From The Other Side

Tom Steinberg from mySociety was speaking at Re:publica08 last week; he was one of the most inspiring speakers I’ve seen. To quote from the website:

mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives.

I think that they’re delivering on the first of these missions, but I’m not sure how well they’re performing on the second (more on this below).

To give you an idea of what they do, here are some of the sites that they’ve built and currently run. All are UK services with the exception of GroupsNearYou:

• TheyWorkForYou: a searchable, annotatable version of Parliamentary debates and committees, as well as useful pages providing clear, non-biased information on a range of different measures of activities by MPs.
• WriteToThem: a site that puts you in contact with any of your elected representatives (Councillors, MP, MEPs, MSPs, etc). You enter a single postcode and it tells you who all your local representatives are, and who you should contact for which reasons.
• FixMyStreet: a site where people can report, view, or discuss local problems like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting. Problems are reported to the relevant council which can then resolve the problem the way they normally would. The problem remains public so users of the site can discuss it with others, and if they chose to, lobby the council to fix it, or fix it directly themsleves.
• GroupsNearYou: allows users to search for and add local groups of all kinds, from farmers’ markets to political activists. 

One of the best things about these sites, particularly FixMyStreet and WriteToThem, is their simplicity.  A first time web user would find them intuitive.  So often those of us that work in media forget that there are still a large number of people for whom the internet remains a new and challenging place. The UK National Statistics office figures show that in 2007, only 61% of houses had access to the internet (the figures).

Another great thing, and one that Tom was very keen to stress, is that these sites invite people to get  involved by helping them solve a problem.  So often we hear from people who’ve built the next great thing, and ‘if only they could just persuade people that it was what they really needed’  then it would take off (more of this in other posts about the Re:publica conference).  The fact that mySociety is (re)engaging citizens on their own terms, in their own communities, is a wonderful achievement.

So all of this is great. But now comes the ‘but’. I’d never heard of any of these sites. Why? They’re great, they’re serving a definite purpose, and they seem to have won awards. A quick straw poll of friends and family shows that none of them had heard of them either.  Tom himself seemed to provide the answer at the workshop I attended.  When asked whether they have publicity, or work with schools, councils, libraries, etc he was quick to point out that they’re charitable and largely run by volunteers.  Why is it that numerous techheads are happy to develop new websites for nothing, but they can’t find people who want to get their hands dirty promoting and publicising? Are they talking to the right people? Tom seems to speak at a lot of conferences about the technical side and citizenship; perhaps if he or others talked to teachers, librarians and council workers, more volunteers would be forthcoming.

I’d also like to know how successful these sites are.  I couldn’t find any research on The mySociety website; there’s some data on the individual sites, but it’s largely to do with whether users have had responses.  I want to know how many individual users there are, how often they use the sites, what the model of growth has been; only then will I really know whether they’re worth the time and money invested. I sense that Tom would argue that if they’ve persuaded even one person to be become more involved, then they’re worth it, but I’m not yet 100% convinced. 

Having said all of this I have told a lot of people about the sites, and that in itself tells you something.