It’s been roughly a calendar year since we started using social media channels here at Parliament. Our strategy around using these platforms will be more clearly defined going forward, but our rationale in using them originally were based around two basic ideas:

1) Linking up with one of Parliament’s primary objectives: to promote public understanding of the work and role of Parliament through the provision of information and access, by

• Informing – ensuring that the public is well-informed about the work and role of Parliament
• Promoting – ensuring that the public values Parliament as an institution
• Listening – engaging the public in ways that reflect their interests

And,

2) Reaching out to people and communities that wouldn’t be visiting the Parliament website.

Evaluation

I realise that stats only tell part of the story, and information on public and internal feedback and traffic back is important. I could write a whole post on the public and internal reaction to us using these tools, but this one is just about the stats. In summary, generally public feedback has been good! And internal departments are now actively looking to use these channels, especially YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.

YouTube

• www.youtube.com/UKParliament
• 47 videos on the channel – started posting videos May 2008
• Approx views across all videos: 224,000 (this is views on YouTube,  on our site, or other sites where it’s been embedded)
• Channel views: 67,000+
• Subscribers: 477

Flickr

www.flickr.com/photos/uk_parliament

• 179,430 views since summer 2008
• Recently we’ve been averaging approx 1000 views per day
• 78% of these views come from users searching on Flickr.com; 13% from Google; 3% from Parliament.uk
• Our most popular image is of the Speaker’s  Table

Twitter

• www.twitter.com/ukparliament
• Regular updates began June 2008
• Followers: 8600
• Updates 1127
• Clickthrough on links (according to bit.ly) is usually over 200. With 519 clickthroughs the highest so far. The stats for any of our bit.ly links can be accessed by copying and pasting the bit.ly URL into a browser window, then adding ‘+’.

Facebook

www.facebook.com/pages/London-United-Kingdom/UK-Parliament/16553417732

Launched June 2008 – 739 fans

We’re starting to do more with our Facebook page, ie, updating it regularly. And it would be good to look at the possibility of developing apps like Number 10 have.

FriendFeed

http://friendfeed.com/ukparliament

Launched August 2008, aggregating all our social media content, and stories from our news area – 284 subscribers.

UK Parliament Google Profile

www.google.com/profiles/ukparliament

Our Google Profile links off to the main areas of the Parliament website and our social media content. Stats are only available for the last 30 days:

Impressions 12438; 1958 Views

Parliament Labs blog

• http://parliamentlabs.wordpress.com/
• 10,000+ views since launching September 2008
• 312 views in one day – for our improving Hansard post – is our busiest day so far.
• 52 posts
• 84 comments from members of the public and Web Centre staff across all posts.

Users of Hansard on the parliamentary website often comment on the need to improve its presentation. Recently the web team has been working with members of the Hansard team and PICT (Parliament’s ICT department) to improve our Hansard pages.

The fruits of our labour can be viewed on our Hansard Beta site. 

What have we done?

Development work is being done in phases.
 
The first phase consists of:

• better layout, with improved content list, font size etc
• better chunking of content – so that you can view/print a whole debate and without having to click on the continue button
• better structure – while this won’t be visible to users, it will help Parliament make further improvements more easily

This release is just the first step.  We want to be able to make better use of this content so that it can be repackaged throughout the website.  To do this we are working with Hansard and Parliamentary ICT department to improve the code.

Lots more to do

A Hansard project is underway looking at all the tools used to create the paper copy of Hansard; we hope the improvements made to the production of Hansard will make it easier for the web team and other websites to reuse this amazingly rich content.

This is only the start; next we want to focus on Hansard by Member, so that each MP or Lords contributions can be easily found, followed and reused.

We would love to hear what you think about the new Hansard pages. Email webmaster@parliament.uk or comment on this post.

The Find Your MP service has been revised. The service uses the new site design and a simplified interface: you can now search for your MP’s details using a postcode, constituency name or Member name from a single search box.

