Or, in fact, they work for you. I’ve got some downtime this morning in between conference calls and was just catching up on VoxPolitics (Where James rightly observes that has not been posting frequently enough).
TheyWorkForYou.com is a new site from the folks that brought us/you faxyourmp, the publicwhip and so on. I have to say that I am gobsmacked by what they’ve put together. Hansard has always been incomprehensible to me. I’ve never figured out how to find what I need and have always ended up asking someone more capable than me – and all of those people, I suspect, work inside government.
With this site, you can put in your postcode to get details on your MP (and how many know what they even look like? so there’s a photo to help out), their voting record, questions asked and so on.
Type in a topic (I used, of course, “e-government” – be sure to use the quotes) and was rewarded with 481 entries, each of which contains much of the to and fro of debates. This is stuff that you will never get to see anywhere else.
I am pretty confident that nothing like this exists anywhere else in the world. A magnificent job. E-democracy just got a leg to stand on.
this is a great site, and it was built using OSS and a £3,000 grant apparently
Thanks Ben. Open source – yes, linux, but blogger isn\’t to my knowledge. the £3000 wasn\’t a grant but is about 10x what I\’ve spent on hosting the last 4 years.
Thought this article on the Beeb today might interest – about 7-yr old bloggers! http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3804773.stm
So Debbie, did you mean \”Weblogs are sometimes criticised for being the self-obsessed ramblings of people who have little to say and too much time on their hands in which to do it\” … or something more subtle?