MP Map: What you can do with Ajaxified snakeoil 29 Nov 2006
Posted by Peter Cruickshank in UK, e-democracy.trackback
Bill Thompson has a right go at Web 2.0 and all that as “Ajaxified snakoil” with homemade data exchange formats amd inconsistent architectures, instead of a model of distributed objects messaging each other nicely.
But isn’t it cool what you can do? Just look at Simon Dickson’s mashup of TheyWorkForYou and Google Maps – giving an interactive map of constuencies, allowing you to pick out your MP, and see what they’ve been up to. (Update: I missed the need for non-Londoners to hit a button to reveal their MPs)
Simon concludes:
I’m wondering if e-government should throw in the towel, and shift its focus from producing websites to producing web services. In other words, create databases visible to the outside world, and let others do the presentation.
Maybe we should go for it, and hope that at some point in the future the data standards catch up? The computer scientist would hate that…
My map does cover all 646 constituencies… but the starting view only shows the London area. As you might imagine, a map with 646 dots is a bit overwhelming. (I tried it, trust me!) But if you click on the region buttons in the top right of the screen, you’ll be able to see the rest. (You’re actually not the first to miss these buttons… I’ll have a look at making them more prominent.)
Ah, that makes sense, thanks! I wonder if you can overlay some icons to make it more obvious? I certainly missed the buttons at the top of the screen.
For what it’s worth, Ann McGuire’s Stirling constituency seems to have been shifted about 30 miles to the west. Apparently she lives up a mountain somewhere to the west of Callander – an inevitable problem I guess
One other suggestion (if the data supports it) could be to put dates against the Commons activity record.
The coordinates provided are the centre point of the constituency’s bounding box, which, given Stirling itself is at the bottom right of Ann McGuire’s constituency which stretches all the way to Tyndrum, seems perfectly accurate to me.
Dates should be available too, yes.
Thanks for the clarification, Matthew
Did you see Simon’s comments on using the existing TWFY API? Might be some ideas there for changes if you ever move to a version 2 of the XML API.
[...] We got some useful feedback from Peter Cruickshank that the MP Map didn’t make enough of the region selection buttons: his immediate instinct was that the map covered London only, but that’s only the initial view. To make these a bit more prominent, I’ve placed them in a separate box which hovers on top of the map. If you want to close the box to maximise the view, click on the minus box, and it’ll retreat. Or to move the box altogether, just click and drag it somewhere else on-screen. Now that’s what I call empowerment. [...]