So the first area we're gonna cover is a huge improvement to the MP profile pages. So these had a complete redesign. Moving the menu to left here is more than just moving it to the left. It means that we can have more content to to pick up these all these new areas and gives us more future proofing to be able to, like, have more different kinds of information and make it easier to explore the stuff we already had. So for instance, we've, separated out speeches and questions into its own page here, which makes it a bit easier to see how to get around it. And, we've similarly on the registered interest page, gone through and given it the expand and just new buttons we were using on a different part of the site. So basically, in every single page here, we had a bit of a look. How could we add a bit more hand holding language to help these people understand what's going on in here, and how we can just tidy up and make it a bit easier to move around these MP profile pages, which we sort of see as, like, the core of what's lay work for you is doing. So as part of that, on those vote sections, we've added added links to context in other areas of the site. So in the recent votes page, we bound and have linked the vote analysis content, which is our fuller analysis for vote in, votes that they work foryou.com, which contains more stuff about party breakdowns, contains more stuff about the motion where we've been able to reconcile that with Hansard. But we're also, where possible, linked to if an MP spoke in the same section as a vote, we link to any speeches they made there. So this is temperamental in the sense that sometimes, debates go across multiple sections. But as a sort of, you know, proof of concept, this works quite nicely, especially for if an MP is quite involved in a bill, their speeches are now quite easy to link to from there. On the voting summaries page, in addition to seeing the all time voting record, you can now see the voting comparisons for specific periods, including the current parliament. And part of the reason here and so this example is from Diane Abbott, who's been around, for all the periods we cover back from nineteen ninety seven parliament and, obviously, significantly before that. But it makes it easier to click around on the historic votes and in principle also to look at just the more recent votes, including the current parliament. We may in we future switch the default view to look at just the current parliament to help better surface the recent votes people are probably looking for, but we also want to think about how we best balance this with the importance of the long term view. So we're sort of we're we're balancing this up at the moment, but for the moment, all the data is there, and you can switch between them. We're also laying the groundwork, for linking to public statements from public for for voting record summaries. So one of the interesting things that TheyWorkForYou has set a part in changing is that MPs are now more likely to give public statements about why they voted a certain way. And that's really interesting. We want to capture that and show it back to the people visiting the site. So on the they work for you vote site, we have the functionality to let us and potentially in future MPs directly add links to public statements they made to votes. And when that now when that happens, the votes that we include in the voting summary, we now show a link here that people can click through. So I hope my hair's not in the way. It might be. But there is a, a a link here to public statements made about this particular vote. At the moment, we've done this for five votes on the assisted dying third reading, two pro, pro, two against, and one abstain. But we think now all the pipes are in place, and we can get this information all the way from the votes page to the, you know, very the high profile voting summaries page. We're thinking about how we can best gather more data systematically first on that vote because we it's an interesting free vote to gather more information about, but also, how we could in future make it easier for MPs to submit things themselves. But that is in part, yep, laying the steps along the way. Similarly, we've also flagged this one as a free vote, and we'd like to capture more whip in information where possible on a series of votes. This isn't publicly available. The House of Commons library has a selection of votes that are known to be free votes, but in some cases, it this is in this is known to be incomplete because whips, sorry. Votes can be whipped for some parties and not others. And so while our framework lets us capture this information, figuring out how to display it is a bit more complicated. So, again, what we're doing there is we're thinking about how do we display it when we get to this page that we want to be simple and comprehensive. And then coming back all the steps to, like, how do we gather the data that feeds into that. So this is very much an early work in progress in how we get that data there. But in the long run, I'd like to, again, gather more information that is outside what's happening in parliament and help get it into these pages to help people understand more about their MP. Second set of things I'm gonna talk about is our email alerts. So TheyWorkfew sends a lot of emails. Every day we run the email alerts and hundreds of thousands of emails sometimes