Did you know that Home Office data doesn’t include the reason that individuals have been taken to immigrant detention centres? Or that the UK is the only country in Europe with no limit on how long they can hold someone in such facilities?

One organisation keeping a careful eye on the situation is Spanish investigative journalism and fact-checking foundation Maldita, whose recent series of articles (in collaboration with Romanian organisation Funky Citizens) also reveals that the detention of Europeans is at its highest level since Brexit, with Romanian, Polish and Lithuanian citizens most represented. 

Maldita’s project is replete with the stories of those detained in the UK; insights from organisations concerned with migration and data retrieved from Freedom of Information requests to UK authorities — new ones, and ones they discovered in the vast archive of public responses available on our FOI site WhatDoTheyKnow.

Reading the set of four pieces, it becomes clear that much of the data required to understand the wider picture is either not collected, or has only come into the open thanks to the public’s right to information.

Happily, when it comes to information from UK authorities, this right is available to those outside the country (despite a threat to this, back in 2020), giving a higher chance that data impossible to source from one end of the equation may be retrieved from the other.

Mentorship

We came to work with Maldita thanks to the Journalismfund mentoring programme, through which we offered support and guidance based on our experience around FOI and supporting cross-border investigations (see, for example, the Lost In Europe project). We were happy to provide expertise on navigating the UK’s FOI system, and making introductions to other organisations that would be of help.

The resulting articles present sobering facts about the quantity and length of detainments, as well as health issues and self harm among detainees. Until reading these, you may not be aware that the UK is the only country where no date has to be given for release — and, as one might imagine, this results in poor mental health among many.

Investigative journalist Coral García Dorado, Coordinator of Disinformation Investigations for Maldita, told us how our interventions had facilitated their project.

During the time we worked together, we introduced Maldita to our WhatDoTheyKnow platform and mentored them around the best way of writing FOI requests. “You can’t imagine how important this tool was for us”, says Coral. “It’s something we don’t have in Spain”*.

An invaluable archive

Perhaps Coral’s greatest discovery was around how useful a vast archive of existing requests can be. This helped in three ways: 

→ They came across data that had already been requested, and used it in their pieces: 

“It’s very valuable,” noted Coral, “because sometimes you would just be asking for the same information that others had — and if you put in the request yourself, you’d have to wait some time for them to send you the information. So if someone has already asked for it and the information is there, you don’t have to replicate the same job again.”

She gave two examples of where they used this approach: “We published incidents of self harm in detention centres. It was requested by one person, and we just picked it up from there.

“And also thanks to someone who requested it on your tool, we know what the longest amount of time is that someone has been held an immigration removal centre: 1,131 days“. You can see how both of these requests fed into the work in this article.

→ Where a request would have been useful, but was several years old, they replicated it

 “We made a request to the NHS because we saw another person’s one. It’s very useful because maybe you don’t know that this information exists, so you don’t know that this information can be provided, and once you see that, you can use the precise same wording to ask them to send you the updated information.”

→  They discovered new ideas to explore

Coral explained that searching the archive using keywords around immigration “gives you an idea of what you can get”

Different countries, different access 

Maldita encountered frustrations around getting information from the Spanish authorities — it turned out that getting it from the UK side was more fruitful. 

“We asked [the Spanish authorities] for information about Spanish people detained in the UK, but in the end, we couldn’t get it – they gave us information about Spanish people in prison,” explained Coral.

“They didn’t have — or at least they said they didn’t have — information about the number of Spanish citizens detained in an immigration removal centre. But then if we go back to some articles published by all the newspapers, for example, El País in 2021, someone from the government said, ‘We know, at the moment of nine people who entered an immigration removal centre this year’. 

“So they had this information, but they said they don’t record this kind of information! In the end, we struggled a lot getting information from the Spanish authorities.”

Other challenges

This kind of setback can be dispiriting, but it surely helps to share one’s woes with others who can precisely understand them. In the course of their investigations, Maldita spoke to a number of organisations.

One of these was the Oxford Immigration Observatory, who explained ongoing frustrations around the cohesiveness of data between centres — making it impossible to track detainees if they were moved from one place to another. In turn, this of course makes it more difficult to pin down precise numbers. 

All worthwhile

Finally, we asked Coral how the investigation has been received. “It did have impact – I have to say most of all in the UK, from the different organisations helping migrants.”

