(TheyWorkForYou.com is a website to get information about political representatives in the UK, while WriteToThem.com can be used to contact these representatives)

These reports are for you if you want to know:

• how popular the sites are: You get detailed usage stats dating back to the inception of the sites.
• who is using the site: We carried out a survey of users, comparing their demographic profile to that of the British (Internet) population.
• what the sites cost to build and maintain: There is a summary table, comparing the costs of the respective site to other mySociety projects.
• how the site came to be what they are: You find information on the history of the sites as well as some interesting stories around them.
• and much much more

Overall, these documents offer a comprehensive picture of two political websites that have hundreds of thousands of users every year. The official release post gives a good summary of the results, as do the executive summaries at the beginning of each report. What I wanted to share here briefly, is some background on the creation of these reports and my understanding of this research:

Several years ago, Tom Steinberg of mySociety asked me carry out an evaluation of the major mySociety sites. The aim was to create a framework with some key indicators that could be measured and compared across different websites of mySociety. At that time, it was not entirely clear what aspects such an evaluation should cover. We envisaged some value-for-money analysis, but what exactly was the “value” that the sites brought? We finally decided to focus on the people who use the site: Are these the usual political animals, or can the site engage people who are traditionally rarely involved in politics, such as people with a low income and/or without a degree from higher education. We carried out extensive surveys of users of these websites and compared their demographics with data from the British population. This reference data that was provided by our very own Oxford Internet Institute’s Oxford Internet Survey – Thank you very much!

But the reports are much more than that: They collect a vast variety of information about the sites, such as statistics on visitor numbers for the last years, popular content sections or the number of messages sent to MPs and other representatives (via WriteToThem), a history of the site, some interesting anecdotes as well as some background about the ecosystem in which these sites evolve. It has turned out that compiling this information has been a major task, as it entails collecting bits and pieces from various parts of the organisation. In the process we chose to apply a new web traffic analyser (Piwik), all in order to get consistent and comparable data from all the sites.

The reports are first of all important for mySociety itself, in order to create a better understanding of how the sites work and what users are looking for. Beyond this, these reports are intended for a wide range of audiences:

1. eDemocracy practitioners – to learn for their sites
2. researchers in online political participation – to get information on the performance of large-scale projects
3. journalists – as the reports show where the sites have made an impact in the political landscape
4. potential funders – to see what can be achieved

What I hope the research results show is that engaging citizens with the help of the Internet is neither simple nor impossible, and that there are few simple answers in relation to whether the Internet is good for democracy [my PhD focuses on this question in much more detail, using some of the data from this research]. In addition, I hope it encourages other projects in this area to open up their efforts to the same level of scrutiny. From my experiences, I know that it is often somewhat difficult for NGOs to engage in evaluation, for lack of money or time, and sometimes also for a lack of understanding of why this is useful. However, I firmly believe that it is crucial to do evaluation both to get some critical assessment of one’s own achievements – to help improve the site – as well as to give other initiatives in this space the chance to learn from the successes and failures of others.

In this regard, I hope the reports reach a wide audience. We very much encourage feedback, both on the results of the report as well as on the methodology applied. We decided to start with WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou, but the plan is to publish more reports on sites such as FixMyStreet.com, WhatDoTheyKnow.com, PledgeBank.com etc.

Disclaimer: mySociety gave me money to do this research, and they provided data, help and advice throughout the process. However, at no point did they interfere with the results or question my interpretation of the findings.

In my doctoral research I look at the communication between constituents and their Members of Parliament. I was looking for a simple way to judge the relevance of the mail that MPs receive from their constituents. As I found, MPs tend to refer to their “postbag” in order to emphasize the importance of an issue as e.g. the Simon Hughes did in a recent debate on climate change (see video below):

So in order to judge how often that happens, I needed to have a look at Hansard, the written record of proceedings in parliament. Now the main online Hansard record at the UK Parliament website is rather difficult and does not provide a search functionality so I turned to TheyWorkForYou.com, one of mySociety’s projects that does not only provide detailed information on MPs but also offers a nicely formatted, searchable version of Hansard, now dating back to 1935 (!).

In this way it was a matter of seconds to find out how often MPs and Lords have mentioned their postbags in parliamentary proceedings since 1935 (it was 1,621 times). A multitude of options allow to filter your search accordingly so that now I know that the majority of these mentions were made during House of Commons debates (989) and that in the current parliament Conservative MP Mark Field leads the table (with 9 references to his postbags). Finally I could quickly produce a figure showing the development of references to their constituent mail:

btw the search is intelligent enough to look for the word “postbag” as well as similar words such as “postbags” or “post bag”

I cannot start to imagine how long it would have taken to produce this figure with the limited capabilities of the official Hansard and it would not have been possible at all at the time when all this data was really only a written record in the literal sense. Not saying that this particular piece of information is a world-changing discovery but it is a good example of how the availability of data in a structured and searchable format (!) can contribute to scholarship nevertheless. In this respect the various Open Data initiatives by governments offer a huge potential for social scientists with the appropriate statistical and computational skills to offer fresh insights. See for example the Guardian World Government Data Initiative that offers the datasets opened up by various different governments in a uniform format.

The Internet & Democracy workshop here in Oxford has been filled with very valuable presentations and discussions. Corinna di Gennaro, who was instrumental in setting this up, has a good summary on her blog.

I presented results from the recent evaluation of usage and users of WriteToThem.com, a website by mySociety that allows UK citizens to get in touch with their political representatives. This is part of my doctoral research into comparative political participation online and offline in both the UK and Germany. Here is a link to the presentation. The short summary is that the website suceeds in engaging people who would otherwise be inactive but it recruits those primarly from parts of the population that are traditionally more likely to participate politically (ie. higher education, higher income, etc).

The truly amazing finding is that people who use the site are not the ones who are already politically engaged and organized. Those are using the site too but many have never before contacted their representative and most are not politically active at all – so here we observe a clear effect of engagement as the site activates people to participate politically who have not done so before.

Another interesting finding is that many citizens make very positive experiences when using the site to contact their representatives. Given a general climate of distrust between represented and representatives many user comments indicate a profound surprise at the respect and help they receive from their politicians. Crucially we can observe that the online experiences do at times translate into political participation offline e.g. in the form of voting as the quote below nicely illustrates:

“Mr [name of representative] went above and beyond what I expected to get, I thought I would just be totally ignored, this experience has made me decide to definitely vote in the next elections”

However, of course it also works exactly the other way around which should be a clear sign of warning for many of those politicians who do rarely reply to their constituents (see for example the MP responsiveness league table) as this participant makes clear:

“What’s the point when your councillor doesn’t reply? He’s not getting my vote in the next election, nor from any of my nuclear and extended families and I’ll tell everyone at work about my lack of a reply as well. 23 of them live in his constituency.“

For more details see the presentation (pdf, 2.6MB).

The results are based on a user survey I set up on behalf of mySociety as part of a bigger project that aims to evaluate the impact of many of their by now well-known eDemocracy websites (e.g. TheyWorkForYou.com or FixMyStreet.com). There is much more to come so keep an eye on this space. Also, if there are certain questions of particular interest to you in relation to mySociety projects that you think could/should/might be answered by this research, do drop me a line or comment below!