Parliamentary recess means there is less day-to-day parliamentary business to report, but work on Project Open Gov has not stopped.
We are using the quieter period to work behind the scenes on some of the larger features planned for the website, while also improving the tools and information already available.
Building better information about MPs
One of the main areas currently in development is a new MP feature.
The aim is to make it easier to understand who represents you, what role they hold in Parliament, and how they have participated in parliamentary business.
Rather than simply presenting a directory of names and constituencies, we want MP pages to bring together useful information in one place. This includes work on:
- clearer individual MP profiles;
- constituency and party information;
- parliamentary and government roles;
- links to official Parliament records;
- voting records from the current parliamentary session;
- clearer information about whether an MP voted, did not vote, or was otherwise recorded;
- links between MPs, votes and other parts of Project Open Gov.
The intention is not to rank MPs or tell readers whether an MP is doing a “good” or “bad” job. Parliamentary activity is more complicated than a simple league table can show.
Instead, the aim is to make the available information easier to find, understand and scrutinise.
Better access to the record can support better accountability.
Connecting the different parts of Parliament
Another important part of the work is making Project Open Gov’s features work together.
A vote should not exist in isolation. Readers should eventually be able to move naturally between a vote, the MPs involved, the relevant bill and an explanation of the parliamentary process.
Similarly, an MP profile should provide useful routes into the parliamentary activity behind the headline numbers.
Building those connections takes more work behind the scenes, but it is an important part of what we want Project Open Gov to become: not simply a collection of separate pages, but a clearer way of navigating the parliamentary record.
Improving existing features
We are also continuing work on several existing areas of the site.
This includes improvements to our votes, bills, glossary and Understand Parliament features, alongside the systems that collect and organise information from official sources.
Some of these changes will be immediately visible. Others involve less obvious work to improve reliability, accuracy and the way different sources of information are connected.
The parliamentary recess gives us a useful opportunity to concentrate on that development work without the normal volume of daily parliamentary activity.
What happens when Parliament returns?
As parliamentary business resumes, our daily coverage will return with it.
In the meantime, we will continue using the recess to build, test and refine new features before making them more widely available.
Project Open Gov is still developing, and there is considerably more we want to add. But the objective remains the same throughout:
to make Parliament and government easier to understand, while keeping the underlying record open for readers to examine for themselves.
We will share more about the new MP features as they develop.