She added, “It’s been great working with you, and having access to the tool. So thank you so much.” 

We return the thanks — it is always a pleasure to facilitate a vital piece of investigative journalism.

 —

* In fact, Spain did once have its own functioning Alaveteli site, which closed in the face of challenges around the government’s reluctance to adhere to the spirit of their own Access to Information law.

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Image: Schumi4ever (CC by-sa/4.0)

Often, responses published on our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow result in newspaper stories, or feed into campaigns or research.

When this happens with one of your own requests, you can add a link to the page. These then appear in the side column, like this:

It’s a great way for other users of the site to see the direct results that come from the simple act of making an FOI request — and now we’ve also added an ‘FOI in Action’ page, where you can see all of them in one place.

Here are five stories that have caught our eye from that page:

• A request for all communications around Eric Trump’s March 2025 visit to Edinburgh allowed the public to see the briefings made to the First Minister of Scotland ahead of their meeting — and resulted in this national news story.
• Minutes from the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Unregistered Marriages, acquired via this request, fed into a chapter of research on many aspects of modern marriage, this one being on unregistered Muslim marriages.
• All evidence points to this response being the basis for the New York Times piece [paywalled] that broke the massive story of the government’s £2.4 million expenditure to hide a life-or-death data breach, concerning Afghans who worked with the British forces. 
• A 2022 report into misogyny in the British Army was not released until requested and then pursued via the user’s right to an internal review. The user knew of its existence thanks to previous news stories referring to it. The Byline Times reveals the report’s shocking findings in this news story.
• This 2019 report from The Bureau of Investigation looked into public sector adoption of algorithmic and data-driven systems, presciently foreseeing the explosive adoption of AI in our public services. This was based on several requests from a single user.

We’re not far off listing 3,000 citations on WhatDoTheyKnow — and these are just the ones users have added. If your request resulted in a piece of journalism, informed a campaign or fed into research, do add it in. As well as helping to show others what FOI can do, it provides a significant link back to the external site, helping bring it more readers.

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Image: Peter Lawrence

Nothing makes us happier at mySociety than finding out that our work is doing some good in the world — and an unexpected email from a happy FixMyStreet user certainly put a big smile on all of our faces.

Michael, who lives and works in London, wrote: 

• “FixMyStreet has allowed so many people to report so many issues that directly affect their lives, and get them fixed without delay, being able to hold councils to account by its transparency and nature.

• “Thousands of improvements up and down the country have been made possible by your team’s hard work and genius ideas to get this website up and running and continuing to function.”

Well! Once we’d come down from all that praise, we thought we’d ask Michael more about his experiences, and what has made him such a keen — and effective — FixMyStreet user. He began with a bit of self-reflection.

“What we are doing on FixMyStreet is making a long-term difference to our wellbeing and environment.”

“I’ve always been interested in urban design, streetscapes, architecture, and how our living environment can be improved,” he explained. “It all started when I was a child, building a beachfront city out of Lego. I also used to play a lot of SimCity, so am kind of used to being able to shape the urban environment, albeit in the virtual world! 

“Architecture and the built environment is an interest I’ve kept into adulthood. But also, I’ve always been quite politically engaged — writing letters to MPs, trying to get things improved  — and FixMyStreet is the perfect platform to combine my interests for hopefully the betterment of our communities and societies.”

These pieces fell into place in 2023, when Michael made his first report on FixMyStreet. 

“Friends from other countries are amazed by the technology and the responsiveness of the councils thanks to FixMyStreet.”

“It was a blocked drainage gully: nothing very exciting! But when I realised the potential for change, and how easy it was to report things and get them fixed pretty quickly, I soon moved onto bigger things — with a particular interest in improving accessibility for wheelchair users and vision impaired pedestrians. Broken paving slabs, trip hazards, planters blocking routes, that sort of thing.

“But generally, I just keep my eyes open when I’m out and about, and try to see how I can improve things. I’ve even taught my grandmother how to use it — she’s pretty good at it!” 

Michael’s original email contained an impressive list of everything he’s managed to get improved with FixMyStreet, so we asked him whether any of them stood out as particularly satisfying.  

“Well, it’s great to get streetlights fixed, but no one really notices that when they are working again! 

