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mysociety / theyworkforyou

Keeping tabs on the UK's parliaments and assemblies
http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
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Idea: tweet every debate title #177

Open MyfanwyNixon opened 11 years ago

MyfanwyNixon commented 11 years ago

At the moment (on days when I have time), I manually tweet links to the most interesting/newsworthy debates, though of course my choice is highly subjective.

We could set up a new Twitter account (because otherwise we might annoy existing followers) which tweeted all the debate titles, plus link. It'd be at intervals through the day so they didn't all come at once.

Just an idea, and I do not know whether people would find it too overwhelming, or boring, to actually follow it (although, if people follow https://twitter.com/big_ben_clock...).

Maybe it'd be better to provide a stream for each MP, as I believe has been suggested before.

MyfanwyNixon commented 10 years ago

Comment from Matthew: Looking at yesterday, ignoring headings with no speeches (bad assumption?), this would be "Oral Answers to Questions - Treasury", "Points of Order", "Benefit Claimants (Automatic Transfer to Alternative Benefits)" (this is a 10 minute rule bill, don't really think it deserves being treated the same as a real debate...), "Gambling (Licensing and Advertising) Bill", "Water Industry", "Bullying (School Transport)".

Comment from Struan: I think this would generate a lot of tweets that aren't interesting to people. I also think that tweeting a coming up in parliament might be of more use/interest.

Comment from Myf: Perhaps a way could be found to filter out 'points of order' etc, and anything with 0 speeches. Out of those, I would click 'Bullying (school transport)' and I can see a few other topics that might interest some people.

MyfanwyNixon commented 10 years ago

+1 from user comment.

jacksonj04 commented 10 years ago

Could the tweet not be once a day, with a message like "Today in Parliament: 12 debates, including European Union (Referendum), and Margaret Thatcher Day. http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?d=2013-11-22". Randomly pick debates, stripping out the 0-speech and Point of Order ones, and repeat up to the character limit.

MyfanwyNixon commented 10 years ago

That might run the risk of making us look stupid if there's a big debate and we tweet some minor one.. although I suppose that could be circumvented in part by a message in the user profile, explaining how the tweets are generated.

struan commented 10 years ago

We could certainly try and put in some exceptions for things like the budget and the queen's speech.

jacksonj04 commented 10 years ago

Why not a generic 'scheduled exceptions' system, where we can stick custom tweets? If there's a scheduled tweet for the day use that, otherwise generate an automatic one.