[open-government] mySociety research papers

Wed Jun 15 10:51:37 UTC 2011

Greetings OKFers,

We all know that there’s a desperate shortage of research showing how open
data gets used in any degree of real detail. That’s because the people who
collect the data on usage often don’t want to share, or they simply don’t
have the time or money to gather together all the learnings for sharing.

So I thought you might be interested in a couple of reports that mySociety
have published today. They’re not *about* open data, but they’re about sites
that are built on open data (and, notably, built on data that wasn’t open
before, but is now).

We commissioned an academic researcher, Tobias Escher to compile evaluation
reports on two of our major sites, TheyWorkForYou.com and WriteToThem.com,
looking in detail at user numbers, socio-economic breakdown, political
involvement and many other factors. He also looked in depth at where our
traffic comes from and what causes its fluctuations.

It’s been a really interesting process for us, giving us more insight into
where our strengths and weaknesses lie than we’ve ever previously had. So we
wanted to share our findings, and to say that if you have anything similar,
we’d be very interested to see.

You can find the reports at http://bit.ly/krDxRe.

Cheers,
Myf Nixon
mySociety
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