go out. Most of these are for people with alerts for their own representatives, but, there's a very strong use of email alerts as a parliamentary monitoring tool. And what we found talking to people in the past is that the alerts help move information around parliament, through government, and through civil society. And this is especially important for smaller organizations that wouldn't otherwise have the capacity. So here's some sort of quotes we sort of found last time we surveyed people just in terms of, you know, organizations that couldn't can't afford dedicated parliamentary monitoring, that can't have a member of staff on it all the time. I like this example, especially of a child poverty group who, were getting the subscriptions to written answers from, the DWP ministers, and that was giving them the clearest view of policy changes that helps them, you know, help their clients. Similarly, we had a response, I think, from someone in DWP who was like, this is, you know, a fast way of getting information about because there's large operational department people all over the country that actually that was a relatively good way of finding out about updated change to policies. So again, it's just helping to get especially the written questions and answers through the system and helping people understand more about changes in government policy and what's going on inside parliament. Yes. So we've done three things to improve this for this group. So we've made it easier to create more complicated keyword alerts. We have a feature to suggest useful phrases to include, and we made it easier to view recent mentions on the alerts in the website as well as in the inbox to help better manage alerts. So for the first step, previously, you'd have to assemble, a, a search in the in yeah. Assemble a search in the in the search bar using a series of ores and advanced search operators, which people can do, but there not many people were making use of it, and so we've built a new interface. That is just, at a very base level, makes it easy to group multiple phrases together. So here's an example where I'm looking for information about freedom information. I've got freedom information. I've got FOIs, a different search word, so now this search will get results for both of those. But we've also tried to think about how we can help people know what those terms are because it's not always clear what is the term of art used inside parliament for a specific debate. So what we did was we built a big, big vector search table, which helps find things that are similar in meaning rather than similar in words, of what's in parliament of of the parliament transcripts of the last ten years. And then using common terms we know about from previous searches, we look for where we could suggest additional ones that were similar. So in this case, it's taken electric vehicle, suggested electric car, and EV as potential extra terms to include. At the moment, this is limited to a certain amount of queries because we're testing it out, and it's sort of an example of how we can sort of we're looking at, like, low resource uses of where machine learning can help us out because no machine learning or AI is used as people are using the terminal. But as in the past, we've done the data crunching to help improve things a bit. So we're thinking about how we can best keep this feature up to date in the long run and provide a model for other parliamentary monitoring sites in terms of sustainable use without massive changes to our underlying infrastructure. And this is sort of a a nice, quality of life thing in terms of, trying to just in terms of managing lots of different requests. So when you, gets when you get through, you can review the results of your search. You can see how many were mentioned last week, when it was last mentioned. If it was never mentioned, it might be a bad search. And we're simply able to click through and see the kind of things that were related recently. So, again, just helping you review and make good search choices rather than just guessing as you went through keywords. So also we've also made it easier to manage, how how the alerts are managed. And this helps people have a greater range of alerts for different kinds of subjects. So you can see which ones have just on the they work for you stash alert page, you can see which ones have recent mentions and also click through to the results in the browser. So, again, here, what we're trying to do here is make it a bit easier, both to get alerts in your inbox, but also if, say, you're sharing an account between a few members of staff at a small organization, just to be able to see here is things that happened in the last week, be able to check-in on that periodically. It's just a nice little way of, you know, keeping in touch with parliament about it. It didn't need to be anyone's full day full time job. Cool. That's the end of the alert stuff. Any questions on that in a bit? But I'm just gonna share a few more things that, we're adding in the next weeks and months. So, hopefully, in the next few weeks, we've been creating the tools and features we need to make the most of our coverage of debates. And, especially, as Julia said, that we're not the official parliament website, so we have a bit more freedom to add context around the margins to help people understand what's going on. So we want to be able