Ö÷²¥´óÐã

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Mark Coyle:

Thanks for bringing to the community, this excellent
service....

=Dennis Junior=

The "how the site works" link is 404ing at the moment.

The speech to text is a great innovation - though it'll be fun finding more words and phrases that trip it up. Searching for "Lisburn" (a city ten miles south of Belfast) shows a lot of references to the "Treaty of Lisburn" - instead of Lisbon! Without the context, a human ear would struggle to differentiate between the two.

The video on the front page is impressive - good way to see who's working!

I just registered to say kudos to the Ö÷²¥´óÐã for making this available and placing a link on their front page.

It gives the opportunity for casual browsers to get more direct knowledge about our democracy, a good beginning in tackling the problem of political apathy, mistrust and media distorted views.

I find it especially pleasing that you have included the European Parliament among the tv feeds, lets hope it creates greater understanding of what the EU actually does for all of us. That said their debates are not know for their excitement...

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

There may well be a conflict of interests with people wishing to use the new Democracy Live site and ISP's who impose a usage quota for their customers. Has this been considered by the Ö÷²¥´óÐã?

With all the problems of bias and the Executive Editor of Question Time misleading readers to his Editor’s blog, I do not think the Ö÷²¥´óÐã should be running this feature. The words democracy and Ö÷²¥´óÐã do not go together well.

For what it is worth I think that The Speaker should seek funding to have Parliament employ its own production company to handle its entire media output.

Great Idea,democracy needs all the help it can get as its under attack from fundamentalists;freemarket fundamentalists that is,constantly!

Why not link this in with www.TheyWorkForYou.com ? That site has a lot of information on MPs, complete with the Hansard (the authoritative record of what happens and is said in parliament). Would be a shame to duplicate effort.

To KennethM,

Should they call it the Ministry of Truth, and its production function the Tele-programmes Department (or Teledep in Newspeak)?

What an excellent site - I have already posted a link on my blog to promote it www.grays8.freeserve.co.uk.

It will surely become a point of reference for all interested in politics - can the bandwidth meet demand?

#6. At 4:41pm on 02 Nov 2009, len wrote:

"There may well be a conflict of interests with people wishing to use the new Democracy Live site and ISP's who impose a usage quota for their customers. Has this been considered by the Ö÷²¥´óÐã?"

Why should the Ö÷²¥´óÐã be concerned about the commercial relationship between ISP and it's customer, if your ISP doesn't allow unlimited or fair-use bandwidth and you want to access content such as this (and I don't just mean DL) then you need to think hard about if your present ISP is offering you the best deal - never has the phrase about "Knowing the value of everything but the worth of nothing" been so true as when choosing a ISP, cheap isn't always best!

#9. At 7:19pm on 02 Nov 2009, Tim Green wrote:

"Why not link this in with www.TheyWorkForYou.com ? That site has a lot of information on MPs, complete with the Hansard (the authoritative record of what happens and is said in parliament). Would be a shame to duplicate effort."

Whilst you have a valid point I must disagree with the comment that Hansard is the authoritative record of what happens and is said in parliament, that is simple not the case, Hansard (in it's corrected version) is the authoritative record of what an member intended to say - a subtle but important difference for researchers, journalists etc.!

To put it on twitter is good. And it get the news out on the net.

#14. At 11:20pm on 02 Nov 2009, Matthew Little wrote:

"To put it on twitter is good. And it get the news out on the net."

What, and these pages aren't the (Inert)net?!

Very bad that this leaked onto Twitter before being officially launched on the Ö÷²¥´óÐã website, a bit like government policy being released to the media before a statement being made in the House...

Democracy on the Go! Yeah, heading the right way!

To Boilerplated. It was on twitter whan i look at it, but it is way things are going.

Any plans to update the /parliament/ link to point to the new site located within the Democracy Live section? At present it still points to the old

Really Excellent. The old politics site was a bit of a dusty backwater but this is truly excellent.

I hope this new investment in technology can quickly recouped by rolling out across the website and subtitle services quickly to make best use of this worthwhile technology. I like the fact old material is a available.

Well done great work.

This is the problem with democracy: people are only interested in things that affect them.

Pretty cool. Would be great to have RSS feeds for each representative's activity, as well as a user you can follow for each on twitter, identi.ca, etc.

"But the real magic lies in the site's search function, which is unlike anything the Ö÷²¥´óÐã has done before."

You mean it actually works!

