TheyWorkForYou news
6 May 2008
The Scottish Parliament
Thanks mainly to our Edinburgh-based volunteer Mark Longair, TheyWorkForYou now covers Scottish Parliament debates and written answers, right back to the start of this Parliament in 1999. That means that each MSP, just like MPs, Lords, and MLAs, now has their own page, linking to speeches and questions they have made. For example, here are the current party leaders: Alex Salmond, Wendy Alexander, Annabel Goldie, Nicol Stephen, and Robin Harper.
As with other types of representative, you can subscribe to email alerts or an RSS feeds for their latest appearances; or subscribe to an email alert when a particular word or phrase is mentioned, either anywhere or just in the Scottish Parliament.
To go with this launch of a large amount of new data, we've rejigged the site navigation slightly to make it a bit easier to follow. Each body now has its own main tab, with links to the sections and representatives under each one (so lists of MPs and Lords are now under “UK”).
Along with improvements to our search engine, including date range search, spelling correction, departmental search, and more, we're launching this now to mark the success in getting endorsements for our Free Our Bills campaign, and we'll be rolling out more goodies as the campaign goes along.
Posted at 13:35:28 by Matthew | Link to this
30 April 2008
Shadow ministers and spokespersons
TheyWorkForYou now includes shadow cabinet positions, shadow ministers and spokespersons for the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and SNP. This information is given both on a person's page and within any debates they speak in, which could help explain why your local MP is speaking on transport or foreign affairs a lot. :)
Posted at 08:25:00 by Matthew | Link to this
21 December 2007
Please donate to help us expand TheyWorkForYou
We’ve been working on Public Bill (née Standing) Committees, and some lovely new volunteers have been working their socks off on the Scottish Parliament, to be added to TheyWorkForYou. Yay!
Unfortunately, the server that TheyWorkForYou sits on is almost full, so we can’t launch their hard work. Boo!
TheyWorkForYou isn’t an externally funded project, and we need funding from other sources to keep it growing and improving. So if the season has filled you with generosity of spirit, why not drop us a few pennies to pay for some upgrades? Any extra beyond what we need will go into the general pot to keep mySociety running and the developers from starving.
Posted at 10:07:35 by Tom | Link to this
11 September 2007
The Queen in Parliament
Whilst we cover MPs and Lords, there's always been one other individual who speaks in Parliament whom we missed. That anomaly has now been fixed, and so you can now view the Queen's page on TheyWorkForYou. :) This means you can sign up for an email alert whenever she speaks in Parliament, subscribe to the RSS feed of the same, or just look at past prorogation and Queen's speeches more easily than anywhere else I've found.
Posted at 15:34:47 by Matthew | Link to this
3 September 2007
Missing confirmation emails
Whilst doing some routine maintenance, I spotted that due to a server configuration mistake, TheyWorkForYou has been failing to send out any confirmation emails since mid-August. Very many apologies to anyone affected - emails from the past few days have now been sent out, and I've got in touch with anyone who signed up in the days prior to that to let them know what happened.
Posted at 17:12:47 by Matthew | Link to this
11 December 2006
The Northern Ireland Assembly
I'm extremely proud to announce that TheyWorkForYou now covers the debates of the Northern Ireland Assembly from its creation in 1998 to its current Transitional Assembly status. Everything should integrate with the rest of the site, so MLAs who are also MPs only have the one central page, such as Gerry Adams or Ian Paisley.
I've done this voluntarily, in secret — this announcement comes as much as a surprise to everyone else involved with TheyWorkForYou as it does to you — partly to try out Beautiful Soup, partly because I obviously didn't have enough to do writing a No10 Petitions website and answering mountains of support mail, partly as an early Christmas present for everyone I know in the world of the internets (hey guys), and partly to show how easy I think it is and that there's no excuse for people not to volunteer to do the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly. :) Here's all the code (and there's not much; the scraper is 28 lines long, the name resolver 273, and the parser only 343 — including comments!) for scraping and parsing the Northern Ireland Assembly, the XML list of Assembly Members I created was quite important, and then it was a matter of adapting the existing TheyWorkForYou code to add a new major type (and completely rewrite the enter/leaving code as that assumed you couldn't be in more than one Parliament/Assembly at once...).
I'm sure there are bugs around the place (do let us know), but I'm off on holiday for a week now; I look forward to my return (so don't expect a quick reply to suggestions or complaints)! :-)
ATB,
Matthew Somerville
Posted at 00:00:00 by Matthew | Link to this
2 September 2006
TheyWorkForYou API
Today, we launched an API (Application Programming Interface) to the data TheyWorkForYou contains. This lets other sites query our site for various bits of information, such as the constituency or MP for a particular postcode, the debates for a particular date, the comments left on a certain MP's speeches, and so on. It's not complete and will hopefully have improvements in future – see the documentation and have a play with it. Do dive in, and let us know of any interesting or fun applications you come up with! The immediate new feature on TheyWorkForYou itself is the list of neighbouring constituencies on an MP's page.
Here's my BarCamp Presentation launching the API, and a couple of applications using it.
Posted at 17:10:00 | Link to this
18 August 2006
New features over the last couple of months
Just a brief round-up of what we've added since our last piece of news.
We've added MPs' membership of select committees, taken from this official list, including membership history where we can work it out.
Our rankings for various numbers have been removed, to be replaced by woolly text – we have more information on this. To make up for it, we've done a bit more text analysis, and added which departments and subjects an MP asks most written questions about, so you can see that Alan Williams has asked more questions about Royal Residences than anything else, or that Anne Main has asked more questions on Flag Flying.
Firefox users can download a search plugin, to enable easy searching of the site from Firefox's search bar.
And a few bugfixes - our handling of when Oral Answers finish should be a bit better than previously, and when searching a particular person's speeches, we no longer group the results by debate, which was confusing, as you obviously expected to see all the speeches for that person that matched your search terms.
Posted at 09:46:36 | Link to this
6 June 2006
Got an idea for a useful website?
mySociety is running a call for proposals until 16th June. If you can come up with an idea for a useful site like this one, and it beats all the other ideas, we'll build it for free. Submit an idea or read and comment on what other people have submitted.
Posted at 06:06:06 | Link to this
1 June 2006
We've added the Lords, and more
For your use and enjoyment we've added Hansard for the House of Lords (their debates, written questions and ministerial statements, just like the Commons), and a page on each of the members of the House of Lords. That isn't all - we've also added a feature to the search to help you identify which MPs or Lords are interested in a certain word or phrases. Just search as usual and then click 'Show use by person'.
Posted at 12:34:56 | Link to this
