Ask David Miliband about Afghanistan.

by Keith

We are pleased at Yoosk that the Foreign Office are once again using the Yoosk platform to gather questions for David Miliband.

In the run up to the London Conference on Afghanistan on the 28th of January, the foreign Office are inviting questions on the subject of UK foreign policy in Afghanistan. To post a question or to browse trhe questions other people have been asking, you can visit their page here.

We are excited about this for two reasons. Firstly of course, because we believe that everybody should have the right to ask our politicians questions, and especially about matters as important as foreign policy in countries where our troops are fighting and secondly because of nthe technical aspects involved.

In the past, the Foreign Office have used our dedicated FCO page but on this occasion, they needed the Yoosk page to display inside their own website. This threw up a number of issues around page size and user journey but we are happy to say that our web team have managed to resolve those issues and got the page up and running on time for the FCO deadline of earlier this week.

We now have two sites running with yoosk embedded within them - the Birmingham Post embedded yoosk earlier last year - and we can see that this is the model that people are going to be turning to more and more. For this reason we are developing an API which  will be available soon and will allow this kind of integration to be performed by anyone. We will be posting more about the API here once we are nearer completion but in the meantime, if you have any questions or comments about it, please feel free to post them here.

Voting begins in our 'Britain's Best MP' Campaign

by Keith

At the beginning of December, we started our 'Britain's Best MP' Campaign. The thinking behind it was to highlight that, despite all the negative press surrounding politics, there are MPs out there who genuinely do a good job for the UK.

We asked users of our website to send in their nominations for Best MP and to send us the questions they would like to put to the nominees. All eight nominated MPs agreed to answer and you can compare what they said on our home page now and cast your vote in our Poll, which will be ‘live’ until the 31st December.

These are the MPs you nominated.

Douglas Carswell (Con Harwich), Lynne Featherstone (Lib Dem Hornsey and Wood Green), Tom Harris (Lab Glasgow South), David Howarth (Lib Dem Cambridge) Chris Mullin (Lab Sunderland South) Bob Russell (Lib Dem Colchester), Gisela Stuart (Lab Birmingham Edgbaston), and Jo Swinson (Lib Dem East Dunbartonshire).

And below is one of the questions which threw up some interesting answers:

'How do you think Uk democracy could be improved?'



Tom Harris has a pessimistic view that just changing the electoral system won’t engage more people in  democracy because, as he says, the ‘democratic process isn’t of interest to most people.’ Is this the case though, or is it just that nobody has yet found a way to present the democratic process in an appealing way?

This is what we are trying to do – make politics a bit more fun and engage more people. We let our users choose the questions which will be asked, have introduced voting, we try and keep answers short and publish them in an easy to view format and then we allow feedback on the answers.

We are not the only ones either, with ideas to liven up the political arena, with Simon Cowell possibly getting involved next year. Until he does though, and telephone voting becomes the norm in political debates, please nip over to our website and take part in our old-fashioned online poll and cast your vote for ‘Best MP.’

MPs R Us: visiting Parliament reveals a very human mix of personalities and behaviours

We’ve seen the headlines, read the comment threads, heard the conversations in the pubs and over the dinner table: MPs are not like us, they are not good people.

A quick Google search for the phrase ‘MPs are Scum’ gives 137,000 results.

A similar search using the word ‘Vermin’ returns 40,900, the C-word gets 25,000 and ‘MPs are Bastards’ tops them all with 183,000. Admittedly, sometimes it is the odd MP calling other people scum but most of the time the abuse is aimed firmly their way.

Here’s one that stands out: http://raedwald.blogspot.com/2009/05/lets-trash-these-troughing-scum.html

“These MPs are scum. They are thieves. Their avarice, their grasping mendacious filthy peculation of public funds, their troughing porcine deception, their self-serving self-righteous....”

There’s more but you get the picture.

Intrigued, as we all are by evil and nastiness, this week I ventured into the Commons to meet five of these ‘troughing scum’ and here’s what I found:

-An MP who was obviously so tired he was struggling to keep his eyes open but who still managed to chair a meeting and to ask some intelligent questions .