This is all very well, but is an example of politicians and the Ö÷²¥´óÐã seeking political engagement with the public by coming at it from the wrong direction. Whilst people no doubt need to understand what goes on in Parliament etc it is infinitely more important that Parliament understands what people want and think - something that our politicians seem unable to do or don't want to do. Information needs to flow upwards, not downwards. As a help, why can't the Ö÷²¥´óÐã make provision for readers to comment on each Ö÷²¥´óÐã website story ( a bit like the Guardian's CIF pages ) instead of the somewhat artificial, limited and contrived HYS system ? Then Politicians might begin to understand what people think and will be able to be held to account if they don't deliver accordingly. Too much to hope for I know, but it would be a good start.

Any chance of you doing some work to correlate your voice recognition with the official hansard transcript?

#24. At 10:19am on 09 Nov 2009, mrg017 wrote:

"Any chance of you doing some work to correlate your voice recognition with the official hansard transcript?"

I hope not, for the reasons I gave here, as I said, Hansard (in the 'corrected' version) is a record of what the MP intended to say, not always what they actually said.

2In reply to comments @ #23:

"As a help, why can't the Ö÷²¥´óÐã make provision for readers to comment on each Ö÷²¥´óÐã website story ( a bit like the Guardian's CIF pages ) instead of the somewhat artificial, limited and contrived HYS system ? Then Politicians might begin to understand what people think..//.."

Sorry but the HYS forum is over run by rants rather than considered debate, to allow that sort of diatribe that onto the main news website would diminish the value of the Ö÷²¥´óÐã's news content and would not actually give politicians any insight into what the majority of people in the country think as the majority of people do not make comment via internet forums etc..

In reply to #25 what i was thinking of was a way of looking at hansard and hearing what was actually said - I would expect that for some searches the voice recognition would fail but a search in hansard succeed and if they could detect the correlation between the audio and hansard they could still take you to the right place.

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

Hello
One of our group pensioners from noted this which is a wonderful example of how the internet connects to democracy to make a difference to society. Quite uplifting to know that the silent majority can be heard, Anna Politkovskaya or Alexei Dymovsky all prisoners of conscience.

When are we going to wake up to the simple fact that until we have an option to vote “no confidence in any of the participating parties ……………. “ we do not have democracy.

I like the idea but the Ö÷²¥´óÐã promoting democracy. Fanciful.

I do hope the great and the good will be asking for a true democracy. How about starting with a Democratic European Union instead of the European Socialist Republic.

Might actually be the start of a popular revolution

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

In principal, this doesn't sound like a bad idea. However.....
I hope that Ö÷²¥´óÐã will include public forums for discussion of the issues after closing down the Radio 4 Today and the Radio 5 News Messageboards which were very lively with topical debate.

Awesome site and to reiterate another comment the site search actually works. Thanks.

[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]

I've known about this site for some time, and I think it's a fantastic idea. It's nice to see media attention on all aspects of government, beyond coverage of just Parliament itself.

I also applaud the transcripts of all debates - this makes searching for relevant topics a dream!

There is one aspect of implementation I find awkward though. Often you'll see suggestions of 'Short debates', 'Oral debates' and 'Select committees' to watch, with no further clues as to exactly what was being debated, or which committee was sitting. It would be nice if hovering over these items gave useful clues as to what they're about! This similarly applies to the schedules pages.

It would also be nice if the Institution pages had more information about what's been recently debated, rather than just a snippet of videos (again, lacking any discernible information about the topics up for debate) and information about how that given institution operates (which is essential for most people, but of little interest once you know about it).

Perhaps some aggregation of news stories from across the media (not just Ö÷²¥´óÐã News), that relate to whatever topic or institution you are currently viewing, would be useful too? Perhaps Google News would provide a good mechanism for this? This might also go some way to abating Murdoch's issues with Ö÷²¥´óÐã News!

Finally, I'd like to make a potentially controversial suggestion. I like the idea of following representatives, but there's greater potential, given the live nature of the data you have available, to keep people informed about the people they follow. How about creating a Ö÷²¥´óÐã Twitter user for each representative that you track, and 'tweeting' whenever that representative speaks, or has been mentioned, in live/recently recorded coverage? You've already done most of this work with the transcripts and searching for mentions of representatives' names. It would be quite exciting to be 'tweeted' when your MP speaks in parliament, then switch over to live coverage to see what's happening, for example.

Generally though, I see this site as only positive, and I look forward to seeing what innovations you develop with this wealth of data next!

This comment was removed because the moderators found it broke the house rules. Explain.

This is the way to cover politics. I've long said as a linear channel Ö÷²¥´óÐã Parliament just can't do it justice and it needed to be more interactive, and this does exactly that - and more.