Video clips of MPs speaking....

This is transparently a good idea. The good burghers responsible for the TheyWorkForYou.com site want to provide video, as well as words, of people's contributions in the Commons.

Only hitch is this requires a lot of work, 'tagging' (manually matching) each Commons speech to the words. But they think that lots of people in the Westminster village will see this as mutually beneficial.

Note to MPs, researchers, office staff, campaigners and bloggers - we know that you want to concentrate on matching up the speeches of a particular MP, or of a particular debate.

If it's any encouragement, MySociety thinks, from this, that Harriet Harman's office is against the idea. Interestingly, here's what happened when they tried to do it with the BBC....

This project was initially commissioned and funded by the BBC, who asked mySociety to create a searchable, online video archive of debates based on footage from BBC Parliament. We were thrilled to help out, because we think that it will enhance the public understanding of - and respect for - the work of Parliament. The initial goal of this project was to use the BBC’s captions to help chop up the video into different speeches. Tom Loosemore arranged for access to the BBC’s internal captions data, Etienne Pollard was commissioned to build an open source recording/transcoding/web-serving system (and then donated some of his wages back to pay for enough hard drive space for the video!), Stef Magdalinski donated a network storage array to hold the disks. However, after lots of hard work trying to get our computers to automatically slice up the video into chunks according to the BBC’s captions we concluded that this on its own wasn’t sufficiently accurate to reliably match up every speech in Hansard with the appropriate snippet in our video footage.

Comments

[Mad Max]

What is more important is that the Commons speaker authorises the use of BBC video and is concerned that we might misuse or alter it.

The American C-Span cable network video on the other hand is owned by the American public for non profit use. So what is the difference?

[Mike G]

Can the BBC not make the video material available online to people who can then tag the material itself. Harnessing, wiki-style, the power of the many to do large-scale tasks. As a safeguard measure against malicious or inaccurate tagging, MPs' offices could then 'approve' the tags before they appear online, a la Facebook. It won't be comprehensive but it'll be better than the status quo...

[Mike G]

Can the BBC not make the video material available online to people who can then tag the material itself. Harnessing, wiki-style, the power of the many to do large-scale tasks. As a safeguard measure against malicious or inaccurate tagging, MPs' offices could then 'approve' the tags before they appear online, a la Facebook. It won't be comprehensive but it'll be better than the status quo...

[Mike G]

Can the BBC not make the video material available online to people who can then tag the material itself. Harnessing, wiki-style, the power of the many to do large-scale tasks. As a safeguard measure against malicious or inaccurate tagging, MPs' offices could then 'approve' the tags before they appear online, a la Facebook. It won't be comprehensive but it'll be better than the status quo...