Hello again. I'm Miff, Communications Manager at MySociety. We recently launched a new vote information platform, votes. Theyworkforyou.com. And this is the first step towards making it much easier to understand the context around how your own MP voted. And also, if you're a Specialist, you'll find lots of new tools and data that you can use. We had an online launch event for this and you can listen to that right now. As well as Alex getting into the more technical details, we'll first of all hear Julia talking about some of the milestones in TheyWork4U's history and doctor Ben Worthy sharing some of his fascinating research on how MPs and the general public have, through history, used voting records. I'll put the links in our show notes to everything that gets mentioned in the recording. And also, if you'd rather watch this than listen to it, you can do just that on the MySociety site. So, again, I'll make sure that that link is in the show notes. Hello, everyone. Welcome. I'm Louise Crowe. I'm chief executive of MySociety.

Yeah. So I'm setting the scene a little bit today by talking about why we publish information and the sort of thinking that we, have done going into it and the way that it has changed over the twenty years that they work for you has existed. So it is nice to start with a little bit of history. In the late seventeenth century, sir Francis Willington said, it is not national nor rational that the people who sent us hither should not be informed of our actions. And that basic principle is the one that guides TheyWorkForYou, making sure that people are aware of the voting behaviors of the politicians that they elected. And it's worth, like, kind of considering what we're doing in a bit of context here because there's a nice fact that it was after the grape fire in 1834, that MPs finally agreed to have a second division lobby built so that actually there were distinct voting lists between the eyes and the nose, and that you could, ascertain how your MP had voted. Until then, it had was just the job of individual MPs, who tried their very best to make lists and then provided them to newspapers, but they weren't accurate. And so, yes, parliament has a long history of changing what and how it communicates about boats, and we are just little part of that history trying to nudge it forwards. So that basic premise is this. It should be easy to see how your MP has voted. And it's worth saying not just your MP, your other representatives too. Their work for you does cover the devolved parliaments from across The UK as well as the Westminster parliament. But although it should be easy, it is worth saying that we recognize that voting and how parliament works and what to vote means is complicated. So we do put a lot of thought into how we display that information and how we communicate it. And our thinking of it has changed over time, and I'm going to talk a little bit about that too. We take two approaches which are briefly we try to provide more information, voting information, than parliament, does at source by reworking parliamentary data and by making summaries that are easy to understand and engage with. And then also as well as trying to make that complicated information simpler by displaying it in different ways, we argue for the information to be simpler to begin with. The processes of voting and how parliament publishes its own voting data could be simpler to begin with. So I'm gonna cover both of these, starting first with providing more voting information. Again, a little bit of history here. I've got two screenshots of Parliament's website in 2005, and they work for you in 2005. And just recognizing that back in 2005, you could see your MP's email if they had one. You can see there quite a few didn't. Their personal, independent website if they had one, and their biography on Dodds. But there wasn't the same way of having an individual MP page and looking at your MP's voting record. Whereas TheyWorkForYou with help from the public whip was, making that available back in 2005. And some of these things have stayed the same. So that back then, we were publishing voting records and linking to the relevant votes as we do now. And, yeah, this just I wanted to touch on this relationship with parliament where we are trying to encourage them to move forward. Back in 2005, we were breaking copyright by, publishing this information in this way, but, ultimately led to new forms of licensing. So more tools and projects were legal and and available. And that's very much the spirit that we still operate in and the spirit of this event today, which is to say, we're producing more voting information than ever. Alex is going to cover that. And not only is it improving TheyWorkForYou and the information we provide on there, but it's making available the opportunity to make other tools and resources and do lots of interesting things with the data as well. But that's Alex's role, so I'll leave that to him later. Obviously, as Louise mentioned in the introduction, a really prominent part of TheyWorkForYou is our work in summarizing votes and producing these voting record summaries where, we say if MPs voted consistently one way or the other or sometimes voted a certain way. And here, just to sort of talk briefly about our approach, we think it's really important to try to be both clear and accurate. And we want to make a simple something that's simple and easy to understand if you're not an expert in how parliament works, but always providing links to more source data and more opportunities