13 items tagged “mysociety”
2018
Exploring the UK Register of Members Interests with SQL and Datasette
Ever wondered which UK Members of Parliament get gifted the most helicopter rides? How about which MPs have been given Christmas hampers by the Sultan of Brunei? (David Cameron, William Hague and Michael Howard apparently). Here’s how to dig through the Register of Members Interests using SQL and Datasette.
[... 1,167 words]2009
ScenicOrNot. MySociety are crowdsourcing opinions on how “scenic” different parts of the UK are, by rating representative photos from Geograph.
There's no such thing as a good day to bury bad news any more, the Internet has seen to that.
2008
Government in the UK once lead the world in it's own information systems, breaking Enigma, documenting an empire's worth of trade. And then it fired everyone who could do those things, or employed them only via horribly expensive consultancies. It is time to start bringing them back into the corridors of power.
Video speech matching on TheyWorkForYou.com. Launched this morning at BarCamp London by Matthew Somerville—TheyWorkForYou now has video from BBC Parliament but they need your help matching it exactly to their transcripts from Hansard. Neat example of a game that helps process large amounts of data.
Lessons from mySociety conversion tracking. Neat trick: show the user a “subscribe” form with their e-mail address pre-filled for them and there’s a much higher chance that they’ll click the button.
WhatDoTheyKnow (via) New from mySociety: a site for submitting and publically tracking Freedom of Information requests to the UK government.
Dynamic Time-Travel Maps. Absolutely beautiful dynamic implementation of Chris Lightfoot’s Time Travel project, put together by Stamen Design and MySociety. Drag sliders to specify your preferred commute and housing budget to see where in London you can live.
FixMySpine. JP muses over what would happen if huge government IT contracts were handed to small, agile teams like MySociety instead of gargantuan IT consultancies. I’ve often wondered the same thing.
2007
Oxford Geek Night 4. Tomorrow night, usual venue. Topics include mySociety, Pylons, MythTV and more.
mySociety Disruptive Technology Talks. Four great talks coming up in London this Autumn, courtesy of the lovely folk at mySociety.
Neighbourhood Fix-It. Report problems to your council across the UK. The most detailed Ordinance Survey maps anywhere online, and a superb example of progressive enhancement in action—the maps work without JavaScript, and the site even works without images!
2004
They Work For You
Today is/was (you never can tell with these wretched time zone differences) NotCon 2004, London’s premiere low-cost, informal, one-day technology conference. Friday’s MiniNTK promised the unveiling of a new project from the people behind FaxYourMP and PublicWhip
and sure enough, here it is: TheyWorkForYou.com.