2. You’ll need to be able to pick them up ASAP from a central London location (WC2).

3. You’ll need to be available to do so during office hours or very shortly afterwards (evenings or weekends aren’t possible, sorry).

4. Note that they are large and heavy so you may well need a car.

For more information, or even better, if you’re thinking “Sold! I’ll take the lot!”, then get in touch with Abi, our friendly office manager, on hello@mysociety.org.

If you feel guilty about relieving a registered charity of its assets, you can even make us a donation (voluntary, but we’d be appropriately grateful).

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.