mySociety blog » Events

Is there something part of the government is doing that you’d like to investigate? Find out everything from MPs’ expenses, to the length of allotment waiting lists, to whether your council’s Guy Fawkes bonfire is properly checked for hedgehogs.

mySociety are running a practical workshop on Freedom of Information at OpenTech on 4th July.

The workshop will help you make your first Freedom of Information request, including working out what to request, where to request it from and what exactly to write.

If you’re an old hand, you can get and give tips on how to take requests further.

We’ve got a fantastic team of Freedom of Information (FOI) experts to kick things off and answer hard questions.

• Heather Brooke used FOI to cause the frurore over MPs’ expenses.
• Francis Davey is a lawyer with a specialist knowledge in FOI.
• Elena Egawhary is a freelance journalist, currently working and using FOI for Panorama.
• John Cross, Alex Skene and Richard Taylor are volunteers who run and improve WhatDoTheyKnow, and all use it for their own activism.

Bring a laptop if you have one. Internet will be provided for the workshop only, so we can scour Government websites, and make requests on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow.com website.

As usual, the rest of OpenTech is brimming with great talks, and will be full of interesting geeky wonks and wonky geeks. Book your place here so you can go to them and to the workshop. Hurry, it’s nearly sold out.

Update: WE WON! [the following is now for historical interest]

Uh oh.  Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.

You can help in the following three ways:

1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com - ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3. Write to your local paper to tell them you’re angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety’s never-finished site http://news.mysociety.org might be able to help you here.

NB. mySociety is strictly non-partisan, by mission and by ethics. However, when it looks like Parliament is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction on transparency, we’ve no problem at all with stepping up when changes happen that threaten both the public interest and the ongoing value of sites like  TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

Update: Every page on TheyWorkForYou, our biggest site, is now strongly encouraging people to join the protest.

Update: We’ve sailed past 1000 members to our Facebook group. Onward and upward!

Update: And now past 3000 members! Also, some MPs are claiming that they need to vote for this Order to protect their addresses, even though they already changed to law to do this. Doh!

Update: Now we’re past 6500, and our supporters have mailed their constituency MPs in over 90% of the constituencies in the UK. And rather helpfully, President Obama has just given us a concise explanation for MPs why this is a much bigger issue than some bits of paper and some minor embarrassment:

“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account - to spend wisely, reform bad  habits, and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

mySociety is auctioning two places on our yearly retreat.

This is only the third such retreat in five years, and it is a super-rare occasion when all the various people who make mySociety tick get together. On these retreats we meet to set our agenda for the next year and try to reassess what we’ve done and what we’re about. It’s a fantastic opportunity to meet many of the most talented developers and thinkers in the field of the internet and democracy, people you’d otherwise rarely be able to catch. And it’s a great moment to catch them, pausing for a moment to discuss what we’re about and where we could go next.

I am fully concious that the tickets are not cheap - we are doing this it is to help us cover our costs as a charity.

The door is not closed to the rest of you - most people on this retreat will be volunteers, and you can be too!

We did it! Give us your thoughts on what we’ve done and where we should go next…

There’s now some more space available for our birthday party in London tomorrow. Sign up here if you’re not already on a guest list.

mySociety friend Harry Metcalfe is organising a spillover event for those who couldn’t get a place at this coming weekend’s Barcamp. Let him know if you want to come.

mySociety will be 5 years old in October. We’re holding a party in London to celebrate, but numbers are limited. Sign up here if you want to come.

Update: It’s full, sorry!

The next mySociety Manchester Meetup will be on Weds 20th August in the Briton’s Protection at 7:30 till 9ish.

Informally covering the range of remotely mySociety antics, and anything else we fancy :)

You don’t need to have done anything technical, a fresh approach is enough. If you can’t make it this month, just come along next time, dates and beer mat minutes will be posted to our mailing list.

For more, see this page.

Meet up with the some of the friends of mySociety in Manchester for a social evening in the pub in Manchester.

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OpenTech on 5th July is an informal one-day conference about technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.

mySociety related sessions:

• mySociety session - more on time travel maps, and the launch of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, and a few other surprise announcements
• No2ID and Open Rights Group: State of the Nation
• Here’s the UK EFF
• Power to the People - One year one from the Power of Information Report
• …and much more

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Very sorry, but this week’s tech talk on Thursday has been cancelled due to a sudden urgent engagement which requires the speakers’s attendance. Please, do still come to the next one.

Whew. It’s exciting times.

As you know, we’ve been looking for a new developer for a little while, and I’m pleased to say we’ve found one. We’re very picky, as we have lots of really convulted, diverse software amazing award winning websites to keep going.

Just as important as finding someone technically skilled, it’s important that they are motivated and excited about what mySociety is doing. If you’re hiring any programmer you should be looking for that, especially so for a small, nimble charity like us. We had lots of good applicants, and were sorry we could only afford to choose one.

Please welcome Angie Ahl! She lives in Cumbria, so keeping with our policy of having staff scattered to the four winds. I can see mountain climbing in my future. Angie runs a web design company working mainly in the film and music industries. I’ll try and persuade her to post here about what she gets up to with us.

Other things - there’s another one of our Disruptive Technology talks in London next Thursday. It’s by Jason Kitcat, who not only is head of technology at netmums.com, but also co-ordinated the Open Rights Group’s electronic voting trials observations earlier in the year. Read the fascinating report - there’s a bit where overall control of the Scottish Parliament literally hung off the edge of the page of an Excel spreadsheet. Sign up now to come and see Jason speak next week.

Speaking of the Open Rights Group, it is astonishingly two years since a PledgeBank pledge got them started with 1000 supporters. Danny O’Brien has written a fun summary of what they’ve been up to. If they can do this, then what could you do with PledgeBank?

You might fancy this anarchic conference. BarcampUKGovweb “is about creating a shared vision for UK government web activity, and establishing the UK government digital network - bringing together the community of webbies within central government and the wider public sector.”.

The next mySociety Disruptive Tech Talk is a week today at 7.30pm at the London Knowledge Lab on Emerald St.

This time we have Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map. When Open Street Map started a few years ago, I thought it would never take off. Earlier this year I accidentally went to their conference in Manchester, and was blown away. There’s a whole community of active people, collaboratively building a vector map of not just the whole country, but the whole world. And it is very usable now - for example, my home town of Cambridge is extremely high quality.

If you’re interested in mapping, or in how to organise communities that disrupt with technology, then come along. But please sign up as the last event was full to capacity! It’s free.

Last week we seemed to spend all week in London. Partly interviewing people, partly redesigning PledgeBank, partly plotting the overthrow of Parliament (joke), partly preparing for the election (thank god it didn’t happen - we’d be far too busy). We even did some general work, scurrying wifi out of the ICA and at one of our trustee’s offices.

As if that wasn’t enough, Stef gave the first of our disruptive technology talks, mainly about Farm Subsidy and UNDemocracy. It was interesting, engaging, fantastically attended, and turned into beer and Sushi. Adam’s posted up a recording of the talk (scroll down in the comments). Make sure you come to the next one on 1st November.