“On the other hand, I submitted reports of missing street trees, and to my surprise, the council responded by planting brand new ones! A cherry tree, and, following a report I made when visiting family on the Isle of Wight, a palm tree on the seafront.

“I was able to use Google StreetView to show that many years previously there had been trees at this location, which had since died and been removed. 

“It’s also really pleasing to be able to report any maintenance issues with trees so the council can come out and tend to them. Trees don’t have computer access — or even hands to type  — so it’s really good that we humans can do this for them!”

What’s really nice is that improvements like these will provide a lasting improvement. 

“Once a street is fixed, it generally stays that way: new paving slabs can last 50 years or more, so what we are doing on FixMyStreet is making a long-term difference to our wellbeing and environment.”

“If one wheelchair user can have a more pleasant and easier day because of a fix I’ve reported on FixMyStreet, I can feel good about myself.”

And then there’s the feeling of doing good for our fellow humans: “If one wheelchair user can have a more pleasant and easier day because of a fix I’ve reported on FixMyStreet, I can feel good about myself. I quite like being able to point out something when I’m out with friends and say “I got that fixed!”, although I usually just keep it to myself. I will be very pleased to see the trees that I’ve requested grow over time.”

As one of our most enthusiastic users, what does Michael find most appealing about FixMyStreet?

“It’s quick, easy, and addictive! It’s the most satisfying thing to find a problem, report it, and return a few days later to see it’s been fixed: a new paving slab fitted, lines repainted, a new street nameplate installed. 

“Once you start, you just can’t stop! It’s easy to report big or small problems: if there’s a dangerous wall, the council will come out to work with the landowner to make it safe, or even the tiny things like a wait button at a pedestrian crossing not working, the council will come out and get that fixed. 

“I’ve got friends from other countries, and they are amazed by the technology and the responsiveness of the councils thanks to FixMyStreet. There is a lot of care and attention that we sometimes take for granted in this country, and a lot of people who want to make a difference. 

“I feel like I’m working with thousands of like-minded people to get this country fixed up and working the way it ought to. I’m a big believer that we can all be improvers of our built environment — we don’t need to think “Oh, someone else will do something about that”. 

“We can all do something, no matter how small, and FixMyStreet is an extremely easy way to manage that. We’ve all got to live on this planet, so we might as well all do something to make it a bit better, however we can.”

We were curious to see some examples of Michael’s successful reports, and he was happy to oblige, showing us a ‘look left’ marking changed to reflect the fact that cycles come from the right; loose paving slabs and broken kerbstones that have since been attended to; and a disintegrating planter now rebuilt.

He also sent us these photos (click to see them at a larger size), showing that cherry tree that he was instrumental in getting planted; and a cabinet box that was moved to make wheelchair access along the pavement possible.

Something that’s woven through mySociety’s values, and the services we provide, is the idea that we all contribute to making the world a better place — and that’s how Michael sees things, too.

“We all spend a lot of our time out and about, walking and driving in cities and the countryside, and it’s hugely important to me — and hopefully many others — that our streets are as clean and well-maintained as they can be.

“If we can all improve our environment, this will help people to feel better in their environments too. It’s easy to feel depressed in a depressing environment, and it’s easier to feel positive in a clean, well-maintained environment. It’s a win-win!” 

Thank you so much to Michael for sharing his thoughts about FixMyStreet. We hope they will inspire others to feel the same way about their own neighbourhoods, and get reporting on FixMyStreet.

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Banner image: Krzysztof Hepner

We launched WhatDoTheyKnow with two goals: to make Freedom of Information more accessible to all; and to provide a free public archive of all the information that is released as a result. Today, 17 years later, those goals still guide us, and there’s more we can do towards them every day.

Most recently, we’ve developed a couple of features: a series of guides that aim to help newbies take the first steps into Freedom of Information; and a new way of browsing to make it easier to find what you need within the huge and ever-growing archive of information on the site.

FOI 101

We here at mySociety might talk about FOI all the time, but we know that to much of the population, the concept is vague, maybe daunting, and often riddled with misconceptions. To try and address this, we recently launched our Learn pages, which provide simple guidance to anyone taking their first steps into using the Act. 

Beginners — or anyone who needs a refresher — can follow these very simple instruction pages, and in no time will be using FOI to request information that can strengthen the power of campaigns, inform the public conversation or simply satisfy their own curiosity.

