[okfn-discuss] SayIt Launch

Wed Jan 22 11:31:22 UTC 2014

Apologies if people receive this a number of times because it's cross
posted over the past few weeks! I thought this might be interesting to
users of this list!

Hi all!

Poplus <http://poplus.org/>, the network that
mySociety<http://www.mysociety.org/>and Ciudadano
Inteligente <http://www.ciudadanointeligente.org/?lang=en>have founded, has
taken a big step forward thanks to the launch of
SayIt<http://sayit.mysociety.org/>,
the second Poplus Component . Our goal is to collaboratively build pieces
of technology that make it quicker and cheaper for people around the world
to build websites and apps designed to make empower citizens. We would love
users, developers, activists NGOs and CSOs to contribute to this network in
any way they wish. It could be by building, using, testing or sharing
components! We're using the Akoma Ntoso standard format currently for all
transcripts we're uploading and we're working on an importer to make this a
whole lot easier.

But I digress, back to the launch.

SayIt <http://sayit.mysociety.org/> exists to make it easy to publish
beautiful, easy to search, transcripts of politicians’ speeches,
interviews, and the proceedings of trials.

We've uploaded some examples from the UK that are demos of what SayIt could
be used for:

The Leveson Inquiry <http://leveson.sayit.mysociety.org/> An investigation
into press ethics in the UK

The Charles Taylor trial <http://charles-taylor.sayit.mysociety.org/> The
former president of Liberia’s war crimes trial

And the complete works of
Shakespeare<http://shakespeare.sayit.mysociety.org/>(you can search
them for any keyword<http://shakespeare.sayit.mysociety.org/search/?q=unicorn>,
browse by character <http://shakespeare.sayit.mysociety.org/speakers>, or
by individual plays <http://shakespeare.sayit.mysociety.org/speeches>).

However, the real goal of SayIt <http://sayit.mysociety.org/> is to
accelerate the launch of websites, all around the world, that keep track of
what is said by politicians and other powerful people. And we’ve built
SayIt<http://sayit.mysociety.org/>so that this feature can be added to
existing websites without having to
abandon all your current technology. The technology is of course open
source, free to use and on github, currently it's not that easy to
reinstall on servers other than our own, and this is something that we're
working on for phase two!

We’ve written a blog
post<http://www.mysociety.org/2014/01/15/introducing-sayit-a-poplus-component-to-bring-transcript-publication-into-the-modern-world/>about
the launch where you can see a little more information about what
this component does. Please do browse, use and give feedback!
All the best

Jen

-- 
Jen Bramley
*International Project Development Manager*
mySociety | mysociety.org/international/
Tel: 0044 (0) 7806 604 041
Skype: JenMySoc
@mySocietyIntl

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