A personal project, originally intended as a product to make UK politics more engaging. Now primarily just a sample app and tech playground.
It started out as a standalone Android client for browsing parliamentary data - something like a basic TheyWorkForYou - but over time I implemented a proper Django-based backend. I wanted to make it more 'sticky', with reasons to use the app regularly, so I started adding social features, allowing users to vote and comment on bills and divisions and even MPs and Lords.
I went quite far down that road before realising I wanted nothing to do with the result: administering something that was quickly turning into a politics-focused social network sounded like hell.
I abandoned the idea of ever actually releasing it, but I still work on it from time to time because it's a 'serious' data-based project which maybe has a decent idea hidden somewhere inside it and I might just figure out what that is some day. If nothing else it gives me an excuse to explore technologies and challenges that I would never normally have reason to bother with.
You can read a bit more about it here if you like. A basic demo webapp (without accounts or social features) can be found at commons.beatonma.org. The repository for the Android app can be found here.