TheyWorkForYou Wants YouToWorkForThem

Talking of wisdom of crowds, here's one of my favourite sites, TheyWorkForYou, attempting to harness it in order to make politics more transparent:

Video speech matching

TheyWorkForYou has video of the House of Commons from the BBC, and the text of Hansard from Parliament. Now we need your help to match up the two.

We've written a little Flash app where you can (hopefully) match up the written speech being displayed to what's playing on the video. We'll then store your results and use them to put the video, timestamped to the right location, on the relevant page of TheyWorkForYou.

Web 2.0 at its best.

Free Our Bills

One of the great unsung heroes of British democracy (such as we have left) is MySociety, which provides indispensable free services like TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. These have transformed the way I interact with my local MP.

And now they have a new wheeze: Free Our Bills:

Writing, discussing and voting on bills is what we employ our MPs to do. If enough MPs vote on bills they become the law, meaning you or I can get locked up if they pass a bad one.

Bills are, like, so much more important than what MPs spend on furniture.

The problem is that the way in which Bills are put out is completely incompatible with the Internet era, so nobody out there ever knows what the heck people are actually voting for or against. We need to free our Bills in order for most people to be able to understand what matters about them.

As they say:

This campaign can only succeed if normal internet users like you lend a hand. Please sign up and we'll send you easy tasks (like emailing your MP, or coming up with some ideas). Together we can improve Parliament!

So please do (well, if you're a Brit, anyway.) (Via Amused Cynicism.)

TheyWorkForYou.com and Open Politics

Today I received an email from a service I signed up to recently. I'd forgotten about it because it dealt with the apparently yawn-worthy subject of what my local Member of Parliament said. In fact, the service promises to deliver to me, freshly-baked, all the wit and wisdom of said Honourable Member.

Now, truth to tell, what the chap opined about the number of buses on Chelsea bridge was less than gripping. But the point is, I now know when he speaks, and what he says. Not only that, the information on the site TheyWorkForYou.com presents a gloriously Web 2.0-ified version of Parliamentary speeches, complete with Ajaxy popups, and links to more information about MPs than you could shake an identity card at.

In short, the service turns the whole area into a data wonderland. This is what open politics should be. Thanks: YouReallyReallyDoWorkForMe.