Closed TomSteinberg closed 9 years ago
Just to add two links; first to the existing ticket on a topic/policy page:
and to:
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)
Some images from the discussion of this on Wednesday 30th July:
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
MEDIUM PRIORITY
LOW PRIORITY
VERY NICE TO HAVE, BUT MAYBE NOT IN FIRST VERSION?
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.
[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.
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:
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.
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...." ?
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.
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):
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:
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).
Ok, changes since the previous mockups:
/debates
page for that vote.:+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...
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!
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)
Go team!
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.