Following their launch in October, we have continued to improve the Council Climate Action Scorecards site — for example, the scores for all councils on any one question can now be seen on one page (like this). Find these pages from any individual council’s page, or via the section pages. 

Meanwhile, CE UK have continued to network, influence and promote the site and their work around the Action Scorecards. They have created significant media interest, especially at the local level (just where it’s needed!) and also attracted coverage from ITV, the Independent, and specialist press such as LGPlus. They’ve been invited to speak to a variety of audiences from an LGA event to Mobility Ways. Having already trained up 110 local residents/campaigners since the launch, the last of CE UK’s How to use the Council Climate Action Scorecards’ training sessions will run today (7th Dec) at 5.30pm, and bring people together to learn about how to use the Scorecards in their campaigning, and network with others doing the same.

A key learning point from CAPE and our Scorecards work has been to see just how fragmented the data around local authorities’ climate planning and action is, and how much of a barrier this is to data transparency and therefore to improvement: it can be highly ineffective, and a waste of (paid) people’s time, to compare metaphorical apples and pears.

As such, this month we were proud to run an event focused on Fragmented Data, with support from our partners in the Blueprint Coalition. Julia Cushion, our Policy & Advocacy Manager, chaired the webinar which saw Anna Powell-Smith introduce key findings of our report Unlocking the value of fragmented public data, while a variety of speakers provided perspectives around the potential and practical application of de-fragmenting data and answer questions from a 80+ strong virtual audience.

It was encouraging to see influential people grasping the significance of what might be seen as a bit of a dry, obscure issue to the untrained eye. This, we hope, is just the beginning of this story and I suspect we’ll see it move into the mainstream over the next few months / years, with more ‘next steps’ from Julia and our Senior Researcher, Alex, sooner. The recording is available here (with subtitles) on our YouTube channel.

We are a month closer to launching the Local Intelligence Hub (LIH) to the public (in early 2024) with our partners the Climate Coalition. November saw more groundwork going into this, with new datasets uploaded, the ‘new constituencies’ work continuing, and functionalities enabled. Our developer Struan moved across from handling the Scorecards’ site development to double our developer capacity on LIH for the next while, and give our other developer, Alexander, someone to work alongside. Planning has also ramped up beyond the site itself, including around communications, and how it fits into the Climate Coalition’s broader plans for 2024.

Partnership has been a solid theme for mySociety’s Climate team from the word go, but it has been particularly noticeable this month with a number of the team scoping out, listening and learning from each other and potential partners to help bring our Neighbourhood Warmth plans together. 

As we prepare for a retrospective on our latest year in partnership with CE UK, I find myself reflecting on how vital trust, mutual respect, care and good will are for enabling people to achieve, as is learning to recognise and rise above one’s ego. Achieving with others can also be, in my experience, deeply rewarding, as we join with the best of others to achieve more than we could alone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work in a team, and with partners, who work hard to put the needs of the planet, society and the sector before themselves.

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Image: Hannah Domsic

Ahem, well, it’s been a while… For us June and July have been all about the team both busily beavering away as deadlines loom, and looking up to the horizon to start to envisage and plan for ‘what’s next?’ 

To provide some context, the programme has benefited from the generosity of two major funders, Quadrature Climate Foundation and the National Lottery Community Fund, over the past two and a half years. Their support has been key in enabling mySociety to firmly plant its feet in the climate space: to better understand the sector and where and how civic tech could add value, as well as bring about tangible change through our work with an array of talented partners.

But all good things must come to an end, so as well as planning what more we can possibly achieve in the next eight months or so, we have started to think about the next stage for our climate work. Watch this space for the outcomes of our thinking on ‘what next’; suffice to say for now – we’ve learned a lot from the last couple of years and are looking forward to fundraising for and rolling out more impactful work.

Meanwhile, back at the coal solar-panel(?) -face… 

Scorecards

We’re aiming for an Autumn launch for the 2023 Climate Action Plan Scorecards (aka ‘Scorecards’). Climate Emergency UK and their volunteers are mid-audit: it’s looking like a sizeable chunk of work but they are still aiming to complete it by the end of August. At the development end, Struan has set up the foundations for the Scorecards site so that Lucas could start experimenting with new branding and a header for switching between years. 

Climate Action Plan Explorer

On CAPE, this month finally saw the fruition of a project we’ve had bubbling over much of the year so far. Thanks to some machine learning wizardry, document search on CAPE is now much more flexible. Our new language model (based on the meaning of words and phrases, rather than basic text similarity) means you can now preview which key topics are covered in different documents, and see results for closely related terms when you search. You can read more in Alex’s blog post. Our thanks go to Louis Davidson and the Faculty Fellowship for working with us on this.

