Category: elusen

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Tarian Cymru – some reflections on the work

About Tarian Cymru

A group of us have been running Tarian Cymru for over two months now, and over 1400 people have contributed over £74,000 towards PPE for health and care workers in Wales.

PPE is still needed. Have you donated yet?

Set-up

Running Tarian Cymru is a lot of work: fundraising, comms and publicity, finding/procuring/buying/importing PPE, liaison with workers, packing, distribution.

The whole initiative has been a unique experience. It’s one of the best experiences I’ve ever had.

It’s amazing to think what’s possible when a group of people come together (remotely) to accomplish something specific rapidly.

It’s so encouraging to see how much activity there’s been for the goal, how generous people have been – with their time, money, skills, and resources. The list of music projects alone is staggering – to name one thing.

I’ll probably have to document the whole thing sometime. In the meantime I tend to make notes here about web projects…

Web

The website is for donors, supporters, as well as the workers.

There was an obvious need for a memorable and clear name, and a simple domain name to share on radio, TV, etc. The web address of the GoFundMe page and social media addresses were not suitable for this.

Then the website had to be ready in an exceptionally short time – in minutes.

Usually I run WordPress software on a server. This means creating a theme, choosing plugins, writing code, maintenance… But I had to avoid the temptation to have so many options and setting and tweaks this time. There simply was too much else to think about on the Tarian Cymru initiative.

Everything runs on wordpress.com – there are two websites for the two languages, Cymraeg and English.

There is a language switch in the menu and in some of the pages and blog posts (the latter by hand). The interface in Welsh makes use of  translations people have done over the years.

Sometimes it’s best to just do things in the fastest possible way, and sacrifice flexibility/options.

Finally

If you’ve read this far then you should consider doing a challenge for the Tarian Cymru appeal.

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Christian Aid’s emergency appeal in Haiti

Yesterday I posted a link and video to Oxfam’s appeal.

I really want to emphasise how serious the situation is in Haiti and how important it is to help by donating money. So here’s another appeal from Christian Aid:
http://www.christianaid.org.uk/emergencies/current/haiti-earthquake-appeal/

Alternatively, you can still donate to Oxfam.

Please circulate this information to your friends and people you are in contact with online.

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Oxfam’s emergency appeal in Haiti

This is from Oxfam’s YouTube channel:

A major earthquake has struck Haiti, just ten miles from the capital Port-au-Prince. Local officials are reporting a catastrophe of major proportions.

Oxfam has long experience in Haiti, and we’re rushing in teams from around the region to respond where we’re needed most. Our response will include providing clean water, shelter and sanitation.

If you want to donate money, please go to http://www.oxfam.org.uk/haitiappeal

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Do you care about Wales? Can you code? Fancy helping TheyWorkForYou then?

Below is some full background to this, but in summary TheyWorkForYou are looking for volunteer coders interested in working on Welsh Assembly data. If that’s you, please join the new discussion list and let’s figure out how to do it.

If you don’t know TheyWorkForYou then take some time to familiarise yourself. It’s a well established site taking parliamentary data and presenting it in a queryable form. It’s free, loaded with information and very useful indeed.

The whole thing is maintained by mySociety who are world class at this sort of thing.

Have a play and see what you can glean about your MP or issue of choice. The search function allows you to subscribe by email (or better still, RSS feed) to notify you immediately whenever something you care about is discussed.

This is all very well for the UK parliament but the Wales section of TheyWorkForYou is currently looking very bare, containing only the following text.

We need you!
It’d be fantastic if TheyWorkForYou also covered the Welsh Assembly, as we do with the Northern Ireland Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, but we don’t currently have the time or resources ourselves — in fact, both those assemblies were mainly done by volunteers.

If you’re interested in volunteering to help out, please get in touch!

So yes, Wales is the only constituent part of the UK which doesn’t have its parliamentary data available on TheyWorkForYou.

There is nothing preventing us, it’s purely because nobody’s stepped up and done it.

As a quick explanation of the work that needs to be done: Welsh Assembly proceedings and transcripts are already available on the web from the official site. But they’re effectively raw dumps – of speeches and other data. It’s almost impossible to get useful insights about members’ voting records. It provides no option to subscribe to notifications that a phrase was used. Apart from a very basic and clunky site search function, all the insights are locked in. You could do a human-powered research trawl through the records, but that starts to get a bit unwieldy for normal people. It feels like the preserve of experts and not really like proper democracy.

Most of TheyWorkForYou’s engine is already built. In the words of Matthew Somerville at mySociety, the work now is to “parse the official report of the Assembly into structured machine-readable data to feed into TheyWorkForYou, along with member information for the Assembly. This will need programming skills, I’m afraid.”

So if you know anything about data structures or programming, why not apply that knowledge for the good of everyone? Join the discussion list for now as we’ll be figuring out how to tackle it.

Any given Assembly Member who does his or her job properly would surely encourage the kind of scrutiny that TheyWorkForYou could bring. You might be wondering why nobody at the Welsh Assembly has added the necessary features to allow their data to be queried. Let’s give them the benefit of the doubt this time. Maybe they don’t always intend to obfuscate and hide this stuff. It’s just they’re not up to speed with any better ways of doing it. You might be able to help them! And the people of Wales!

I’m not naive enough to think that all problems can immediately be solved by opening up this information. Neither will it be enough to get every voter running to the polls once the information is available. All manner of things can go wrong in the democratic process. But if your thing is data, there is a clear problem there and maybe that’s the part of the scene you can help with.

In Wales we have a good selection of knowledgable, principled and often witty political bloggers. I’m not one. But I can help resource the conversation in the party political domain by opening up the possibility of insights from the data. It will be a step towards better accountability among our representatives. Let’s hope it does clear a pathway to some possible solutions.

If you’re not a coder, you could make a donation to mySociety or spread the word.