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Search for “2008” on WhatDoTheyKnow

Show results from our database of over a million Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to UK public authorities.

We Know A Lot More: a quarter of a million pieces of information since 2008

Back in January 2012, I wrote a blog post to mark a milestone: WhatDoTheyKnow, our Freedom of Information site, had processed 100,000 requests. Just three years later, that number now stands at 250,000. That represents a quarter of a million requests for information that have been processed through the site, and published for anyone to…

FixMyTransport launches – mySociety’s biggest project since 2008

Everyone at mySociety is quite bubbling with excitement at the news that we’re today officially launching FixMyTransport.com , mySociety’s first new core charitable website since WhatDoTheyKnow launched in 2008. We’ve never before launched a site that took so much work to build, or that contained so much data. What is it for? FixMyTransport has two goals –…

Summing up 2008

According to some, today is the day when the world is going to be saved. Not sure if I agree with that, but recognise that the inauguration of Barack Obama is of some importance :-)). And, naturally, so is the work carried out by mysociety.org. I therefore thought today would be a good time to…

What would the world look like without WhatDoTheyKnow?

Yesterday we shared the news that WhatDoTheyKnow has processed its millionth public request.  The site’s been around since 2008, nearly as long as the UK’s right to information, and we think it’s fair to say that we’ve had some impact on the world during that time. Let’s go back, just for a moment, to 2006…

20th anniversary: the speech

Read more about our 20th anniversary event Thank you for joining us to celebrate mySociety’s 20th anniversary. It’s brilliant to be able to toast 20 years of using data and digital tools to empower people.   One of my favourite descriptions of our work was written a few years ago by the journalist Zoe Williams.…

How many rubber bands the Royal Mail uses, and other amazing facts revealed through FOI

We recently ran a survey, asking the public to tell us how they’ve used our Freedom of Information site, WhatDoTheyKnow.  To get people thinking, we put a number of prompts on social media: we asked journalists to tell us what stories they’ve uncovered through the site; and campaigners and activists to tell us how they’ve…

What we want to know about WhatDoTheyKnow

Have you used our Freedom of Information website, WhatDoTheyKnow, for something noteworthy? Or do you have fond memories of it that you’d like to share? Please tell us all about it here. Perhaps you’re: A journalist who used FOI requests sent via the site (or the Pro service) to inform news stories A campaigner who…

Helen Cross

Helen joined us as a staff member in 2022, but she’d been involved with mySociety, and specifically our Transparency services, for many years before that. “I was the 1,787th person to sign up for a WhatDoTheyKnow account, so a pretty early adopter”, she explains. “I made my very first FOI request in November 2008. It…

Need something in your neighbourhood? Sometimes all you have to do is ask

What happened when you contacted your councillor or MP through WriteToThem? If that was the first step towards a change for the better — large or small —  we’d love to hear about it. When we asked this question on Twitter, the first person to reply was Tim Morton, who told us how he’d used…

Why having the Right To Know matters

Today is International Right To Know Day. Right to Know Day was started back in 2002 by international civil society advocates, and has since been officially adopted by UNESCO with the more formal title of ‘International Day for the Universal Access to Information’. To mark this day I wanted to highlight some of the reasons…