Public Whip

The Public Whip is a parliamentary informatics project that analyses and publishes the voting history of MPs in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.

It was developed by Francis Irving and Julian Todd following the 18 March 2003 Parliamentary Approval for the invasion of Iraq as a tool to record which MPs had defied their party's whip long after the information had become effectively inaccessible for reference.

On 1 August 2011 Irving and Todd handed control of the site to a new team.[1]

The project is loosely affiliated to mySociety's TheyWorkForYou with which it shares a large part of the same parliamentary parsing code-base.

In 2014 the OpenAustralia Foundation launched a fork of the project for Australia's federal parliament called They Vote For You .

Awards and funding

In 2004 the Public Whip won the New Statesman New Media Award for "civic renewal".[2]

The site has never received a grant from any funding body and remains entirely paid for by its creators, including server costs and bandwidth.[3]

Technology

Originally the software was written in Perl, and then later rewritten in Python. The main process downloads the daily transcripts from the online Hansard, matches and assigns IDs to the names of MPs, and saves them into XML files. These are later uploaded into a mySQL table and viewed through PHP webpages.

At the end of 2003 the project was extended to read the archive of Parliamentary Written Answers. Following a request from mySociety, the Parliamentary Parser[4] was expanded to include House of Commons and Westminster Hall debates, and finally the House of Lords, which are all more or less in the same format. It is now maintained by them to provide the data to their TheyWorkForYou website.

Publicity

The website has occasionally been cited in newspaper articles, and is sometimes referred to in election material.[5] It has also been used to provide voting analysis to citizens during elections.

Activism

An election quiz which advised voters of which party or incumbent candidate most closely matched their political opinions (according to the Parliamentary vote) was on the site for the 2005 General election and received over 10,000 hits.

In anticipation of preparing a version of it again for the next general election, Julian has distributed leaflets and tried out variations of the site at the 2008 Crewe and Nantwich by-election[6][7] and the 2008 Glenrothes by-election.[8]

Creators

Francis Irving currently does programming work for mySociety, most recently WhatDoTheyKnow, a site that provides an on-line interface to the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

Julian Todd has extended the concept of parsing transcripts for speeches and votes to the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations with a website called undemocracy.com established in 2007.[9] The work was motivated by the discovery of the transcripts on-line during research into the application of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1267 in his home town of Liverpool.[10]

gollark: "Features:- Fortunes/Dwarf Fortress output/Chuck Norris jokes on boot (wait, IS this a feature?)- (other) viruses (how do you get them in the first place? running random files like this?) cannot do anything particularly awful to your computer - uninterceptable (except by crashing the keyboard shortcut daemon, I guess) keyboard shortcuts allow easy wiping of the non-potatOS data so you can get back to whatever nonsense you do fast- Skynet (rednet-ish stuff over websocket to my server) and Lolcrypt (encoding data as lols and punctuation) built in for easy access!- Convenient OS-y APIs - add keyboard shortcuts, spawn background processes & do "multithreading"-ish stuff.- Great features for other idio- OS designers, like passwords and fake loading (est potatOS.stupidity.loading [time], est potatOS.stupidity.password [password]).- Digits of Tau available via a convenient command ("tau")- Potatoplex and Loading built in ("potatoplex"/"loading") (potatoplex has many undocumented options)!- Stack traces (yes, I did steal them from MBS)- Backdoors- er, remote debugging access (it's secured, via ECC signing on disks and websocket-only access requiring a key for the other one)- All this useless random junk can autoupdate (this is probably a backdoor)!- EZCopy allows you to easily install potatOS on another device, just by sticking it in the disk drive of any potatOS device!- fs.load and fs.dump - probably helpful somehow.- Blocks bad programs (like the "Webicity" browser).- Fully-featured process manager.- Can run in "hidden mode" where it's at least not obvious at a glance that potatOS is installed.- Convenient, simple uninstall with the "uninstall" command.- Turns on any networked potatOS computers!- Edits connected signs to use as ad displays.- A recycle bin.- An exorcise command, which is like delete but better.- Support for a wide variety of Lorem Ipsum."
gollark: You would need to get rid of the autoupdate capabilities of potatOS itself, or swap them to your own pastebins/github stuff, and then keep everything in line with the current versions.
gollark: Anyway, <@151391317740486657>, what you can do is fork potatOS and get rid of the bits you don't like, but that's also hard (less, though) and would be very difficult to keep updated.
gollark: That doesn't count.
gollark: Anyway, I'm fairly sure you can't get the private key.

References
  1. Katy (6 August 2011). "Okay, so what are you going to do with it?". publicwhip.org.uk.
  2. "New Media Awards TwoThousandAndFour". New Statesman. 2004.
  3. "FAQ: Do you make any money out of Public Whip".
  4. "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2006-07-16. Retrieved 2006-06-26.CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link)
  5. Francis Irving (3 March 2005). "Found this week in Bristol election leaflet".
  6. "The Public Whip Crewe". 19 May 2008.
  7. Ozimek, John (17 May 2008). "Can't decide how to vote? Publicwhip.org will tell you". TheRegister.
  8. "The long winding road in Glenrothes". 4 November 2008.
  9. Grossman, Wendy (13 March 2008). "Is it possible for geeks to fix the United Nations?". The Guardian.
  10. "The UN as evidenced on the streets of Liverpool". Freesteel blog. 4 September 2006.
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