We also attended the LGA Annual Conference in Bournemouth this month, and talked to a number of councillors and council officers about both CAPE and our plans around domestic retrofit. In particular, we were keen to test out an experimental interface that makes it easier to compare your council to its ‘climate twin’, based on the machine learning topics mentioned above. The twins algorithm isn’t quite ready for prime time, but feedback from the conference is helping us move it closer to launch.

Neighbourhood Warmth

Our Neighbourhood Warmth project continued to explore new territory as we held workshops with communities in Birmingham and Frome, as well as with council officers via the UK Green Building Council, to get feedback on the staging site and our ideas for rollout.

Siôn is now leading a process of reflection with our partner, Dark Matter Labs, to pull our key lessons together and to look at the next stage of development for the project. We’ve got some ideas but are keen to collaborate and ground this project in the communities we hope to serve. Check out our Neighbourhood Warmth month notes for more detail on where we might be headed and what we’re learning along the way.

Local Intelligence Hub

The Local Intelligence Hub—our climate data sharing platform, built with The Climate Coalition and soft-launched to their members in April—has now served users from almost 100 different Climate Coalition organisations. This autumn, we’re planning to open up public access to most of the datasets on the platform, so community groups and citizens can benefit from the data without requesting an account.

The detail-oriented amongst you might have noticed this means two big launches around the same time this autumn. One of our priorities for this month was to estimate the development and design requirements of both projects, before deciding we could do two launches at once. On paper it looks fine, so we look forward to seeing how that works out in reality!

In the meantime, the data set on the Hub is getting richer and richer as Alexander continues to upload new demographic datasets and deal with the glitches with incredible commitment and good humour. We’ve also started laying the groundwork to ensure the Hub supports the new (2023) constituency boundaries, when it launches to the public later this year. 

Last but definitely not least, we welcomed Julia Cushion as our new Policy & Advocacy Manager in June. Julia has done more than hit the ground running: speeding out of sight almost immediately, I think she’s managed the fastest first mile in mySociety history, with blogs such as From fragmentation to collaboration: strengthening local climate data and What local climate data do we need. Talented and a really great person too.

And on to the future

If you’ve had an idea of ‘what next’ for mySociety in the climate space, please email us at climate@mysociety.org – now’s a great time to chat with us.

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Image: H. Zell (CC by-sa/3.00)

Joining mySociety as the Climate Programme’s Delivery Manager a couple of months ago, it soon became clear I had walked into a super-organised, passionate and able team. What was there left for me to do? Turns out the answer is to variously support, organise, communicate, enable, help them look ahead, let them get on with it and occasionally help them to say ‘no’ or ‘not right now’ to the things that aren’t top of the list. I led the team through cycle planning last week. This is a particularly favorite part of the job for me: it gives us a chance to look back and see how far we’ve travelled; and then think big for the future.

The last six weeks has seen Climate Emergency UK (CEUK) steam ahead on the analysis of councils’ climate action plans, recruiting around 140 volunteers, developing and delivering training, and designing subsequent stages to the process which will include a ‘right to reply’ by councils and second marking by a smaller group. mySociety has supported CEUK by developing technical systems that enable them to carry out this work – from robust spreadsheets that minimise the risk of scores being overwritten by other volunteers, through to automatically tracking the number of plans started and completed. We expect the results to go live in January 2022.

mySociety developer Struan joined the Climate team full-time in early August and, along with designer Zarino, he has been working on improvements to the Climate Action Plan Explorer (CAPE) including better search, a zip download of all plans, and the basics of an API.

Our new Outreach and Networks Coordinator Siôn Williams started in mid-August and hit the ground running, helping the team think through its approach to outreach while bringing fresh perspectives and considerable relevant experience. Several relationships are already bearing fruit including Friends of the Earth asking all their supporters to ask their Councils for stronger Climate Action Plan commitments, using CAPE as their main source of information. Myf meanwhile has developed a set of ‘explainer resources’ to help people understand how to use CAPE to maximum effect; as well as forming key relationships and building up a database of ‘who’s who’ in a range of sectors.

We’ve also been starting to explore our assumptions about how we can best support local communities and local authorities to act quickly and effectively, laying out our Theory of Change for the programme, encouraging us to pan out and think about what change we want to see in the next few years. CAPE is a start, but we are hungry to achieve more.

Looking forward, we will develop this further over the next few weeks, using it to lead into some longer-term planning. We have also been working on mechanisms to ensure we can work emergently, and hope to detail this out in next Climate month notes. Watch this space. And enjoy the crunchy autumn leaves when they come.

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Image: Andrew Ieviev