Work out requirements for first version of votes/policy page, so developers know what to implement

[TomSteinberg]

The deliverable for this should be a mockup or a HTML/CSS layout for a single policy page on TWFY.

The deliverable for this should be a list of features, and any display or technical requirements, for the policy page, that developers can use as a requirements doc.

[RichardTaylor]

Just to add two links; first to the existing ticket on a topic/policy page:

490

and to:

https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/stance-viewer-jekyll

[tmtmtmtm]

For completeness, there's also https://github.com/tmtmtmtm/stance-viewer-sinatra which I put together in an afternoon a few weeks ago, just to show how the same site could be created fairly trivially with entirely different tech.

It should be pretty much identical to the Jekyll version (though it also adds side by side party comparisons: http://ukvotes.herokuapp.com/compare/con/lab)

[zarino]

Some images from the discussion of this on Wednesday 30th July:

[zarino]

Current synthesis of the features and requirements, with rough "priority" based on what people voted to see in an ideal world on the policy page.

(The features might need to be re-prioritised based on what's technically possible in the timeframe – I'll leave that up to the developers.)

HIGH PRIORITY

• Full description of policy:
  • Human-written policy name, like “gay rights”
  • Human-written introduction, maybe like: “An MP voting for Gay Rights would be in favour of homosexual people having the same rights as […] and for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation to be illegal.”
• How this MP voted, in general, on the policy:
  • eg: “Louise Ellman voted strongly for gay rights”
• This MP’s vote breakdown for the policy:
  • List of individual votes, like on PublicWhip (example)
  • Display the vote date, subject, and MP’s position (for/against motion) – perhaps as a sentence like “Voted in favour of allowing same sex couples to marry (5 Feb 2013)”
  • To reduce initial weight on the page, maybe only show “strong” (ie: “interesting”) votes, and then have a button to click which shows the rest?
• Express my views as same/different:
  • Pre-filled tweet box? “Louise Ellman strongly supports gay rights. Me too! Find out more on @TheyWorkForYou: http://theyworkforyou.com/…/gay-rights”
  • Do we have MPs’ twitter handles? Could we @mention them?
  • Corresponding Facebook form / button.

MEDIUM PRIORITY

• Why the MP voted this way (hansard speeches, tweets, party leader statements?)
  • We’ll have a human-written search term, or set of search terms, eg “gay marriage”, “gay rights”, “same-sex”.
  • If the given MP has used any of those terms in hansard, show the speeches.
  • If we have the MP’s twitter handle, and they’ve mentioned any of the search terms, show their tweets on the subject.
  • If there are no speeches or tweets from the MP, tell the user, and instead repeat the process but for the party leader (eg: has the party leader spoken or tweeted about it?)
• Are this MP’s votes normal for their party?
  • Could be a simple line under the main “X voted strongly for Y” headline, saying “The Labour party, on average, voted moderately for this policy”
  • Or could be a little graph that gives more idea of the whole spread of party votes, and where the current MP stood (example) – but this would require detailed data on all MPs votes for each policy. Is that ok?
• What actually changed in the law?
• Will this require human-written summary of legal changes around this policy?

LOW PRIORITY

• Express views to my MP
  • Twitter link?
  • WriteToThem link. Needs to be made clear you’re writing to your MP.
• Is this MP usually an extreme/changeable voter?
• Link to source data on PublicWhip
  • Single link to this MP’s voting record?
  • Or individual links to each vote?

VERY NICE TO HAVE, BUT MAYBE NOT IN FIRST VERSION?

• Express my agreement with my local MP, then show me other people in my area that agree with me (link to their Twitter profile, so I can talk to them?)

[tmtmtmtm]

I've created a very rough version of the policy+mp page, to see what the issues and corner-cases are. You can explore these from, for example, http://ukvotes.herokuapp.com/person/tom_watson

This is purely the 'informational' side, not the actions, and It's completely unstyled, but it should be working off accurate data[1], so lets us see what's likely to work or not work automatically, what will need more human input etc.

I'll drop some notes about things I've discovered, issues etc into the Google Doc.

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[1] other than for a few edge cases relating to people voting both yes&no on the same motion. If you see anything that looks wrong, let me know.

[zarino]

First iteration at a page that pulls all of this together: (apols for @2x graphics, zoom to 50% for an idea how it would look on a mobile)

I think we'll be lucky if we can find a useful tweet or hansard speech on many of the topics for most MPs. I was surprised my MP hadn't mentioned badgers at all in parliament or on Twitter (what am I paying her for!?!1!)

Assuming the above page is at a URL like http://theyworkforyou.com/policies/badger-culling/10186/louise_ellman, then this is what you might see if you went to http://theyworkforyou.com/policies/badger-culling directly:

[RichardTaylor]

I think this looks excellent.

TheyWorkForYou will need to be clear somewhere about how a statement like: "The Labour Party also voted strongly against badger culling" has been derived or why TheyWorkForYou puts "against" under the Labour symbol.

@tmtmtmtm has done the calculation to produce eg. http://ukvotes.herokuapp.com/party/lab there just needs to be an open explanation of how it was done (or putting the calculation into words).

I think "The Labour Party also voted strongly against badger culling" is clearer than "An average Labour MP also voted strongly against badger culling" or whatever the more precise formulation ought be.

As with describing MPs as rebels the problems here are likely to occur when there is no official Labour party position on something and we say "The Labour party voted xxx".

