Sprint 43
Hi, I’m Colin a product manager working on beta.parliament.uk. Each sprint I’m going to keep a running update of the work we’ve done & things I’ve learned along the way.
The team’s current focus remains on helping users to:
find a MP or Lordcontact a MP or Lord- understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens
What we’ve done
New year, ‘members activity’ alpha kicks into gear.
Following alpha best practices we’ll be:
building prototypes of members activity
testing our prototypes with users
demonstrate that want we intend to build is technically possible
Apologies: was on holiday so this is a delayed update!
What we achieved this sprint;
- following the xmas break everyone returned and settled back in
- we held a retro to revisit and discuss what we learned during discovery
- alpha planning commenced and we prioritised the activity we would include in our prototypes for testing
- plans were all set out for the next few weeks of research and prototyping, great job by Marttiina
- participants were recruited, with some slight delays - (not us, the recruitment company)
- ‘plan y’ was discussed - which is essentially a back up plan to meet some deadlines that the organisation set out a few months back
- Lords photos related tasks have been moved over to the steady hands of Jeanette. They will arrive in due course. Victor is being a hero and doing a handover soon
Random things I’ve learned or have been reading
- Using “the corpus of the British Hansard from 1909 to 2013 leads to insightful findings. In particular, we found that politicians’ usage of emotional words is significantly related to economic cycles”
- Importance of fonts
- “Government Ministers and politicians are again the least trusted; 19% trust Ministers and 17% trust politicians more generally. In a follow-up wave conducted after numerous sexual harassment cases in Parliament came to light, trust was at 22% and 20%.”
- Will online voting increase turnout? Excited to see results
- What happens in countries without net neutrality laws
- “By replacing human-curated judgement with data-backed judgement, AI ultimately narrows our field of vision and reduces our social and economic choices—in retail, dating, entertainment, education, health care, and job opportunities. Taken individually, the nudges of mercantile and political interests may be of little consequence. But en masse, our lives become more and more subtly influenced and molded by the companies we let make decisions for us. In this way, the salient tradeoff in the AI age is not privacy, but choice itself.”
- Future of retail