to explore if you'd like to. But it's worth saying that we do recognize that people are busy and they may not always explore the source data. And so it's really important to us to get these summaries as accurate and clear as possible and make clear why we choose the things that we do and the process that we go through to do those. And so you'll always find links to giving feedback and to understanding more on they work for you. And, yes, as I've already mentioned, today we're having this event because we're launching they work for you votes, and we're making even more of the source data available. But I will leave that to Alex later. So as well as the work that we do to make, it easier to understand how your MP has voted and to summarize those votes, as I mentioned, we also do some, work behind the scenes trying to argue for improvements to voting processes. So there's taking compliment complicated information and trying to make it a bit simpler, but there's also trying to simplify outsource. So here our principle is that it should be easier for MPs to vote in the first place and for everybody to understand those votes. And here, we're also balancing processes that create transparency, but we're also really concerned and sensitive to the circumstances of representatives' lives, what it is like to be an MP, the job of an MP, and how the working conditions of MPs are changed by how voting changes. So we believe that the House of Commons should defer votes to a standardized voting time where you could have multiple votes quickly in succession through electronic means. At the moment, each division, has eight minutes attached to MPs being allowed to walk through either lobby. But on average, a vote takes somewhere between twelve and eighteen minutes. And so it's a long path of the parliamentary day that it takes for an MP to vote. The current proxy voting schemes are mostly controlled by the whips, and we believe that they should be extended more so to MPs' personal discretions. They should have more, charge over those things. And also alongside the physical process of voting, talking about the data that parliament publishes, Alex will talk a bit to towards our steps towards emotions database, but parliament could itself maintain and publish a database of motions to make this all much clearer. And also key link schedules, which is a kind of track changes on legislation. So you'd be able to see much more clearly what an individual amendment was doing to the legislation. And finally, a key part of TheyWorkForYou is that we publish MPs' votes within the context of their party, and so we say how they compare to their party. But we always have argued that voting instructions given to MPs, the whipping instructions, should be made public. Sometimes this is talked about like it's obvious, but I think for lots of people, it's not obvious. And so I think there's a lot to be gained from that. Before I hand over to Ben, I just wanted to recognize, as we said at the beginning, that, we try to take a really thoughtful approach to voting information because what an individual vote means is complicated. And, again, looking to the history, how we have talked about votes has changed over time. We know that when you start highlighting aspects of behavior, this does change behavior, and Ben is going to go into a lot more detail about this. But a few things that we have noticed and sort of changed over time and tried to adapt towards, back in the early days, we were publishing, statistics based on how regularly MPs intervened in debates. MPs started talking, really, really briefly to try to, up their rankings, and so those kind of comparisons we've removed over times. In general, rankings are back and, like, kind of league tables of MPs isn't sub like, something that we publish anymore. The comparisons that we do publish are within parties. And, also, the the types of votes that are included in our voting record summaries have changed. Some of the changes that we made to votes to make sure they were focusing on votes that have parliamentary impact. And so, for example, we no longer include opposition day votes as part of our voting record summaries. So, yes, to say that, the very much the through line has carried out through throughout, they work for use history, which is we want people to be able to see and easily understand how their MP is voted. But we acknowledge the impact that our work has, and we're trying to monitor and make that as, successful and helpful as possible. So it's changed between 2005 and 2025. But, yeah, we hope in positive ways. And the way that we try to find out whether what we're doing is working and having the impact that we'd like is by asking for feedback, which you'll see us ask all over our websites, and we really do mean it. Not only just in general are they helpful, but, for things that are really important that we get right, things like the voting records and what gets included and how they get aligned, we have a form you can fill out to tell us if you think new votes should be added or if you have any, thoughts or concerns with our current ones. The final thing to say, before I pass over because we are a charity now, it's kind of my job to say it is that, one of the constraints for making for us making they work for you as successful as possible is funding. It's something that we're always looking for to improve our service. So just in case someone would like to fund they work for you, has great ideas about how we can improve it. We'd always love to have that conversation.

