Sprint 46

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

Half the team were away on holiday this week and then snow descended upon London and the UK. We persevered…

What we have achieved:

• In week 1 of the sprint the first objective was to prep pages ready for members of the House of Lords portraits which are coming very soon
• mini-team tweaked the pages and made improvements, help to add the photos and create media pages much like the designs for MP photos.
• we also attempted to solve some left over bugs which dominated a lot of Colin’s week - namely making sure our list of current Lords was upto to date, name changes, affiliation to party changes and to eradicate some odd contact details in which we present solely a “.”
• part of the conversation to correct bugs relating to the colour of the images and making sure the right members matched the right Lords
• agreed dates for linking current website member pages to the new beta pages (mid-March-ish right now)
• more written q’s and a’s chats. Fruitful.
• chat and contributing to proxy voting discussions - very encouraging that we got our voice heard and are influencing how Parliament is going to work. You can contribute here too.
• Caroline nailed a roadmapping session with lots of other product managers
• measure of success chats
• week 2 of the sprint half the team returned and we set about prepping for the next round of research
• getting feedback from colleagues over in the palace with our part-time BA and me door stopping people in the House of Lords
• new designs for the next round of research sorted addressing challenges we identified in the last sprint and comments from the team swirled in. Plans coming together nicely for how the sessions will be ran.

Wider team work:

• Lots of House of Lords-related work as mentioned above!
• Bryony carried on with groups with complete dedication.

Random things we’ve learned or have been reading:

• could be a useful tool for some
• Data centres in Iceland going to use more energy than homes
• Airbnb and how it affects the interpretation of what home is.
• Changing demographic of Facebook users
• Bringing the Internet to rural communities
• What the decentralised web could look like
• Future of surveillance - biggest challenge right now… bad quality video
• UK wants to tackle fake news with special unit? But we don’t trust what is being fed to us on social media anyway?
• “What we are seeing now is that when free speech is treated as an end and not a means, it is all too possible to thwart and distort everything it is supposed to deliver.”
• Change my view: a good case study in civil discourse
• “I thought the [smart] house would take care of me but instead everything in it now had the power to ask me to do things. Ultimately, I’m not going to warn you against making everything in your home smart because of the privacy risks, although there are quite a few. I’m going to warn you against a smart home because living in it is annoying as hell.”
• Buying social media followers
• Making sense of privacy terms and conditions
• “YouTube is something that looks like reality, but it is distorted to make you spend more time online,” he tells me when we meet in Berkeley, California. “The recommendation algorithm is not optimising for what is truthful, or balanced, or healthy for democracy.”
• Cobots
• Moving past the smartphone and laptop
• Amazon health