Browse by category

Our second addition is a new way to browse the closing-in-on 1.25 million public requests on WhatDoTheyKnow.

Even with clear guidance, it can be hard to pin down wording for that first request, so If you’d like some examples of how others have done it (or inspiration on the types of things you can ask), you can head to the ‘browse by category‘ page, where we’ve started to group examples of requests by topic. 

At the moment, these are heavy on topics relating to the environment, as this interface was conceived by our Climate team to feed into the Scorecards project — however, there are other categories too, and more to come.

So, whether you’re interested in information around cinema, radio and television; historic eras; railways; past exam papers; flood defences or a wealth of other topics, there is plenty of inspiration to be had there.

WhatDoTheyKnow was launched in 2008. 

We’re still working hard to increase transparency, in the UK and around the world

In this era of misinformation, the value of factual data, straight from the source, increases every day. Donate here and help ensure that we continue to provide the services that make Freedom of Information available to everyone, here in the UK and in the 30 sites around the world built on our free, open source software.

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Image: Gabriella Clare Marino

If you were one of the 100+ people who joined us for today’s webinar, you’ll already know it was hugely informative and timely.

We packed three fascinating speakers into the course of one hour-long session on using FOI to understand AI-based decision making by public authorities. Each brought so many insights that, even if you were there, you may wish to watch it all over again.

Fortunately, you can! We’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, and you can also access Morgan’s slides on Google Slides, here and Jake’s as a PDF, here (Jake actually wasn’t able to display his slides, so this gives you the chance to view them alongside his presentation, should you wish).

Morgan Currie of the University of Edinburgh kicked things off with a look at her research ‘Algorithmic Accountability in the UK’, and especially how opaque the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)’s use of automation for fraud detection has been, over the years.

Morgan explains the techniques used to gain more scrutiny of these decision-making and risk assessment processes, with much of the research based on analysing FOI requests made by others on WhatDoTheyKnow, which of course are public for everyone to see.

Secondly, in a pre-recorded session, Gabriel Geiger from Lighthouse Reports gave an overview of their Suspicion Machines Investigation which delves into the use of AI across different European welfare systems. Shockingly, but sadly not surprisingly, the investigation found code that was predicting which recipients of benefits are most likely to be committing fraud, with an inbuilt bias against minoritised people, women and parents — multiplied for anyone who falls into more than one of those categories.

Gabriel also outlined a useful three-tiered approach to this type of investigation, which others will be able to learn from when instigating similar research projects.

Our third speaker was Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch, who spoke of the decreasing transparency of our public bodies when it comes to AI-based systems, and the root causes of it: a lack of technical expertise among smaller authorities and the contracting of technology from private suppliers. Jake was in equal parts eloquent and fear-inducing about what this means for individuals who want to understand the decisions that have been made about them, and hold authorities accountable — but he also has concrete suggestions as to how the law must be reformed to reflect the times we live in.

The session rounded off with a brief opportunity to ask questions, which you can also watch in the video.

Presented in collaboration with our fellow transparency organisations AccessInfo Europe and Frag Den Staat, this session was an output of the ATI Community of Practice.

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Image: Michael Dziedzic

So many insights were shared at TICTeC, from so many practitioners who joined us, in person or remotely, from all around the world.

You can access their presentations now in a variety of ways:

• via the conference schedule – click the ‘see session detail‘ button on any session to find the links to the associated slides and videos;
• if you are only interested in videos, see the YouTube playlist here;
• or if you just want to access the slides, you can find them on Drive.

Please note: videos and slides are only available for sessions that were recorded, and where presenters gave consent to share.

Whether you’re interested in how to get young people more invested in voting, how AI can make complex parliamentary documents more accessible to all, or how to supercharge transparency around climate lobbying, there’s something there for you. Maybe you’d like in on the Pol.is 2.0 sneak preview, or to listen in on our thoughts about how mySociety plans to use AI in the coming months.

Whatever you do, be sure not to miss our two incredible keynotes Marietje Schaake and Fernanda Campagnucci, both of whom, in their own way, presented new approaches to the vital democratic questions of our time.

These are just a few of the 47 videos awaiting you now: have a browse and you’re sure to find something to inform, enthuse, inspire or astound you.

Photos of the conference are now also available on our Flickr page.