to add better context and explain as a key debate. So so far, the vote annotation, I think I've already talked about previously, if you if you have a if if you if you're if they work for you if you if you've entered they work for you looking for your MP, it will highlight if your MP has made a specific statement about a decision in a in a vote. At the moment, that's near, like, four people, but in the future, it would more. And, similarly, we've improved the approach we had to Wikipedia data matching to we because we previously and continue to link to Wikipedia articles that match content to debate. We've include improved the approach there using, new, NLP techniques to better work out what is the or appropriate links. And we're still testing this out, but we have much fewer false positives at the moment. So, basically, we're trying to make links links that are there should be more relevant. Coming up in the next few weeks is improved display of our glossary, where we've been doing some work in in terms of how we manage it, display it ourselves. And we've revived, the old they work for you annotation feature, not at this point for public use, but for our use in terms of being able to make it easier for us to add context to debates. So we'll if a high profile debate comes up, we now have more options to say, here is what's happening. Here is you know, because because it's not always clear from the parliamentary transcript exactly what's going on. And sometimes very interesting things happen sort of between the lines. And so we sort of want that ability to go back in and say, like, here is what was happening when this was going on. So this is something we're sort of building the capacity for ourselves at the moment. In the future, we may also be interested in opening it up to other trusted partners. But for the moment, we're just sort of building the groundwork for us to, I guess, do what I just see as, like, normal stuff that isn't new feature, but is, like, continuous, like, making the parliament easier to understand, to lay in the groundwork for future work. Something we'll have to talk about in the next few weeks is something we call write to them insights. So a thing we run alongside they work for you is Write to Them, which helps people write to their representatives at different levels of government in The UK. So you enter your postcode, you get your counselor if you're in, the bold areas of the country. You see more people than just your MP. What we don't have a good view on is what people are writing about through the site because we don't read people's messages except in certain circumstances where that's enough privacy policy, but in rare circumstances, we do that. But basically, we don't systematically look at it, so we don't want those in it. So what we've been doing is running a survey of people to ask them again what just in a sentence, what did you write about? And we've been doing analysis, putting in some instant cluster l l m l l m l l m, there we go, usage to understand a bit more about what people are writing about in that. And that's sort of some really interesting, divisions between, like, Katie's work and campaign or policy usage at the site. And this is informing our future plans for how we can make right to them more useful of people and getting the right message to the right place. So more on that in the next few weeks, but some really interesting stuff coming out of that survey. On our who funds them work, where we are continuing our work in looking at money in politics. So, you know, one of the small upgrades in this one was, making the register of interests upgrades more more uniform through the site. We have two reports in the pipeline that we hope to get out in the next few months. The first is leaky pipes, got a nice leaky leaky pipe there, which is our report about the collection system for election donation data, where to to spoil it, the the collection system for election donation data is difficult to understand. There are diagrams in there that do not help you out, but sort of explain that it's difficult to understand. And the second is the helpfully titled untitled written questions report, where we've been using AI approaches to explore overlaps between written questions and MPs declared interests. And so this gives us an interesting new window to do kind of analysis that is difficult to do at scale, where in principle, it's technically possible. Parliamentary rules make it quite difficult to access the results. So sort of a a range of practical and policy results coming out of that one, which we'll have more to say in the next few months. How you can help. Thank you all for coming. That's you know, it is nice to have an audience. That's one way you can help. So, certainly, one thing you can do is use the site and give us feedback. These are new features. We've got buttons all over the place to help give us feedback about, like, where people have the wrong information, especially on APPGs. We're anticipating some of these will be wrong because we're getting the lists that may be out of date on APPG websites. We're hoping this is part of a process where everyone keeps things more up to date, so it's easy to to to work this out, but there may be some teething troubles in that. So we expect things to be a bit wrong. We're very open to, like, where where, you know, things need to be corrected. Similarly, tell