than they were about their voting record. Thanks so much for listening. Thanks, Ben. We'll hand over to Alex now. Thank you for that, Ben. That was fantastic. I'm gonna be talking about, the new cycle launch in DayWork for you votes. So, here is the sort of the new cycle launch in DayWork for you votes, which is a new platform for presenting the most information that, is meant for anyone to use, but it's also we've been designing to sort of for our own work to help us do better work on their work for you and to be able to do better analysis. So, our initial client with this is we wanted better tools and information, to help understand and create these version summaries. We wanted them to see as a glance more information about a range of votes and to be able to dive in and understand what those votes were about. We wanted more flexibility and number crunching and to be able to do both, both do and support more ad hoc, analysis of votes. Part of this meant untangling some of our processes. We've gone through a slow process over the last few years of building new data flows and tools, migrating our existing approach into new systems. And the end result of that is they work foryouvotesorvotes.theyworkforyou.com, a new annex that is useful in itself, but also a foundation for a range of work we're doing that we hope is useful for others too. So the basic bread and butter of what we do is display the results of a vote and calculate breakdowns by party and identify disagreements within parties. But we're now what we're also adding is these basic breakdowns by party to say who was for and against the motion and some of the stand, like, divisions inside a party. We also have a searchable voting list that shows how individual people voted and also this party alignment, which highlight rebels who will have a lower alignment with the party. So that's also sortable and searchable. Where we're going beyond this sort of analysis of the numbers is in generating analysis of parliamentary dynamics. So based on how, votes are divided in a particular way, we've represented still one of eight common clusters reflecting who was proposing the particular vote, divisions among opposition parties, and levels of participation. And the purpose of this is to be able to very quickly get a sense of what the interesting votes are to look at and just generally understand at a glance when looking down a list all the particularly interesting votes happening in that day or month. We calculate these for all the new votes we know about. For House of Commons votes, these are calculated and published within minutes the votes being published on the Commons voting website. The thing we're really doing that's different in this website is we put a lot of work into identifying what's actually being voted on. Often, it's quite hard to work out the motion that relates to a vote. It's not always printed immediately before the vote in the hand side, and it isn't directly linked to in the API data. So to do this, we've got a very complicated parser to identify things that look like motions and try and assign them to the right decision. Having the text of the motion makes it easier for us to understand and do analysis on the motion. So from this, we can link to basic, descriptions of different vote types, like, amendments, second readings, approved statutory instruments, and provide additional descriptions of how that particular vote fits into the parliamentary process. From here, what we can also do is something that a few people will also over the years is votes, that are associated with specific piece of legislation going through parliament. So we now automatically tag votes that seem like they're related to the same bill to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of a bill. I will say this is slightly temperamental at the moment because it depends how things are named and labeled. But it is better than nothing, and we're seeing how we can adapt it over time. The biggest difference between TheyWorkForYou and other systems that are tracking votes is we don't just track votes. We also include, decisions that are made without a vote, which are what we call agreements, to and and from this, somebody linked to the relevant motion was decided. We do this for a few reasons. It was practically a necessity when we were trying to assign motions to decisions to know about all the agreements because to design the right motion, the right decision, you have to understand which all decisions were being made. But also, it's just useful to have a canonical reference for different part of parliamentary process. Often, there's a high profile issue that could be passed without a vote, and people go looking for the vote, and they can't find it. And that causes confusion. Am I in the right place? So by having a canonical link where we can sort of talk about here is the decision that was made. Here's how it links the legislation. Here's how it links the motion. We can show more about how the parliamentary process works and can tag them as part in part the process of passing legislation. In rare cases, we're also including these in voting summaries. We did did this for instance on, respectively, on the vote to, set a net zero target in The UK and some on the standards committee votes. We're generally conservative on this because agreements can be hard to interpret. They might mean everyone was a support and said there was no opposition. But what they can also mean is where, fundamentally, it's known who would win the vote. And as Julia covered, voting could take quite a long time, and so it's costly. And so agreements are a way where effectively everyone agree not to spend the time for a known outcome. So it can reflect both this is very important and everyone supports it, or it could reflect, actually, this is not controversial, but also not widely seen as important. So by pulling these out, we wanna shed a bit more light to how this aspect of parliament works because most decisions made, lots of especially in terms of the internal movement around stuff are made by this sort of consensus. A result of the sort of what we've been doing behind the scenes is that, they work for you votes now powers that they work for you votes and summaries. So this is where we group rated votes together to show a record on they work for you. Building on last year's change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, this new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voter summaries for different time periods. So we can now show an all time and a this parliament view, which means we can feel more comfortable putting more and more votes into the this parliament view, then they won't get swamped by all the votes at the same time as reflecting the implication of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset each election. These voting summaries are currently complete up to the start of this