The aim during the development of the service was to remain transparent, publicly visible and accountable. Wherever possible, the choice was made to use open source technologies – and to make code and data available, unless legally constrained. The project was delivered using a set of tools and services that have supported our preferred lightweight working practices:

• Distributed version control: git, publicly available and hosted on github
• Issue tracking: Google Code project hosting
• Communication: team members on Twitter, project updates having their own account at @fymp
• Web framework: Apache and Phusion Passenger, Ruby on Rails (using ZenTest and Cucumber for testing and spec assurance), MySQL Community Server
• Hosting and storage: Amazon S3, EC2
• Virtual machine construction: Elastic Server
• Load testing: siege

The House of Commons agreed on 30 March 2009 to a Report from the Procedure Committee recommending that there should be an experiment with the format of interleaving bills and Explanatory Notes in the case of a single bill in the current Session.

As recommended by the Procedure Committee, the House of Commons has today published the Equality Bill in a trial format as proposed by Chris Bryant MP, from the Deputy Leader of the House.

The Bill and Explanatory Notes are available as a:

• PDF with both texts side-by-side,
• an HTML with the texts side-by-side, and
• an interwoven web page (HTML)

All versions are available on the Equality Bill page

The Procedure Committee of the House of Commons is interested in feedback on this experiment, specifically:

• Do you find the interleaved document more helpful than the 2 separate documents?
• Which version of the interleaved document do you prefer? The PDF side-by-side, the HTML side-by-side, or the interwoven web page (HTML)?

The Web Centre would like to know your thoughts on this development, do you know of other sites that have this functionality, is there is a better way to present this information.

Let us know what you think on the blog comments or by email: webmaster@parliament.uk

We worked with the good folks from Tweetminster recently to put together a custom iFrame widget that we could use on the Parliament website.

This involved styling the widget Tweetminster already make available so that it fitted with the look of our new redesign, and specifying what Twitter feeds it would use. We wanted the widget to be ‘Parliament on Twitter’ – so it uses our own @ukparliament feed, any MPs or Peers that use Twitter (are there any Peers using Twitter yet?), but no parliamentary candidates, government departments or political parties.

The hope is that using this widget will further promote how Parliament and its Members are trying to engage with social media tools and with the public. During recess it should also give an insight into the work of MPs in their constituencies.  Although, we have included a disclaimer because the Web Centre team is responsible only for the content of @ukparliament updates, not those from Members…

WordPress.com doesn’t like iFrames so below is just a screengrab, to see it working go to our new Get Involved page.

There’s a lot going on in Parliament, so you’ll want to stay in touch by using our calendar. Thanks to our recent redesign,  a cut-down version of the calendar is now embedded on our main homepage and most of our top level pages, like those for the Commons and Lords.

But, if you don’t want to visit our site on a daily basis, you can now subscribe to our improved calendar feeds. These start with a big, subscribe-to-everything feed and are then split down into all the different areas our business takes place  – like Westminster Hall, or Commons Select Committees. There are RSS and Atom feeds available for everything.

We’re going to make the availability of these feeds more obvious on the calendar homepage shortly, but you can see them through the URL address bar (in Firefox) and in the toolbar area (IE 7). The feeds are also all visible on our Commons and Lords homepages as you move through the different tabs.

In the meantime, while we work on raising the profile of these feeds on the site, here’s a list of the RSS feeds (you can switch them to atom by changing the ‘rss’ to ‘atom’). We’re in recess at the moment, so most of the feeds are showing business for when Parliament goes back to work:

Calendar, all: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/all.rss

Commons, all: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/commons.rss

Lords, all: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/lords.rss

Commons, Westminster Hall: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/commons_westminster_hall.rss

Commons Select Committees: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/commons_select_committee.rss

Commons General Committees: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/commons_general_committee.rss

Lords Grand Committees: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/lords_grand_committee.rss

Lords Select Committees: http://services.parliament.uk/calendar/lords_select_committee.rss

As always, your feedback on this and other services is welcome. Leave a comment below or email webmaster@parliament.uk

What’s new?

We’ve launched a new design for the Parliament website: www.parliament.uk

The redesign features a refined navigation system and improved information architecture, together with a new section called Topical Issues and greater emphasis on our Parliamentary News area.