Here at mySociety, we’ve built a number of tools around data and the climate: CAPE, the Climate Action Plans Explorer; the Council Climate Action Scorecards, and, most recently, Local Intelligence Hub, which allows you to look at climate-relevant data in your own area and compare it with the nation as a whole.

All these sites are designed to equip users with the information they need to hold their representatives accountable over action for the environment and nature. But what does that look like in practice?

We had the opportunity to see for ourselves this month, thanks to the Mass Lobby, organised by The Climate Coalition (TCC), in which more than 5,000 highly motivated constituents made the journey to Westminster to have in-person conversations with their MPs and stress the importance of action.

For those who were wondering what on earth they would say once they were face to face with their reps, our own Zarino and Julia were on hand, ready to tap each person’s postcode into Local Intelligence Hub and furnish them with some pertinent facts and figures to get the conversation rolling.

Thanks to Local Intelligence Hub’s broad coverage of factors such as MPs’ stances, public opinion, and local demographics, Julia and Zarino could even ask each person what they cared about most, or what was the big environmental issue on their own turf, and find the most relevant information around it.

In fact, many of the charities and campaigns that make up TCC had shared the link to the Hub beforehand, so a good quantity of constituents turned up with their homework already done. Either way, it was amazing to see the site — which we run in partnership with TCC, supported by Green Alliance — being used for the exact reason we’d built it.

With Hope for the Future at the next table, specialising in how to speak to MPs in a way that will actually change their minds, lobbyists went into the room extremely well prepared!

Over the day there were meetings with around 200 MPs, usually with around 5 -10 constituents in each. Unfortunately, an important set of votes took place in Parliament that day, meaning that some were unexpectedly called away, but it’s fair to say that a lot of MPs were given a lot of useful data from a lot of informed constituents that day. We hope it will motivate them to do the right thing when it comes to climate and nature.

TICTeC, our Impacts of Civic Technology conference, has been running since 2015. Over the years, we’ve seen shifts within both tech and democracy that have been reflected as priority topics: from the foundational (and evergreen) question of ‘how can you assess the value of civic technology if you don’t measure its impacts?’, to the rise of authoritarian ‘strong man’ leaders across the world, to a surge of enthusiasm for what blockchain can do around civic tech.

As each of these topics rise to the top of the civic tech community consciousness, TICTeC has provided a natural place to air questions, concerns and solutions.

This year, of course, the foundation-shaking issue is AI. Compared to 2024, when the technology was just beginning to be applied in our field, there’s been a maturing of the discussion, and much more concrete engagement with both the opportunities and the challenges that AI brings around government, truth, trust and delivery.

Our job is to make sure we steer towards the good — or, to phrase it in alignment with mySociety’s own aims, to examine how to engage critically and transparently with AI to create a fair and safe society.

AI across TICTeC 2025

The theme of AI was woven through the conference: where it wasn’t the primary topic itself, it coloured our thinking and had relevance everywhere. 

Sessions dealing primarily with AI could be divided into three broad angles:

• Since AI is already making inroads into governance systems, how can we ensure it is used well? 
• How have AI’s capabilities been harnessed to make civic tech tools, improve functionality or increase efficiency, and how’s that going? 
• Can tools counter the problems that AI presents around truth and trust?

Let’s look at each of these in turn.

AI and democratic governance

Both of our keynote speakers were keen to point out the need for oversight and citizen participation as AI is rapidly adopted across government systems. 

Marietje Schaake, whose presentation you can rewatch here, warned of the dangers of private tech firms holding more power than our constitutional democracies, thanks to the limitless profits to be made from this new technology; while Fernanda Campagnucci (presentation here) advocated for citizens to be allowed into the decision-making processes not just around governance itself, but in the making of the tools that facilitate it.

We also heard from the people at the frontline of governance. An instructive session from Westminster Foundation For Democracy and the Hellenic Parliament (not recorded) quizzed participants on how comfortable they would be in easing the administrative burden of parliaments by allowing AI to help categorise, filter and even answer letters from citizens. Would our opinion change if we knew, for example, that there was a backlog of 40,000 messages to representatives?

In a session deeply rooted in the realities of running a local authority during a period of tech acceleration, Manchester City Council explained that in a city where 450,000 people don’t even use the internet, it is crucial to ensure AI is being used ethically and to communicate how it affects citizens’ lives: “Whether or not you choose to interact with AI there’s no way of opting out – AI based decision making is happening around you.”