year. We will do an update covering the 2025 in June. And here is a part of the site that's currently incredibly boring, but I'd like in the long run to be the most interesting part. As Ben covered, an impact that they work for you has been more public explanations of by representatives of how they voted. We'd like to start recording this to make them more accessible to people viewing representatives' voting records. So divisions, agreements, and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or links. We can also record information about the voting party voting instructions when this becomes public. We test this out on specific votes, but our plan in the long run is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes. And this will both add more information to day work for you, but also create a general resource of finding out not only how people have voted, but why. So I think this is sort of one of the directions we wanna take with this site. It's not just, it's where can we build on the official information to give people more opportunities to give representatives more opportunities to communicate and more people more chances to find out information that is relevant to these specific votes. We want one thing we really want to do with this is make it a platform lots of people can build on, which will gonna make more and more of the information accessible and they work for you over time to reach our wider audience. But we want to raise the step raise the standard and ease of, analysis of parliamentary data. So making the data not just available through an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easier for research and analysts to get the benefit of all the work we've done joining up this data, without having to do it themselves. So as a side effect of how we're working with this data, you can now run SQL queries almost directly against the data we hold. We don't have to iterate through APIs a lot. We'll be doing some guides on how to get the most out of the raw data we're publishing. But, generally, the goal we want here is to to lower the bar to explore and further information so that if you have a question that can be answered exploring it, it is easy to jump to how you answer that question rather than how do you deal with five or six different sources of data. So, over the next few months, we're gonna be testing that annotate annotation feature, starting with the assisted die inferred reading, which, as a free vote, especially benefit from gathering statements from MPs about how they vote. We have a spreadsheet which we'll be sharing on social media where we're trying to capture statements from MPs stating their stance on this issue so we can then re annotate that vote, and they work for you votes with that information. We'll also be adding coverage of, roughly called, like, statements and signatures. But the goal of this is to capture early day motions in parliament in the same system in a way that's generalizable to other, like, lists of MPs, such as signing a petition or signing it in your when a group of MPs sign a letter. We want to be able to for a range of things that are effectively MPs signaling. So these are often things that do not have direct practical implications, but our MPs signal that I have a view on this stance. I am part of this group, and we want to help make an agent campaign is in understanding MPs' interest and put into the MPs to, you know, MPs that are useful to talk to. So, those are sort of the things that plans would like to extend over the next few months, and results that will appear in their work for you and in our office, the local intelligence hub. Going beyond these, these are not currently funded projects, but what we'd like to extend is further. The first aspect is devolved parliaments. We've currently included agreements and motions for the Scottish parliament in part because they publish a NICE motions database, which is one of our recommendations recommendations for the UK parliament. So the implementation was far, far easier. In principle, we want to try turning on the motion detector for the senate, which might work fine. We just need to budget time for, adapt adaptations needed there. We don't currently cover votes in the Northern Ireland Assembly at all because they work for you scrapers to not extract the divisions from the transcript. This is something we can fix. Noble nine assembly publishes lots of great data we can make use of. We need to do some additional work to properly display the results of cross community votes. So here, my thinking is to sort of where we can define a set of linked work. We might be able to work with volunteers to make progress on. So just chipping away at the problems and getting all the information from different parliaments into the system. And one of the benefits of this is you can start to see, like, legislative consent on bills. So for instance, there's there's one example in this I can't remember where, the Scottish Parliament has given legislative consent to a bill. It appears in the same length in the same list as as the votes in the commons. And so there is there's something to be said like seeing The UK as a as a parliament with five chambers, and being able to understand how things are flowing between all of these is helpful to understand. And the second bit is the House of Lords. For the moment, we are covering the votes in the House of Lords, but we're not currently extracting the motions, or the agreements. I'd like to do more of that because it's interesting to understand, like, where do the changes that eventually make the bills come from? And especially one of the, assets that we've built is very, very complicated system to extract the motions, for what MPs are voting on. Sometimes what you get is we disagree with this law's amendment 16. It'd be very nice to know what law's amendment 16 was. Currently, these are published. They're not included in Hansel. They're sort of published in a set of PDFs of the amendments papers people moving between houses. Ideally, we think this should be published better, but I think we can work with what's there. And so here, what I'd like to do is wrap this up as a package of work, improving our ability to help understand and scrutinize the work of the house of lords. So in general, this is a work in progress. There are forms all over the site to flag mistakes. In particular, the motion extract, we've, you know, tested a bunch of stuff. There are going to be problems somewhere. If you see something that's wrong, hit the button. That helps us reflect it for the future. This is already a site that's powering their work for you, empowering what people are seeing every day. I want it to be it's useful to us. I want it to be useful to other people. So if there are ways it can be more useful, let us know. And I think we are now able to move to questions, either for us about this or any of Ben's research.

