Ok, doing these regularly fell apart at *about* when the election happened – but let’s get back on track!
WhoFundsThem
On the WhoFundsThem work, last week we inducted the 50 volunteers who are going to answer 32 questions for 650 MPs. We’re using the crowdsourcing software we developed for the Council Climate Scorecards with CE UK (and taking big inspiration from their general approach). We’ve also released the underlying research we’ve based the questions on.
It’s been really exciting to meet the volunteers, and getting to grips with the fine detail of what’s in the registers. This is the reason we wanted this to be a volunteer project, because while you can get good aggregate stories through data analysis, to get good analysis on an individual level, you really have to go through it by hand.
Over the next six weeks we’ll be going through that process, then reviewing the results and making a right of reply available to MPs, before a launch in the new year.
On our “ask the APPGs for the information they have to give out on request” project. We’ve made our first information request to the APPGs, getting some resistance here (eg APPGs who say all the information is on the website when it’s not) but waiting to see what we get back by the deadline later in the week. Depending on the level of disclosure, we might stagger the questions we ask to balance “the rules say you should know this and make it public” with “in practice, awareness is low and these are run by small organisations”. But we’ll see what happens.
One of the things we’ve started to pay more attention to is written questions, given reasonable suspicion that there has been some cash for questions happening. There’s something odd in that Parliament seems to ask what the conflict of interest might be, but doesn’t publish it (just says it exists). We’ve got an FOI request in to see if there’s some more information we can get Parliament to publish (or flush out what’s happening in the processes there).
Julia’s been down the rabbit hole of trying to understand the different donation disclosure systems (visiting her local council to see what the disclosures look like there). We think there’s some under-disclosure nationally, so we’re checking in on ways we can validate that.
Across these areas, there’s basically a set of things where there are “rules” that exist, but in practice no one is actually monitoring them to enforce — and we might get some improvement just by paying attention and trying to kick other processes into motion. Along these lines we’ve got an experimental machine learning approach going, to feed possible “conflict of interest” disclosures in debates to our volunteers, but we’re also thinking about doing a weekly blog post about the number and quality of disclosures that week (there’s in general something interesting about how MPs rhetorically use ‘I declare an interest’ to speak to personal experience).
Previously:
The new Register of Members Financial Interests is out and we have thoughts (and spreadsheets) / mySociety
New register of interests spreadsheet – with much richer data / mySociety
Monitoring and voting updates
The stars (and funding) have aligned to get Struan to spend a month on a range of TheyWorkForYou updates we’ve had planned. The key work here is to improve TheyWorkForYou as a political monitoring platform.
One of TheyWorkForYou’s most impactful features is the email alerts – we’re going to make it much easier to manage ‘keyword’ alerts (for people interested in topics rather than people).
Alongside just making it easier to manage, we’re planning to use the same approach we used in CAPE, to help people search for the right things by offering related search terms (based on a vector analysis of the TheyWorkForYou corpus).
Something that came out of our previous research was how helpful it was that TheyWorkForYou converts written answers into email alerts. We want to do the same for devolved Parliaments by adding three new scrapers for written questions, so that all answers published are searchable and alertable through the same platform, giving a common toolkit to organisations working across the UK.
A new coat of paint
Lucas has refreshed the TheyWorkForYou homepages and made a suite of colour changes for better accessibility throughout the site.
In general, on TheyWorkForYou we’re trying to pick off design improvements as we go through related projects. On the MP profile pages we’re gradually moving elements out of one long page and into their own pages with supporting content. This also, in the long run, will help a bit with the display of people who are in multiple parliaments at the same time (or who move between them).
Machine learning
We’ve been doing a big set of experiments exploring how vector searches (which use some of the more basic bits of large language models) might fit into our future plans.
In general, I’m much more comfortable with uses of machine learning that are enabling better search or discovery rather than summarisation at this point. Obviously there’s some good proof of concepts already out there in terms of summarising debates — we just feel there’s a big space to use these new tools to speed up old approaches (improved linking to glossaries rather than creating glossaries, for example) without getting too into generated content.
TICTeC
As part of our community of practice around Parliamentary Monitoring Sites we had a good session on subnational PMOs with some organisations focused on municipalities. I’ve got a longer write-up coming from this because I think it’s a related but different problem to parliamentary monitoring where we need a slightly different toolkit.
What else are we doing
The answer to this question is usually “applying for grants”. We’ve put together a good set of ideas over the summer – and if we get them or not I’ll do some more public write-ups of what we think the direction of travel is.
But for a quick taste, we’ve got pitches around:
- A big revisit of WriteToThem – and how we pivot that into solving some of the big democratic problems of the current moment (getting the right message to the right place in a layered democracy).
- Getting good at public education through TheyWorkForYou — we have the potential to add a lot of value beyond just republishing debate transcripts, but need to redevelop the annotation and glossary tools from earlier in the site’s history for the modern era.
- Making Parliament work better — there remains very basic “this data is in a PDF and doesn’t have to be” work to be done, that can improve not just outside understanding of the process, but provide more tools to people working inside Parliament.
- Better digital tools and transparency for citizens’ assemblies — how do we take the same “improve transparency/improve efficiency” philosophy and apply it to deliberative approaches?
Less developed, but in the works:
- House of Lords: not going anywhere anytime soon — but is also unpopular. We want to get better at presenting how it works and applying pressure to perform well, while contributing to the picture of evidence for reform. Some tools we have for the Commons can move across well to the Lords (eg registers of interest), but what special approaches do we need for this large appointed house?
- Mayoral scrutiny: there’s wide acknowledgement of a big scrutiny gap here. We have some ideas on how best to support this – but also an awareness that the tools of TheyWorkForYou aren’t quite right to deal with what is less “one institution”, but one among many in area governance.
I am once again…
As ever, if you’ve read this far, and you’re not a monthly donor to mySociety, would you consider becoming one? There is even an anonymous form on that page to tell us why you don’t want to, which is always helpful for us to understand more about.
Related, but if you are someone (or know someone) with lots of money — we have really clear plans of how we’d make use of it in a wide range of areas!
One of the reasons we do this work is because we don’t think there’s a more efficient way of improving UK politics/democracy than making TheyWorkForYou (and friends) better. Obviously it’s our job to make that case well, and I’m always happy to hear from people.
Header image: Photo by Marko Blažević on Unsplash