1 nomination from readers

• To quote the rationale from the campaign site itself:

  "Being the people who run TheyWorkForYou, we spend lots of our time taking rubbish, broken information from Parliament and fixing it up so that it makes a nice, usable site so you can find out whether your MP is actually working for you or not. Lots of people seem to like it, nearly 2 million came to visit last year. It’s time for Parliament to improve its act and start publishing these vital documents properly in the first place. Quite apart from the fact that we’re a tiny charity without many resources to fix this information, we are all, as taxpayers, paying for them to produce it in a uselessly old-fashioned way. Unless Parliament produces better bills:

  * we can’t give you email alerts to tell you when a bill mentions something you might be interested in;

  * we can’t tell you what amendments your own MP is asking for, or voting on;

  * we can’t help people who know about bills annotate them to explain what they’re really going on about for everyone else;

  * we can’t build services that would help MPs and their staff notice when they were being asked to vote on dumb or dubious things;

  * we can’t really give a rounded view of how useful your MP is if we can’t see their involvement with the bill-making process; and

  * we can’t do about 12 zillion other things that we’re not even bright enough to think of yet."

  After having spoken with Parliament in an altogether friendly manner, attending meetings and discussions, it became clear that Parliament has no interest in constructive criticism or opening itself up to the public. Indeed, we have been accused of being naïve for believing that the public might actually be interested enough to want to know what goes on at the heart of our democracy and intelligent enough to understand the information coming from it. It's not even as if we're asking for lots of our tax-pounds to be spent on this system. We believe it's around £10,000 of work and we even scoped out what we would suggest such a system could look like.

  We believe that this simple change to the process of Parliamentary draftsmanship could make a measurable difference to the efficiency of the British democratic process. Even if the only improvements we can achieve are the few enumerated on the campaign site (and above), we feel that could significantly increase and improve democratic participation. But we're pretty sure that last bullet point is the really impressive one — it's not the results we can think of that will be the killer app, it's the projects we can't think of yet that will mean we end up wondering how we ever managed before Parliament published Bills as well-structured XML.

  Nominated by Owen Blacker, 18 May 2008