other people about these new features and work. Like, we we think you know, adding this up the last few days, we've made a lot of changes to how they work for you is run this year with they work for you votes providing better analysis of stuff on the voting end through all these new features to give you a richer view of what MPs are up to. So please, if you're interested in they work for you and you know other people who might be, please tell them there's more to see than there was a few weeks ago. We've got a newsletter, up by society.org to tell you more about our work. So, please, if you want to hear more about what we're doing in the future, please go there. If that's the wrong link, which I'm suddenly panicking about, maybe someone will put in the chat the right link. And especially one thing you can do is support us financially. We want to run the best version of these sites to make UK democracy more accessible, and we want it to be freely available. To be able to do the best version of that, we do need financial support support, but we can't offer more much more than what we give everyone for free anyway. Every donation helps us go further and faster in the work we're doing. We think there's a real role for from the outside, joining up more of these official and unofficial sources. And just generally, we've got a philosophy that's it's not just asking parliament to be better, but there are things we can do to improve democracy from the outside, and we're optimistic about our capacity to do so. So just if that's something you wanna help out with, you know, the donate links are not only on this slide, but everywhere all over the site, and it's always appreciated, and it really makes a big difference. So I think that's the end of my things. If I'm right, the next slide will just say big questions. It does. It's question time. So,

Yeah. Alex, have you, like, comments on that? Obviously, by putting them in voting records, we're trying to kind of cluster them. I think some of the stuff you're saying about the work we're doing about annotating debates fits into this. But yeah. I'll let you start. No. This is a it's interesting because one of the things we're sort of doing at the moment is looking a lot at international parliamentary monitoring sites, and many of them have as as a sort of core component bill analysis, which isn't something we do a lot of. So one of the things the parliament's API has got better on this. One of the things that we are doing a loose way is on the they work for you website. There are tags, which sort of group votes on the same bill together where we can find them, which sometimes usefully pulls up the legislative consent from the devolved parliaments. We'd like to get better at this. There's especially there's this piece of work I'd like to do on there's there's a there's a few piece of work to do. I'd like to move the range of on the House of Lords, and one of which is making the amendments flowing between the two houses easier to understand. We think there is good potential in especially using, new element based technologies to extract information from those PDFs the amendments are in. Like, I think it's very plausible to get better at putting those amendments out. One of the things, that happens in the work for you notes now is we match we've tried to associate the votes with the motion where we know it. So we have a bit more be able to click back from the vote to what was being voted on. But as things are live, it'd be much better to be able to pull that up the amendment paper. So currently, we are making baby steps in certain directions. It would be a big new thing, but I think it would be certainly worthwhile. So basically, yes, it's a problem. We haven't solved it. I'd like to. I think it's possible. So yes.

And to plug a a different event we ran recently, we recently ran an international event in part looking at this question about how do we get the information out of these websites, especially when, you know, search is turning more to AI that makes it harder to click through to things, about sort of people's experience about using video to get information out to more places, about using WhatsApp channels to get information out to more places. So it's a it's a I I think, basically the part of the way we see their reviews, it should just be the hub of how a range of, you know, different you know, we want we want journalists, we want people who are who who have their own audiences to use our site to get the content. And we ourselves want to try and get it fair. Like, we know it's not enough just to put it on day work for you. We want to figure out how we can get this information where it's most needed. But yes. So, like, this is sort of the start of, I think, how we get the information out. They just happen all in one place and make it easy to discover.

Yeah. Do you want me to save it while I have the other There is. Mhmm. So sorry. I didn't take screenshots of this, but on that, on the alerts page, there is a representative alert immediately beneath that where you can see your current representative alerts and click on or off the button about votes. So you can just see the just see their contributions to debate questions. So that is on they work for you.com/alert if you currently have alerts. And, Cindy, when you create new alerts, it should ask you if you want to recover their voting records.

