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Simon Willison’s Weblog

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.

TheyWorkForYou.com is the finest example of a political hack I’ve ever seen. It’s basically an ultra-user-friendly front-end to the Hansard public record of all speeches and debates in the houses of commons, with each MP getting their own page complete with a summary of their recent performance and member’s interests and a list of their recently recorded parliamentary appearances.

The community features are pretty impressive as well: you can add comments to any speech made in any debate, and there’s also a user-populated glossary which is automatically linked in to the speech transcripts.

But with all that, the most useful feature is probably the most subtle: you can subscribe to an RSS feed of your MP’s appearances, meaning you can keep track of everything they say on your behalf. It’s simple, powerful and a perfect example of the political hacker ethic at work.

Posted 6th June 2004 at 9:51 pm

This is They Work For You by Simon Willison, posted on 6th June 2004.

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17 comments

  1. To bad they have the dreaded "beta" label.

    Matt - 6th June 2004 22:54 - #

  2. We need something like this in the US.

    Scott Johnson - 7th June 2004 02:40 - #

  3. The US Congress' equivalent, the Congressional Record is at http://www.access.gpo.gov/congress/04crpgs.html.

    Bill Humphries - 7th June 2004 03:32 - #

  4. @#$! It's all in PDF.

    Bill Humphries - 7th June 2004 03:34 - #

  5. I question their choice of top-level domain. It shows no evidence of being a commercial site, and the domain doesn't help to identify its geographic target. Considering there is hardly anything in its entry page that conclusively pegs it as related to the UK Parliament specifically, this is pretty poor judgement.

    I suppose it was a matter of expense?

    J. King - 7th June 2004 06:06 - #

  6. You're right, it would probably have made more sense as a .org.uk - but I imagine they're trying to make the site as easy to use for non-technical people as possible and you can't deny that .com URLs are the easiest to remember.

    Simon Willison - 7th June 2004 06:21 - #

  7. I question whether the Congressional Record was the equivalent of TWFY. It seems more like our Hansard, a dry and unreadable site - hopefully some US based Political Hackers will step up to sort this out.

    Simon - 7th June 2004 07:23 - #

  8. That's awesome. Nice clean interface too. They should definitely try and go global, although I imagine it would be a costly exercise in terms of manpower... if our governments were honest, they would ante up for such a service.

    n00dles - 7th June 2004 10:32 - #

  9. Yep, we chose the .com address because we want the site to be attractive to as wide an audience as poss. In the UK, that means .com But you're right about the lack of a clear 'this is for the UK' indicator - our mistake - we're fixing it. We can't go global, but others can do their own Parliaments... we're busy open sourcing the code. -T

    Tom Loosemore - 7th June 2004 12:23 - #

  10. Thhis is awesome many many thanks for bringing it to my attention. Will be very interesting the next time I meet my MP in the street (Yep, a very rare occasion since she got elected) Geoff

    Geoff - 7th June 2004 14:54 - #

  11. I agree that the Congression Record being in PDF is completely crap.

    By comparison, will someone write here a valid post code for use on TWFY.com? I'd like to poke around, but don't feel like guessing. ;)

    Jeremy Dunck - 7th June 2004 20:03 - #

  12. You could use one of the BBC's postcodes at Broadcasting House:

    W1A 1AA

    ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/help/contacting.shtml )

    What an interesting site - it also publishes what percentage of faxes from faxyourmp.com your MP has replied to.

    sfb - 7th June 2004 21:53 - #

  13. Really excellent work. Well, if you can't do the rest of the world that's fine, how about the rest of the Commonwealth though :-D? I'm from Australia...

    s.oteric - 8th June 2004 08:20 - #

  14. Valid postcode for Bath University is BA1 7JY or BA1 7AY You could also try... CV13 0RJ

    Meri Williams - 8th June 2004 17:40 - #

  15. Stay tuned for Australia. ;)

    anthony - 10th June 2004 05:22 - #

  16. Kewl Anthony, if you need any help at all mail me what you need and I'll see if I can oblige :-)

    s.oteric - 12th June 2004 08:19 - #

  17. Sorry though my mail was there... s@oteric.net

    s.oteric - 12th June 2004 08:20 - #

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