This month we have the chance to interview Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety, the folks behind such innovative sites as TheyWorkForYou (whose governmental data we display on Nestoria) and FixMyStreet. In the same way that we aim to make Nestoria as simple as possible to do one thing: search for property, mySociety aims to build very simple websites that help people engage with their community. Most relevantly to property mySociety recently produced some very innovative and much discussed travel-time maps.
Tom, thanks for speaking with us. 1. Please explain the goals of mySociety.mySociety is all about building deceptively simple websites which give citizens simple, tangible benefits to the parts of their lives that are concerned with their democracy and their communities. We aim to provide benefits that are as simple and tangible as when Amazon sends you a book, but just in the more nebulous (but highly important) arena of politics, democracy, social capital and so on. We also aim to teach bits of the public and the voluntary sector how they could be spending their money a lot better to help citizens. 2. What the technical challenges you face?
Wow, big question. There are lots but some of the more interesting are:
- Attracting audiences with zero marketing budget to things that aren’t as inately ‘fun’ as YouTube videos of cats falling off tables. We do this by working hard on legit SEO, and by making our sites the sorts of things that lots of other people running other sites can make use of, by, for example linking to speeches made in Parliament on TheyWorkForYou, or by encouraging people to write to politicans via WriteToThem.com
- One challenge I especially like to work on is generating public good from private desire. One good example of this is FixMyStreet, where people who report problems end up generating a public database about local problems. On the brand new WhatDoTheyKnow.com people use the site because it’s an easy way of getting information they need, personally, but it generates a public database that Google can crawl of what people are looking for, and what the Government is giving them back.
- Sometimes we have sheer scale problems. At its peak load ever the No10 petitions site saw 141 people confirm their signatures successfully in one second – more than 10 times the rate that the BBC expects to be able to sign up new people, and all running on just three machines. Most of that is thanks to the lasting genius of our late and much missed colleague Chris Lightfoot, and the loving care of our awesome dev team.
Perhaps the top lesson we can give anyone who runs a search service on a database that is constantly changing and updating is this – build alerting systems and advertise them aggressively (can you see the advert on this page? – I hope so!). People talk a lot about RSS but if you run such a database and don’t let people sign up for email alerts when a word or phrase or other unique string comes up, then you’re missing a huge number of repeat visitors, as well as failing to serve your audience. 4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
Well, as it happens I’ve been using your site a lot in the last week attempting to find somewhere to live (has anyone got a nice 1 bedroom in the East End to let?). It seems to me that you’ve got various challenges:
- Persuading your users that they’re on a site that has most of what’s out there to be had. I’d like to see some some of percentage, even if it was a guesstimate of how much of the total property available in the area I’m looking at that’s currently on the market is in front of me. Google has done a great job at making people think that if it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist, so expectations of completeness are very high.
- Obtaining good, reasonably priced geodata to power your service. I believe you’ve only got the first part of postcodes, which caused me a bit of a headache first time I used the site. I hope that Nestoria will be amongst the voices calling for improvements in licensing from the Ordnance Survey – it feels as if change is a afoot.
- Partnering with companies so that the user experience of what people find is as good as the finding process. Nestoria is almost embarrassingly more usable than most of the sites that supply its data at the moment, which causes some user frustration.
Thanks Tom. Lots of good feedback here. Creating simplicity is deceptively difficult and requires continual fine-tuning. We’ll keep doing our best to encourage open geodata and to partner with sites that value user experience. Likewise, we’ll be opening up more of our data in the very near future. Keep up the great work at mySociety and please extend our thanks to the entire team. Meanwhile we invite all our readers to check out mySociety’s latest community site: GroupsNearYou past Nestoria interviews: Lelia Ferro, Lloyd Shepherd, Adam Samuel.
