eDemocracyCamp: MySociety - MySociety.org
I’ll try to come back and clean this up later, add in a few links, but for now, here are the notes. WiFi is spotty here, so I can’t really liveblog anything.
Presenter: Tom Steinberg
I’ve got a more cohesive review here.
Important Note: All of this code is open source
MySociety.org - arguably runs the largest network of non-partisan democracy/e-government sites in the U.K.
Started by building faxyourmp.com
- Put in zip code to find MP
- 2000-2003 – won awards, incredibly simple
Wanted to build more things like Fax your MP
writetothem.com – tells you who all of your polis are (at all levels) and lets you write to them
- Survey for two questions
- Did you get a reply?
- Have you ever written to a politician before?
- Important to know if they’re engaging new people
- Can figure out differences in wealthy and poor areas b/c you get zip codes
- Roughly the same amount of communication to politicians
- What else can we use this information for?
- Very private, everything deleted from servers within a few weeks.
theyworkforyou.com – notifies people via e-mail whenever a politician votes on/acts on/speaks on an issue
- Available via an api
- Loads of information put together in a way that is easier to understand
- Instead of saying they voted for/against specific issues, aggregate into sentences, they voted for/against this most of the time
foi.mysociety.org - Freedom of information website (will be whatdotheyknow.org/com)
- People make request to the government agencies
- Very public, all of the government’s answers are posted
pledgebank.com - Peer Pressure – how to get people to do things
- Conditional pledges – I will do things if x other people will as well.
- You stick a pin in the map with a problem in your area. The site then identifies the proper government authorities to fix the problem.
- Two weeks later it sends e-mail asking if it got fixed. If not, it sends you to writetothem.com so that you can directly contact your politicians about the problem
hearfromyourmp.com – Mailing lists of people who want to hear from their MP
Important to have an organization in place to escalate requests. In other words, fixmystreet.com works very well because it can send people to writetothem.com
- At end of 2006, the PM’s office asked them to build a petition website
- Gov’t doesn’t own e-mail addresses so they can’t spam
- If they reject a petition, there is a public paper trail
- Two days in had the same number of users sign up as myspace
- Anyone can go to the site and make a petition
- Basically can’t be vulgar or defamatory
- 30,000 petitions submitted
- 15,000 rejected, most rejections due to duplication
Sctemviser (this spelling is way off) – who should I vote for website
- A Dutch website.
- They gave out 4.8 million answers – there are only 16 million people in the Netherlands
Demographic issues: Senator from Florida and Senator from North Dakota have very different volumes of mail.
- Solution: compare only like states
MySociety started when someone who liked faxyourmp.com donated 10,000 pounds for them to come up with new ideas
- Crowdsourced ideas through an open blogging platform
Someone donated 400,000 dollars
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