Thank you so much, Alex. We have got some, questions coming through. I think you have covered some of this in some of the work that, you were just talking about. But one of the questions was, what are your next plans for TheyWork for You votes? Out of the things you told us, is there anything you would particularly prioritize, or do you think that there are some dream things,

that you haven't mentioned that you would like to see one day? So, like, the the annotations bit is the best I'm most keen on in the near future because I think that's something where we can sort of demonstrate that it's useful from the outside, like, gather more this information in one place and do instead. We'll look into in some of our work, we're like, we think parliament can do this better. We want to demonstrate how. But also in other aspects, we're aware of where we can do things that parliament can't because it's, you know, it's it has lots lots of, powers and resources. It also has constraints because it has to do a certain set of things in, you know, in neutral ways governed by how MPs want it to be run. And so from the outside, there are things where you can do that are less hard easy to do inside parliament. So stuff like annotations is where we see that being a key thing. Similarly, on the, we've got as you sort of said at the start, we'd like information about the whips to be published. I am curious to the extent to which we can systemize leak leaking it. So that's some of the things I want to build towards is can we effectively make weapon information public without actually requiring things to be published from within Parliament itself. So those are like the the steps you want to explore over the next few months. It is better working representatives to see if they want to engage the system, how we can engage with the system, and how we get and when we start gathering this information, how we get it to people, into they work for you, into our systems to get the most from that information.

Yeah. Really helpful. Thanks. I think sometimes we get feedback that voting is just one part of what an MP does or that it's nuanced. And I think we want to capture all of those things, and we want they work for you to and show those. And so, yeah, absolutely great steps in that direction. We've got another one here. How can I subscribe to hear more about those topics that I care about? Is that still why they work for you? Like, we run the alerts, or is there now more information via the vote sub site?