-A genuinely warm and open young MP who was quieter than usual and who seemed pre-occupied at the meeting. She later tweeted that she was ‘ a bit miffed at being dropped from the BBC Question Time panel at 48hrs notice-because of the Iraq enquiry’. I’d be disappointed too.

-An MP who talked about locking himself in his house and drawing the curtains in the face of a barrage of press attention, and of the effects of all this on his family. This MP is very respected by a great many entrepreneurs and innovators for his willingness to listen to their problems.

-A down to earth and deeply committed woman who breaks all the stereotypes of how a typical MP looks, talks and behaves. If it wasn’t for all women shortlists, she almost certainly wouldn’t even be an MP.

-An ‘old school’ MP who is incredibly knowledgeable about China and Vietnam and who clearly wants to see the UK act as a force for good in those countries. What struck me was that he didn’t have a computer anywhere in his office , so no fancy gadgetry for him on expenses.

All these people were very different in personality, behaviour and politics but they all seemed to share a commitment to serving the public and their country. They have one other thing in common: they are not scum.

Are most of MPs flawed? Certainly. But then, aren’t we all? Help us find Britain’s best MP by interviewing them with your questions- find out how by clicking here.

The Yoosk Leadership Contest: help us find the country's best MPs

By Tim

Britain’s Best MP

‘UK Politics is broken’ is the all too common refrain we hear from the media. ‘Something must be done.’ Very often though, that ‘something’ is to sit back and highlight the negative rather than focus on the positive and the best way to ‘fix’ things.

Have some MPs abused the expenses system? Yes. Are all MPs bad? No. Many are hard working people, trying to do their best for their constituents.

We at Yoosk want everyone interested in politics to help us find the MP's who are the best examples of what a good MP is and does.. Then, in conjunction with The Independent newspaper we are going to interview them and find out what makes them tick. What are the experiences that shaped them, what values drive them, how do they behave and what makes them different?

Here's what we want you to do and how it will work:

1. Send us your nomination and a brief reason why you have nominated this person by clicking here or you can twit your nomination to #bestMP or add your nomination in a comment at the end of this post. Or you can just visit the site to see who has been nominated and add your vote.

2. Nominations close on the 27th November.

3. You will then have an opportunity to question the top 10 nominated MP's. Yoosk and the Independent will get the answers and publish them here and on Yoosk. You will have the opportunity to rate answers and the MP's performance via the yoosk website..

4. The winning MP will be the person who finishes at the top of the Yoosk Performance League Table which you can see on the top right of the Yoosk Home page on the closing day 17th December.

We are not looking for what makes a good party leader or how politicians rise to the top of factions or cliques. We think those are different qualities. We are looking for your ideas on the MP's who really stand out as strong, independent and principled voices, who can act with a degree of selflessness and who in doing so, show us a better way.

Yoosk offers a very open forum where both question and answer have a dynamic and an immediacy. ....... and I believe it is important (particularly in these times when we politicians are somewhat unloved) to be out there to show everyone that we do care and care passionately -  which is the reason that I am sure we all got into politics in the first place!' 

Lynne Feathjerstone MP

Why are we doing this?

When it comes to politics and the connections we the public have with the MP's and Councillors who represent us, Yoosk is very much about individuals rather than parties. We like Lynne Featherstone (LibDem), Deirdre Alden (Conservative prospective parliamnetary candidate) and David miliband (Labour) because of what we have personally witnessed: an obvious commitment to listening and engaging with the people they represent.

We want to do our part in making sure we get the best individuals in the next Parliament, irrespective of which party forms a government.

Reasons to be Cheerful..

By Keith

Trying to get Public Figures to answer questions from our users can often be a difficult task - we still haven't succeeded in getting any answers from Gordon Brown for example.

