Talk:Public Whip

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Untitled[edit]

The entire website is currently displaying the following message. I'm not sure if this is a temporary maintenance page or permanent closure, but I thought I'd record it here as a record of how long it has been up. Thelem (talk) 15:23, 10 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Dear voter,

We've been running Public Whip for almost 8 years now.

It remains the only way you can easily find out how your MP voted.

People use it and rely on it, it has become core infrastructure of the UK political scene.

Luckily the bulk of the maintenance is done by mySociety, who keep the Parliament Parser running, which they also need for TheyWorkForYou. We thank them for that. But even so, there is still work that needs doing on Public Whip itself from time to time.

Yep, it's our fault for not making it sustainable. For not building an organisation at the start that could maintain it for a long time. Foolishly we thought that a well funded organisation like Parliament or the BBC or mabe even an NGO might have taken it on by now.

Alas, I still can't find out how Julian's MP Louise Ellman voted on the Iraq war from her Parliament page. And the BBC's massively well funded Democracy Live, has nothing about voting at all. As if MPs just turned up in Parliament like some weird version of Question Time that the editor hasn't cut enough, rather than having an actual means of asserting power while they are there.

There's loads of things you could do with Public Whip. It's not the difficulty of maintaining it that is the sad thing, it is the opportunity cost of nobody who cares about it iterating on it and improving it.

If you want to know how your MP voted, you can still find out. Phone them up. Click through zillions of pages on the Parliament website. Watch the video on Democracy Live, maybe you'll get to see them creeping into the wrong lobby.

Maybe it doesn't matter any more how your MP votes. Perhaps you should give up and head to the Dark Mountain Conference, run your startup, or Kayak in the sea.

Yeah, that's probably best. It feels like summer now anyway.

Francis
Spring, 2011