Three speakers from the Civic Tech Field Guide laid out the case for audits on how AI is being used in your own community, showing how anyone can do it, and Felix Sieker from Bertelsmann Stiftung made a strong argument for public AI, with proper accountability and democratic oversight, rather than the power being concentrated in a handful of private firms — something that is already being developed in several different forms, including by Mozilla.

MIT GOV/LAB ran a workshop (not recorded) in which we could chat with a simulation of a person from the future about the effects of a climate policy, then decide whether or not we would implement that policy once we had a human account of its results. This is part of ongoing research into helping to break deadlocks in policy decision-making.

How AI is already being used in civic tech

Both Code for Pakistan and Tainan Sprout showed how they’ve deployed AI to allow citizens to query dense policy documentation and get answers that are easy to understand

Demos talked about the work they’ve been doing around a new AI-powered digital deliberation process called Waves, hoping to ‘do democracy differently’ in our current crisis of mistrust.

Dealing with AI and misinformation

Camino Rojo from Google Spain showcased new tools, some of which are shortly to be rolled out, to help counteract misinformation. In particular, these allow users to check whether or not media displayed in search results was artificially generated. At the moment, the onus lies with the image generator to provide this information. Strict guidelines apply, in particular, to those advertising around sensitive areas such as elections.

AI and mySociety

In the final session of the conference, we presented the various ways that we’ve been exploring how AI can support mySociety’s work. You can rewatch this session in full here.

We have been guided by our own AI framework, in which we set out the six ethical principles by which we adhere when adopting this (or any) new technology. In essence, these can be boiled down to the single sentence: “We should use AI solutions when they are the best way of solving significant problems, are compatible with our wider ethical principles and reputation, and can be sustainably integrated into our work.” 

In other words, we are not working backwards from the existence of AI to see what we could do with it, but approaching from the question of what we want to achieve, and then examining whether AI would aid us to do so more efficiently.

In this session you can discover how we’ve used AI to more effectively deal with problems in bulk, and make information easier for everyone to access across our work in Transparency; hear thoughts on how, for our work in Democracy, and especially the recent WhoFundsThem project, we’ve found that a human approach is sometimes needed — but that there are some tasks that AI can make easier here.

For the future we’re thinking about AI as it might apply to WriteToThem not to burden representatives with more mail, but perhaps communications of a higher quality.

Overall, we’re keeping a wary eye open for how AI will almost certainly be (and already is?) muddying the ability to trust the provenance of information — especially given that mySociety is essentially a ‘resupplier’ of data from public authorities and Parliament.

In a LinkedIn post, our Democracy Lead Alex got at the core of the challenges ahead of us all in the civic tech field, when he said: “Different kinds of technologies make different kinds of futures easier – and what we’re trying to do with pro-democratic tech is to make democratic futures easier. But the opposite is obviously [possible], and AI has arrived at the right time to merge aesthetically and ideologically with authoritarian regimes.

“A core to the spirit of civic tech is persuasion by demonstration – and to me TICTeC is a wonderful distillation of that spirit of both imagining better things, and doing the work to show what’s possible.” 

And on that thought, we will roll up our sleeves and work towards the version of the future that is better for everyone.

—

We’re leading the conversation on AI and democratic decision making —

and we need your help.

mySociety was founded more than two decades ago to help democratic governance deliver on the raised expectations of the internet era.

We are in a period in which the relationship between tech and government is more entangled and fraught than ever. We’re stepping up, but we can only do so with your support. Please do consider making a donation.

Over the past few weeks we’ve seen public debate and campaigning around the government’s proposed cuts to PIP — benefits that are intended to ease the additional costs of living that come with being disabled. 

The Bill was voted through, but only once it was agreed that the proposed changes to PIP eligibility would be paused until after a ministerial review involving disabled people has taken place. This concession was the result of MPs threatening to rebel.

With the objections coming from within the Labour party itself, it would be easy to think that the entire discussion was happening between MPs. In fact, when MPs vote with their conscience, their stance has often been partially informed by lobbying from their constituents and from campaign groups with a particular interest in the outcome.

Freedom of Information can be an excellent resource for this sort of lobbying: it provides incontrovertible facts, sometimes from the very authorities being petitioned. 