It's we don't have any alerts directly off the they work for you site. In principle, you could set up stuff for the API if you're technically able. But I guess the thing to say that's most relevant to that is next month, we're gonna be releasing another update to TheyWorkForYou, specifically looking at the email alerts and especially improving our, keyword alerts functions to make it easier to find debates and votes on particular issues. So what I'd say is, TheyWorkForYou is still the site for that, but we will be getting better at that pretty soon. So, say subscribe to our newsletter for information about when there's new features launch.

And here's a question. Maybe, Luis, you could also want to come on in on this. Having looked at my society for a long time. Have you ever made changes to their work for you platform based on direct feedback from a member of the commons or lords? Are you transparent about this? I I know that the, the example that Ben mentioned, the Robert Larkin one, we kind of, like, wrote a whole blog about this, made us think about certain things. And we hear from MPs, and members of the house a lot all the time in terms of updating their contact information, other parts of,

how we do things. No. The my society they work for you blog is a treasure trove of all of the, like, decisions and changes and, and things that we've made over time and the communication we've had. We've got a question here. If any serious lie or foul play is uncovered, do you liaise with other organizations such as Full Fact or Hope Not Hate? I wouldn't say lies or, foul play is something that really comes into TheyWorkForYou in terms of votes because it is a record of, how people are voting. Look. It's incredibly useful when,

trying to understand for the voting summaries what's going on with these. Look for organizations for every done summaries. But we tend to be a bit behind doing the, voting summaries as, like, we have, like, a business at my period at the moment. And partly why that's useful is other people have the time to write detailed explanation of what's going on with them. So we're very much building on the work of other organizations when we come to that point. We take seriously and think carefully about what each vote means in term in policy terms. And so as Alex is saying, yeah, the work of other organizations helps us there. Alex, a question maybe for you. How does the clustering

part of your votes work? The clustering

is basically what we wanted was a shorthand that worked across parliaments. So what we do is for each vote, we create six columns of percentages, saying, was the government, did the government vote for, against, or was absent, and did opposition parties vote for, against, or absent. And so that sort of creates, the class the means for all the votes we knew about up to that point, including the ones that devolve parliament to to create a set of clusters and sort of roughly then work out what they will what what what they are actually signifying. So the the thing about clustering process is it's kind of inherently arbitrary. We could have 20 if we wanted, but that is sort of a good stopping point. So, basically, how this currently works is, when votes are loaded in, it compares them to where to the centers of those clusters and say what the best cluster is. And, also, if it seem if it's roughly speaking, a a fit, but it's a bit out, is it but is an outlier, we sort of flag it as an outlier. So for instance, the, second reading of the recent assistant dying bill was a good one for this because it's a free vote. It the parliamentary dynamic should be all over the place. The cluster shouldn't pick it up properly. And it goes, yeah. This looks like roughly like something the government's posing that the opposition is rejecting, but seems a bit weird, which is what you'd expect from a free vote. So we also have somebody to go in and then modify that directly, but it's in general sort of useful for us, like, going down a column and going like low participation votes. Interesting. What's that about? Or, like, these are, you know, these are the strong conflicts. And also just especially, like, what was the direction of the vote in terms like, is this an opposition moment being proposed? Is this a government moment? So just it it just helps us, like, at a glance to try to understand, like, what's happening that day in parliament. Once it's going through, like, 20 votes at a time. Well, I can also take the, vote motion off the house of lords, quickly because that's the type of question. Yes. It does. They're back in the comments on that. We're not currently using that information, but it's available. It's the ping pong between the houses that's a bit unclear. But, definitely, the house lot is better publication on the amendments.