If the Labour party haven't taken a view on an issue, and haven't whipped their MPs, we could get complaints about equating the actions of a majority of Labour MPs with the actions of the Labour party.

There's also a question of if the "title" of each individual vote is the best thing to display or if the sentence describing how MP voted ought be shown eg.

13 Mar 2014 - voted to stop the current badger culls.

http://www.publicwhip.org.uk/division.php?date=2014-03-13&number=232&mpn=Louise_Ellman&mpc=Liverpool%25_Riverside&house=commons

I think the sentences are the most informative and reliable.

Saying an MP hasn't spoken about something is quite a strong statement; it might be necessary to tone that down to "we've not found...." ?

[dracos]

I agree - I'm not sure we will be able to show, defensively, party positions like that, given we do not know the actual party positions or whipping.

An average policy can have upwards of 25 of more votes, I'm not sure repeating the MP's picture that many times makes it particularly clear :) To be honest, I'm not sure if the individual votes of a policy are that important to be shown in that location. Have a look at e.g. the equal gay rights policy, I don't think listing them that prominently will obviously help people with their knowledge on the policy.

[zarino]

I'm not sure we will be able to show, defensively, party positions like that, given we do not know the actual party positions or whipping.

I'll leave that up to you guys to hammer out. There might be some wording you'd prefer. Worth bearing in mind, this is meant to be a page for non-experts, but I'm sure you already know that.

An average policy can have upwards of 25 of more votes

Yes. @RichardTaylor and I were thinking of just showing the votes marked as "strong" in PublicWhip. So, of the 26 votes on Gay Rights, only the 9 "strong" votes would be shown. 9 is admittedly still quite a lot, but it is a 16 year old topic!

I'm not sure if the individual votes of a policy are that important

When we've previously talked about this (see flipchart notes from July) mySociety team members have generally prioritised the vote breakdown as an important feature, I think mostly because (and I'm paraphrasing lots of discussion here, so apologies in advance):

• A list of votes helps to show how binary "aye" and "no" votes get combined into the headline "strongly against" or "mixture of for and against" summary (which user testing has revealed novice users generally don't understand).
• Even with only "strong" votes included, it still helps show how often a policy has been debated, how old the debates are, and whether there's been a change in attitude over that history.
• Votes are also a nice tangible thing – an actual vote that happened on a specific day – especially when compared to the averages and summaries we use elsewhere on the site.

[RichardTaylor]

I think having a simple sentence summarising the view taken by MPs from a particular party is very valuable; but there's a need to be careful with the phrasing; maybe: "Generally Labour MPs voted against culling badgers"? (and a link to how that's derived).

As for the sentences Tony has demonstrated how these might look. eg. for my MP on Gay Rights the individual vote sentences would be:

• On Mar 5, 2014, voted to enable the courts to deal with proceedings for the divorce of, or annulment of the marriage of, a same sex couple.
• On Mar 5, 2014, voted to make same sex marriage available to armed forces personnel outside the UK.
• On May 21, 2013, voted in favour of allowing same sex couples to marry.
• On Feb 5, 2013, voted in favour of allowing same sex couples to marry.

http://ukvotes.herokuapp.com/issue/PW-826/julian_huppert

He's only been an MP since 2010 so only 4 "strong" votes are present.

I think that is informative, it's two votes on the principle and two on elements of detail/implementation.

If there's a concern about too much detail the 5 most recent strong votes in a policy could be shown (PublicWhip is still there for the full detail).

[zarino]

Ok, changes since the previous mockups:

• The table of votes (which used to show vote title, vote date, MP's picture and stance, party logo and stance) now just shows the date and a description, exactly the same as @tmtmtmtm's prototype.
• Dropping the party column means we avoid the controversial "how can we say Party X was 'against' this particular vote?" issue.
• We also de-emphasise the general party statement, by re-wording it and moving it further down the page.
• On the main "choose an MP" page, the distribution graph has been replaced with a simpler table of stances for the three main parties. There's a much clearer link to show more parties in the list, and a prominent link to explain how we calculate the summaries.
• And below that, there's a list of the "strong" votes for this particular policy. I'm imagining clicking one of them would take you to the /debates page for that vote.

[wrightmartin]

:+1: This is coming along really nicely.

I'm still not sold on the Ed Milliband tweet functionality, I think it will be really hard to get right.

The tweet/share thing irks me a bit too as it's the most prominent thing on the page, could we hide it behind buttons? I remember digg.com does it nicely...

[zarino]

Oh, interesting. I like the tweet action being so prominent. It feels like a natural next step – I've just read about how my MP voted, and now I get unwittingly upgraded into a political agitator.

In my original sketches, the tab content was hidden, as you'd expect. But then I thought, TWFY's meant to be about getting people involved with politics – the first step to that is tweeting some vitriol at a politician!

[zarino]

Regarding the "what this MP said in parliament or on twitter" section – yeah, I think originally @RichardTaylor and I thought there'd be more content out there (and maybe there is – I've picked a relatively obscure topic). I wonder whether, if there are no speeches or tweets by the MP in question, we just hide the section entirely, rather than reverting to the party leader.

(Worth also pointing out, twitter integration at all is a bit pie-in-the-sky right now, and I'd rather see this page go live without it, than wait for us to collect every MP's twitter handle and write some twitter API searching thing)

[TomSteinberg]

Go team!