We’ve recently seen how FOI requests on WhatDoTheyKnow have helped create news stories that inform opinions around PIP. 

For example, Learning Disability Today published an article in April, casting light on how many current claimants would have lost out if the government had, as they originally planned, removed the daily living component from claimants scoring less than 4 points for at least one activity. They say that their FOI request to the Department of Work and Pensions “revealed much higher numbers than previously suggested”, resulting in “almost nine out of ten current standard daily living awards failing on renewal”.

And Rightsnet has the stats on the number of PIP decisions reversed before going to appeal, alongside the medical conditions where this has happened most and least often — a useful benchmark for those considering an appeal, but such stats are also frequently used to point out the inadequacy of the system.

As the matter is not yet settled, and given the requirement for a ministerial review that involves disabled people, we expect to see many more relevant FOI requests in the near future.

 —

Image: Roger Blackwell CC by/2.0

Transparency is always a strong theme at TICTeC, and since so many members of the Access to Information Network were in town for the conference, we thought we’d take the opportunity to meet up. 

And so, the day after, several people who run Freedom of Information sites came together in an airy attic room to share knowledge and discuss challenges. 

As always when we convene this specialised interest group, participants were delighted to have in-depth discussions to other people who fully ‘get it’ — to whom the challenges of running such sites are not just academic, but form part of their day to day realities.

Sitting around the tables were Stefan and Luisa of Frag den Staat (Germany); Michael from CoST (Uganda); Ana from ForSet (Georgia); Miguel from Plaza Civica (Peru); Liset and Tim from SPOON (Netherlands); Krisztina from Átlátszónet Foundation (Hungary); Martin from Abrimos (Mexico); Rachel from AccessInfo (Europe); Michal, Piotr and Marzena from Citizens’ Network Watchdog (Poland); Laurent from MaDada (France); Maria from Fiquem Sabendo (Brazil); Matt from the Civic Tech Field Guide and Julia, Louise and me representing mySociety.

Positive wins 

We began by sharing recent successes. A few of the organisations were successful in overturning governmental attacks on, or restrictions to, FOI rights, while others had used research and activism to undermine negative perceptions around the Right To Know. We heard of successful campaigns and grant bids too — overall, sharing these wins was a great way to kick things off.

Learning new skills 

Ana gave a really insightful presentation on how ForSet had worked with ‘influencers’ to reach a new audience. Here, the term ‘influencer’ really just meant content creators with a wide following among the Gen Z audience they were trying to appeal to. 

For context, in Georgia young people have been out on the streets en masse, successfully protesting against proposed laws. Even if they weren’t yet old enough to vote, Ana pointed out, they could still influence public discourse and the political agenda. 

And now, as that generation reaches voting age, ForSet wanted to use social media platforms to encourage democratic participation.

As with everything the organisation does, the level of preparation and analysis that they brought to the project was outstanding, making sure that they fully understood who Gen Z would pay attention to, and trying out different messages to see what worked. There was so much to learn here about how to break into new audiences and how to ensure that what you were doing had an effect.

A forest of trees

Next, Rachel led us in an exercise to plot the challenges we face running ATI sites onto a tree diagram – with causes at the roots, core issues on the trunk, and consequences in the leafy canopy.  

What we discovered was first, that challenges and problems tend to be the same in every context; and second, that causes and effects are so interlinked that it is often difficult to decide which is which. For example, a lack of public understanding around ATI can both cause a low usage, and be the result of inadequate education around the topic. Authorities’ low response rates might be the result of poor governmental oversight, or the cause of public apathy – and so on.

Batch and back-ups

In the afternoon, the topics were decided upon by consensus: we had a useful conversation about the issues around batch requesting (sending the same request to multiple authorities), which sites offer in a variety of different ways ranging from it being open to most users, to being available only to staff (and some don’t offer it at all).  

Secondly, we discussed ‘backing up’ – both backups to ensure our own site archives were safe from loss, and means by which to scrape massive public archives when it becomes clear that they might be taken down by the authorities running them. This is not an imaginary scenario, as members were able to testify, and of course as we have seen recently in the States.

Finally, people voted on which topics they are keen to see covered in future webinars of the ATI Network, with youth and AI decision-making being most popular – so watch this space for those webinars to happen.