Sprint 45

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 Lord
• contact a MP or Lord
• understand how a MP or Lord represent citizens

What we’ve done

We are powering through our alpha phase. Team working amazingly together.

What we have achieved:

• Prototyping, learning and putting things in front of users (inc asking about how users use the current site, reactions to our prototypes and letting them assess the laguage and content within the prototype)
• Insight 1 from first round of testing - People want to know what is important to an MP in terms of interests and issues, because it helps them to understand the MP as a person and check whether what they say they care about matches what they do. Challenge for team - How might we show the relationship between what MPs say they do and what they actually do in Parliament
• Insight 2 - Journalists reporting on Parliamentary activity and politics look for facts about what is going on in Parliament recently, because they need to make sure they cover all relevant aspects of it for their readers. Challenge for the team - How might we relate what an MP is doing to what is happening in Parliament as a whole
• Lots of analysis, feedback
• Design days with the team
• An insight from the second round of testing - Journalists find the dialogue between MPs and the government an interesting source for writing stories. Challenge for team - How might we help journalists identify what is interesting in written questions and answers
• Insight 2 - Reporting journalists need to be reactive and look for activities based on when they have happened in Parliament, because they approach covering Parliamentary activity from a broad perspective in the first instance, rather than what an individual MP has done. Challenge for team - How might we present a broad picture of parliamentary activity without overwhelming the user
• Written Q’s and A’s likely to be first activity ready to deliver so extra work around them, including potential measures of success
• BA catch-ups
• Roadmapping work

Wider team work:

• We have a milestone to add a banner promoting the new beta pages in March so more work towards achieving that
• The early steps towards Lords photos have begun
• More work on groups and answering bodies
• Trying to promote the creation of a cross-legislature community
• More topics/concepts chat - important for activity
• Helping out plans to make PDS more engaging on social media
• Bryony helped to put on codebar which is very cool and should be applauded!

Random things we’ve learned or have been reading:

• What happens when Amazon comes to town
• Does inactivity count as activity
• Plain english guide to bills > smart people will always fill the void if needs are unmet.
• Maternity leave + proxy voting. Chats being organised around this.
• Full steam ahead
• NYC protecting citizens from machines discriminating.
• At a work event I predicted the end of the nation-state in 2018. Nesta only went and said that may begin in 2018.
• Nesta 2018 predictions in full.
• “a sign of the growing power of machine learning algorithms to rewrite reality…A world awash in AI-generated content is a classic case of a utopia that is also a dystopia. It’s messy, it’s beautiful, and it’s already here.”
• How to fix the net. Like the idea of SOLID.
• New facial recognition features on Facebook
• Look forward to seeing how this develops
• Open data to reduce cost and improve quality in Colombian public schools
• Fascinating list of events that affected the Internet in 2017. Personal fave is severing the Internet to avoid cheating on exams in Iraq and Syria.
• 50 top fake news stories in 2017
• Why prototype
• Open data can benefit all and not just make the rich, richer.
• Expansion!
• Alexa and sexual harrassment
• Efforts to fight fake news may hurt citizen journalism. It’s also worrying that it could limit wider freedom of expression in the name of saving us from junk news articles.
• Good discussions about the future of music streaming with friend Jack last week - article notes on some points.
• Tackling Wikipedia’s gender imbalance