they have they have to sort of call the member of the list. They don't have to release a schedule of what they're charging to be a member of APPG if they are, and which was sort of one things we'd like to change. Like, if you are charged to be a member of an APPG, then we'd like to know how much you're charging and kind of to who. There there is, like, the the the generous interpretation of it is it helps you spread the cost of the secretariat across an industry that if there's lots of industries involved, lots of companies involved, you can spread the cost out rather than someone sort of sorting this out behind the scenes. On the other hand, there's also been a few cases where, you know, we we've we've seen it highlighted in some of our past blog posts where, effectively, it's been fairly clearly billed. It's like, if you give us this money, you will have access to parliamentarians. And in almost exactly that language, which is, of course, you want you know, you don't want them to be more subtle than that, but they should be. Mhmm. So it's one of those things where it's like it's it's very clearly a way that, you know, the the the the value proposition is we have MPs. You have money. Let's meet in the middle, And that's not great. So, like, it is we we'd like some more transparency there to try and push towards the good version of APPGs. Because we we believe that, you know, APGs, you know, they're not just vehicles for corruption. They're also, you know, nice talking shops, and they help people understand issues and get things across. But we really wanna put pressure on to get get towards the good version rather than the, you know, the bad version.

Yeah. I think the interesting thing about them is that some of the open letters were quite big, and this is part where we started tracking them, was there's a few diff and we're we're gonna encounter some interesting use cases as we go into it, but I thought one of the interesting ones here is effectively a mechanism for Labour backbenchers to group together and write to a minister in a long form. And that's in part why the, the length of it is quite interesting because it sort of it lets people sort of do the, you know, you're doing a great job minister. We're all on board with the Labour Party program. However and that is so so it's sort of that sort of like signalling that a group of people is interested to it. And sometimes the quite significant group of people is interested to it. Like, I think one of the largest ones we had was around UK's representation UK's recognition of Palestine as estates, which of course has now happened. So that was sort of part of that internal discussion inside the party. So I think that's sort of like the initial way, like, trying to understand parliamentary dynamics is often is the governing party dynamics and open letters, which are both public, private, single, and you try to try to show deference up while also opposition is sort of a really interesting sort of mix of what that actually looks like for, you know, for people to have arguments inside the party about something.

I I I think it's it's interesting because because, APG is a semi unofficial. I sort of what what to get against, like, we should gather all someone should get parliament should gather all the stuff. I mean, hopefully, they get a membership list at least. But, like, I I think it's especially useful if APPGs have a website, so they should, you know, almost always have websites because it's nice explaining what they're doing and they should list their stuff there. I know parallel parliament, has gathered a few more of the doc well, our original approach is to try and gather even more documents, but we sort of read it to op scores in terms of, you know, people not wanting to give us even the documents or that they should they were or that they should have done. So we scaled down to the membership just because we thought that was the most useful thing we could do. But I know in some cases, more information is available on the panel of parliament website who has done a bit more work around APPGs in that way. So, some of the information will be there. But, yes, essentially, I I don't think we're gonna build a big dataset around APPGs, but we're sort of very interested in them because it's sort of, like, adjacent to lots of other things, like trying to explain what's going on there. So I think the short answer to your question is no, but I get a lot of words in the meantime, so hopefully some of them are useful. But but it is very interesting.

Yeah. Including debates that are raised but awaiting dates, Alex. I don't know if you had any thoughts on that or if we've don't know if you can see that one in the q and a. Yeah. It's it's it's one of those things. There's there's, like, a lot of things in TheyWork for you that in principle had a big feature. There's just a lot of them. So I think we're unlikely to do that in the near future, but also remember that as something that might be helpful. It's sort of there there are lots of small areas where we could we could make things better, and it's sort of trying to pick the right route through what what's easy and what has the most value, but definitely an interesting area. It it's it's sort of like what is helpful in helping build good data at parliament, what is helpful about people helping people understand their MP specifically. And I think what we're trying to do for this update is bring in more information that is, like, helping people understand their specific MP. And, yes, this could just be a try try to get that balance right between here is some data, but also here is the context around that so that we can properly explain how parliament's working is a difficult one. So, yes, good idea. We're probably not gonna do it soon, but it's a good idea. If somebody wants to give us loads of money, that would expedite it.