The Topical Issues area organises parliamentary research material by subject, with the long-term aim to draw in other areas of parliamentary business like debates and Bills. News covers the main parliamentary business in the Chambers, Westminster Hall and Select Committee reports, inquiries and evidence sessions (read about the development of our News area)

Why?

The Parliament website aims to make parliamentary information more accessible, show that Parliament is relevant, and enable people to connect and engage with us.

The aim of the redesign is to: provide a site that is modern, fresh and engaging; refine the routes to information, making it more accessible for the user; and offer more focused, timely and dynamic content to improve the overall user experience.

Development and testing

The design and new information architecture has been developed by our team following extensive consultation across Parliament and external users, alongside a comprehensive programme of user and accessibility testing.

Plans for 2009

The launch will be a phased approach. The first phase is the new homepage and major landing pages, the Topical Issue section and new top level and service navigation across all content areas. The next stage of the roll-out, a redesign of all content pages, will follow throughout 2009.

Our five main areas of work for the Parliament website in 2009 are:

• buying tools to improve both search and content management on the website and intranet
• making changes to the look and structure of information on the website so that it’s more user friendly and information is easier to find
• making significant improvements to the intranet so that it will become an essential tool for Members and staff
• working with our ICT department (PICT) and others to ensure that all information generated by the work of both Houses, including Hansard, Bills and procedural information, is delivered effectively to the web
• working on a strategy that will enhance engagement between Parliament and the public through the use of social media and other tools.

As always, we’d welcome your feedback on this work. You can leave a comment below or email us through webmaster@parliament.uk

(You can see earlier iterations of our website in this welcome post)

The House of Lords Information Committee is currently running an inquiry on:

… how we can improve understanding of the work and role of the House of Lords, and how people would like to interact with the House of Lords and Parliament.

We’ve been promoting this inquiry on Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and in the dedicated forum.

If you have a view on on the inquiry you can contribute using those channels – look! you can even send in a video (see below) – or go low-tech and send in written evidence.

The forum is part of an expanding series, and we are currently running five: ranging from collecting views on university life, the role of prison officers and market trading.

Our ongoing mission to keep the UK Parliament Twitter feed interesting continued last week when we experimented with some live twittering of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). Twitter users commenting on PMQs as it happens, and each other’s comments, and hashtagging the lot has become increasingly popular recently and our team were looking to see how we could add value in this area.

Most weeks we ‘top-and-tail‘ PMQs and then sit back on the sidelines while one of Parliament’s most recognised and popular events takes place, lots of people twitter about it and the UK Parliament twitter… doesn’t do anything.

So last week, every time an MP got up to ask a question we tweeted who they were, tried to get down what their question was on, and then linked through to their previous spoken contributions in our Commons Hansard by Member area (there is also a Lord’s equivalent). Here is an example of what we did.

The Order of Business shows you what MPs might be called to ask a question so we could do some of the work in advance, but we didn’t know what the question would be on or the exact order so that happened on the fly. We also tried to throw in some explanatory information as when the Speaker intervened to ask David Cameron to withdraw a question, and to answer comments coming in from our followers.

When it was over, we had lunch. When that was over, we asked our followers for feedback and it was pretty mixed:

Some people were really positive, others were a bit stunned by our feed’s sudden switch into rabid updates and there were a fair few that didn’t see the value of our updates when we couldn’t comment or editorialise on the action (although someone liked this neutral stand).

We enjoy doing live twittering on the feed and PMQs was no exception, but we felt the consensus from the feedback was that what we did on PMQs didn’t work. Therefore, next time we’re not going to tweet every MP as they stand up but will rather look to put up background or explanatory information during PMQs, in addition to the usual highlighting of our services like the live video feed and the available transcript after three hours.

Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments below or through Twitter.

Last week we ran drop-in sessions around the Paliamentary Estate to get feedback about the intranet information architecture – we are moving from a departmental structure to a more intuitive task based approach. 

It was a really worthwhile exercise, speaking to approx. 130 users,  it also allowed us to understand what intranet users are actually using it for!!

The good news is that we found people accepting of the proposed changes – we were even asked why we hadn’t done it sooner!!

Liz and Liam manning the stand