Whenever we get some answers, we see it as an achievement, but occasionally there is extra cause for satisfaction such as when the answers are particularly thoughtful or insightful as were these answers from Mathew Taylor, or when we manage to obtain answers for people who would not normally have a chance to get their voices heard. See this question (the asker of the question is no relation btw) posted to James Purnell and these questions posted from Jordanian citizens and answered by David Miliband.

In the interview which Jonathan Walker conducted with Siôn Simon last week (blogged here earlier) one of the questions came from Alison Smith aka Pesky People who is an ardent campaigner for the rights of disabled and deaf people to have full access to the Web, and after having her question answered, Alison told us this:

'Asking this question means that we are on Siôn's radar and he has been in touch to meet with us. This will enable us to influence, campaign, demand and highlight the digital injustice and discrimination we face. Digital Britain doesn't include Disabled or Deaf people and the discussion of digital inclusion is very tokenistic.'



Having met Alison, I know that she is a determined person and am sure that her persistence is the main reason that she has secured this meeting with Siôn but it's good to know that maybe Yoosk has helped in a small way.

If you would like to know more about Alison's campaign, you can visit her blog here. Nobody could argue against the justice of her cause.

New Features and a New Look on Yoosk .

by Tim

We've just made some quite significant updates to the Yoosk platform and we would like your feedback.

First a quick explanation of how the changes fit into the scheme of things. This is really only an interim upgrade which we wanted to do before we get started on a thorough overhaul of Yoosk, which we plan to complete by early 2010. This rebuild will happen in stages and will include the implementation of the development work funded by 4IP, which was announced here.

What you see at the moment is not related to this forthcoming rebuild but is rather an interim fix to address some quite pressing priorities we have identified over the last 6 months.

1. League Table and widget.

This aggregates all the positive scores that public figures receive when they answer. It has been widgetised and can be easily embedded on blogs. Each Yoosk channel (Parliament, Birmingham, FCO etc) has its own league table, so as we grow the number of local Yoosks and Yoosk channels for different organisations, the public figures who appear there will be able to keep track of how users rate their interview performance.

We know that this is a challenging proposition to sell to some public figures and we welcome feedback on how best to position this.

2. Key Page redesign

You'll see we have tried to make a clearer user journey- we have some way to go yet we know, but we hope you'll agree that it is an improvement. Above all, we've attempted to make it more obvious what Yoosk is for and how users can get involved.

Examples of this are:

-embed code for the two widgets up there on the front page

-Clearer links to Yoosk channels

-A simpler question box making it obvious that users must ask a named individual

3. Learn More site guide.

In order to give greater clarity on exactly how Yoosk can be used by different individuals and organisations, we have created a Learn More section.

We look forward to getting your feedback and hope you enjoy the new site.

You the Interviewer.

By Keith

Last week marked something of a 'first' for Yoosk. Birmingham Post journalist Jonathan Walker arranged an interview with the Minister for Creative Industries, Siôn Simon and used the Yoosk platform to gather the questions from the general public which he would ask in the interview.

It worked like this. First Jonathan was registered as a 'reporter' on Yoosk which allowed him limited access to the Yoosk CMS, he then wrote an article in the Birmingham Post explaining that he was going to interview Siôn Simon and inviting questions from his readers and directing them to post the questions on Siôn's page on Yoosk.

Jonathan caught up with Siôn at the Labour Party Conference in Brighton and, camera in hand, asked him the questions gathered from Yoosk.He uploaded the answers to his personal Youtube channel and published them in the Post and also on Yoosk.

This is not the first occasion when journalists have used the Yoosk platform, (City University students have conducted several 'Yoosk' interviews) but it was the first occasion when the complete process from gathering the questions to posting the answers on the Yoosk site had been managed by an independent journalist.

The exercise went without a hitch which was good from a technical viewpoint, and seven questions were posted for, and answered by Siôn. Many Thanks are due to Jonathan, Siôn and our 'question posters' for their cooperation and support.

If you would like to conduct your own Yoosk interview (you don't need to be a recognised journalist), contact us via our 'Contact' page, and we will be happy to work with you on your idea.