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Ben, if you don't mind me putting you on the spot, I guess it would be great to hear your reflections on some of the things that we've been talking about today, some of the the stuff that Alex has been working on and talked to us through, any of the other questions or thoughts, changes since you've done your research or, yeah, any reflections?

but that's not my society's fault. It's the fact that whipping is secret. But that would be a really important thing to know because most MPs most of the time vote according to their width, especially now when you've got so many new MPs as well. Yeah. And you're absolutely right. I think in our dream world, we would show loads more. We know we want to be a site where, people can find out about all of the different things that their MP does. But as you say, there's only so much data available. And I think some of this annotations, and EDMs and others work that we're doing is trying to go some way to that. UI improvement features. I think any any sort of feedback or features for They Work For You support at theyworkforyou.com is a good email address to write to and tell us what you think. Also, there's a big form on the website at the moment. When amendments, typically, those from small parties are not selected by the speaker, is there a way you can indicate this to people looking at the votes which do take place? I know that, yeah, there's been votes re and amendments, recently that people were really trying to follow. And another great example of how confusing parliament can be, and then combining that one, Alex, with one, any tracking of legislative consent motions to decisions and involve legislatures would be very interesting to the commons library.

Taking the legislative consent ones first. Yes. I think I've spotted a few in the Scottish Parliament. I'd like to see how that does with the motion detector, see if that's coming up and okay. So please get in touch. There's something specific that's useful to talk about there. And then if that's stabilizing in the in the Scottish Parliament, it's sending that to the senate in the Northern. I understand it will be a nice thing to progress from there. So like that, I've seen I've seen a few of them. This would be interesting to, like, keep tracking how that's going. If folks are the only thing that is visible, people's public conversation get a bit confused. And it's like, well, I I want to know what happened with this thing. And the answer is, well, it went nowhere. But there's no specific place you can go to for that. And this sort of so, again, it goes to, having emotions database work to look very closely. So, like, the roads not taken in terms like there was this motion. There was this amendment proposed. It has a real link on a real website, and you can also see it wasn't discussed. So just being able to, like, highlight all those sort of paths not taken in terms of things that didn't need a vote or things that didn't get voted on just helps, like, anchor that wider discussion about how parliament works. And they also just have to say on the, Ben's point about, like, information about why why MPs doing the rest. But, yeah, this is sort of a thing we're sort of aware of what it's like talking about a vote spot. It's like people think that they work for you as the vote site. But probably, if you like, we did the day with you does a lot of other things and especially the email alerts, and we'd like votes to be one of the things that we do as opposed to the main thing that people see us doing. And, there's an interesting project I like. Like, it's a little bit more UK project, but DC inbox. And this is an American academic who essentially subscribes to all the newsletters of, House of Representatives, have representatives of the House of Representatives, and that publishes the results of that. And I think that'd be a really interesting sort of project, again, in, like, what people are choosing to communicate and what people are choosing to do locally. So, like, I'd, like, sort of fit out a bit more of a UK version of that would look like in the same sort of sense that what MPs do isn't just in parliament. It's around the rest of the place, and where can we sort of make that more accessible, more communicable. What would be the most helpful thing for they work for you that parliament could do with its data on votes? You had to pick one thing that parliament could do to make our lives easier.

Alex, what would it be?

I mean, I'd definitely say having just spent all the time building the motions database, not having to do that would be great. And if it and if they could retrospectively make that time pointless, it'd be fantastic just because the it's a fairly horrible piece of code that has, like it's it's got you have to have a lot of different edge cases to properly match the two. So having a system where in some way, you can say this is a motion. This is where it was voted on. The Scottish Parliament effectively has this, that their motions database is linked to the votes database. There's some exceptions, like, when things get amended, but that will be the thing. And so we we want to add value on top of what parliament does. And so the most the more we can do things that parliament can't do for various reasons and the better parliament does things, the resources it has, the more that helps us out. At the same time, as I sort of appreciate, the reason we can do this is because we are able to pull in a slightly more freeform way between these different things without having to say this is an official system, and this is how it all works. So it is easier for us to do some things, but at the same time, it it would be better when it's done at the source. And and we really invite that for people to tell us what were, you know, what are the things that are working and not working.

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