I subscribed to a daily email for a member of Parliament, to see how They Work For You gets the word out for British citizens who want to keep their elected officials accountable. I picked one I knew from past episodes of Murdoch scandal news, Tom Watson. Now I receive a daily email from the site, very nicely set up. Their motto is: Keeping tabs on the UK's parliaments & assemblies.

This morning there is an email, for example, letting me know exactly what Watson said in Parliament yesterday. A link in the email takes me to this page, right down the page to where Watson asks a question of the Secretary of State, who replies in the following paragraph.

In the right margin, several options present themselves. I can write a blog post linking to Watson's single speech or to his speech in the context of the ongoing debate. I can see where this debate appears in the Hansard, which is the rough equivalent of our Congressional Record. Readers who are logged in can add annotations to the speech, providing context or rebuttal or informative links--that's pretty nice. Some key terms in the speeches are set up as links to informative pages of various kinds.

And each speaker's name links to a page devoted to information about his or her record of public service. On Tom Watson's page, like the others, you find an astounding assembly of information. Voting and committee records, profiles on journalism sites, financial records, key issues for this figure, some statistical data, ways to communicate with the person, social media sites, and more. Also, on each of these individual pages there is an invitation to sign up for the daily emails covering the Parliamentary speeches and votes of that person.

That's a very nice example of Tech for Democracy, isn't it? Correct me if I'm wrong, but here in the United States we don't have any tracking of elected officials as good as this in place, do we?

PS. On 9/3 I wrote both Indiana Senators through their web submission sites about this excellent tool now in use overseas, and the two websites returned form email messages within the hour, both promising a proper reply sometime soon. Just now, on 9/10, a second form email has arrived from our Democratic senator, caste as a reply but not mentioning the particular thing I wrote about in any way.