There has been a lot of talk about communities here at EuroOSCON. A particular community that seems to matter to many people are the voters. How can we bring the government closer to the people and how can we create open forms of discussion and data that makes politicians sit up and take notice.

In his keynote, Dale Dougherty spoke about how some people approach life as a series of projects. The folk over at MySociety seem to have this same approach in trying to get the government to listen, with projects such as FaxYourMP (now WriteToThem), HearFromYourMP and PledgeBank.

All of these use technology and open source to varying degrees, and Tom Steinberg in his talk Democracy: A Hacker’s Guide provided some interesting hints to others following in this path (a version of some of these sites for New Zealand is coming soon). Here are some of the hints:

  • Scrape and structure data that is already out there: often governments have data or services that are open, but just not accessible in the appropriate format. For example, a government web site that updates a page every week with new ‘call for participation’ events. If you could build a web site that lets folk register for these events and receive them automatically, you’ve provided value. The same can be said of content, and doing it well will mean that you can out-google them.
  • Appropriate technology: for example email alerts are an important way of getting information out. I guess not everyone has RSS feed readers, and you need to get to the widest audience you can using the appropriate technologies. It’s not about bleeding edge technology, it’s about functional and useful technology so reject the cool over the useful and focus on technology that can be used without training. You want to reach the widest audience that you can. Another example is the use of faxes. Building web sites is fine, but we shouldn’t think of solutions that are entirely on the web if that’s not the best way to solve the problem.
  • Forms of pressure: by displaying MP attendance figures or response rates of all MPs, the MPs find that they are suddenly ranked within their peer group. Some data needs to be mined from the raw scraped material, and sometimes you can create real value by aggregating relevant material. For example, an MP with his biography, voting record, attendance figures and response rates. Much of this is simply scraped and accumulated over time, and as a result you add more value to the data.

Much of the software that they use is open source too, and Tom made another important point: make it easy for people to volunteer. Their volunteer page, for example, starts by asking you what type of user you are (not a techy, programmer, graphic designer). If you are programmer it will then list tasks grouped by the estimated time it will take to complete them. This explicit approach of binding effort with potential results seems to increase participation, as opposed to displaying a 10 page road map and listing modules that need to be implemented.

In the end it’s about two communities that they are building, as in many open source projects. The community of users, and the community of developers/contributors. Make it as easy as possible for both communities to participate in your project.

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