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.

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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.

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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.

TICTeC is wrapped up for another year. The roller banners are stowed away, the lanyards saved for next year, and now we’re back home from Belgium with memories, insights and enough hope to keep us going ’til next time. 

It’s always energising to come together with the global civic tech community and share everything we’ve learned. We had attendees from 34 countries, bringing together their experiences — and judging by the comments we’re seeing, we’re not the only ones to have found it both enjoyable and valuable.

The two days were “fabulous and thought provoking”, allowing for “the exchange of experiences and coordinated actions”, and delegates said they returned “inspired, with new insights on civic tech trends and promising collaboration ideas”.

Perhaps Hendrik Nahr from make.org, summed the whole experience up best when he said, “It felt like a family gathering of the civic tech community from Europe and beyond. I’m grateful for the energy, the open exchanges, and the motivation to keep pushing forward tech for democracy.”

We are grateful too: TICTeC is not just about mySociety creating an open space for such discourse; it also depends on the people who participate and the insights they so generously articulate.

What we talked about

It’s hard to provide a full summary of such a packed event, but fortunately we’ll soon be able to share videos of the majority of the presentations, along with slides and photographs, so you’ll be able to choose what you’d like to see. 

The overall theme of the conference was tech to defend and advance democracy, and within that there were strong strands around tech to tackle the climate emergency; citizen participation and deliberation; transparency and access to information… and across everything we heard of the seismic changes to society, to tech and to democracy — both already seen, and expected soon — by the emergence of AI. 

To pull out a few high points from so many thought-provoking moments:

Marietje Schaake, delivering her keynote remotely because of last minute train strike issues, still managed to enthrall the auditorium and ignite our two days of conversation with an incisive overview of how big tech is overtaking democratic governance globally, with oversight lagging dangerously behind. We posted a summary on Bluesky in real time, if you can’t wait for the video.

Fernanda Campagnucci‘s day two keynote (summarised here) sliced up the different approaches government can take to citizen participation, from citizens feeding into decision-making processes, to citizens being invited to co-create both the data and the governance systems, featuring a nice story about an elderly lady who grumbled that everyone was talking about APIs (a way for software systems to communicate with one another) at a town meeting but she didn’t know what it meant. Once someone had explained to her, she turned up at every subsequent meeting to request APIs of every department’s output.

Colin Megill used the opportunity provided by TICTeC to launch Pol.is 2.0 to a highly relevant audience. This is a paid version of the open source decision-making platform — the basis of Twitter’s “Community Notes” functionality — which contains a ‘superset’ of new features. Its enhanced LLM capabilities allow it to break sprawling conversations into any number of subtopics, making them easier to moderate and removing blocks to overall consensus that can be created by small sticking points.

Panels brought people together to talk about aspects of parliamentary monitoring and access to information from around the world – discussions we will be continuing through our communities of practice work. 

There was a useful session on the importance of, and methods for, measuring impact — after all, TICTEC’s foundational purpose — from OpenUp South Africa, Hungary’s Átlátszónet Foundation and SPOON Netherlands.

We wrapped up the conference with an examination of how mySociety is navigating AI in recent and near future work, and an open forum about how TICTeC can evolve and continue to be useful to the global civic tech community. 

We presented how we’re thinking about, utilising and navigating both the positives and potential dangers of AI. Such considerations are also preoccupations for others in our field: several organisations are experimenting with AI to achieve or work more efficiently toward their pro-democracy aims; others are foreseeing problems that AI may bring, from amplifying misinformation to algorithm-based decisions that affect individuals’ lives. 

There wasn’t an organisation at TICTeC that isn’t thinking about AI in one way or another, as evidenced in diverse sessions across the entire conference. There’s a sense that the conversation has matured from last year, moving on from hype to clear engagement on practical uses, and for scrutiny of both model creators and government uses. We’ll write more about this in a separate post.

And also, watch this space for videos and photos from TICTeC 2025, which we’ll share as soon as they’re ready. That should keep us all going until next year.

The 2025 Scorecards launch today

Wondering how your local council’s doing around climate? With today’s launch of the 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecards, you can check their progress right now. 

And because this is the second edition of Scorecards, you can check not just your council’s scores, but also how they compare with last time. Are they doing better or worse in each of the vital 93 areas for meeting the challenges of the climate crisis?

Today, you can:

• Search for your council by name
• See at a glance how their overall score compares with others across the UK, overall and within each section of activity
• Click through for an in-depth breakdown of every question and how they scored
• See at every level of the Scorecards how their performance compares with the 2023 assessment.

What next?

Great — so you’re up to speed on the areas where your council’s doing well on climate action, and where it could be doing better. 

Start a conversation If you have thoughts about these, you can use the Scorecards to open up conversations with your local councillors — our website WriteToThem makes that super easy. (Want more data? Type your postcode into Local Intelligence Hub for lots more climate-related local info!)

Use Scorecards in your work If you’re a council climate officer or councillor yourself, we hope the Scorecards will show where you could be making improvements — and give you an idea of which other councils are doing well in those areas. You can even get in touch and swap notes! Take a look at our case studies to see how councils have been using Scorecards to learn and improve.

Help us do more

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.
If you value the work that we do to make it easier to hold authorities to account for climate action, please consider making a donation.

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Image: Alastair Johnstone / Climate Visuals

If you’re someone who’s concerned about the climate but not really sure what to do about it, this webinar is definitely a good place to start.

Our event this week brought together investigative journalist Lucas Amin of Democracy for Sale; Anne Friel, Head of Just Societies at Client Earth; and Joschi Wolf of the German transparency project Frag Den Staat – all sharing their knowledge around Freedom of Information as an invaluable tool for tackling the climate crisis.

It was very encouraging to hear practical tips and thoughts that made FOI-based activism seem within reach, even to the beginner. And all from your own desk!

Watch the webinar on YouTube. We’ve also compiled the responses to the questions from the audience that there wasn’t time to answer during the session: you can see those here.

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Image: Matteo Miliddi

The Council Climate Action Scorecards are helping climate officers across the UK to understand which elements of their path to Net Zero are working well, and which areas need improvement.

Marina Ebbage, Procurement Policy Officer at Norfolk County Council, explained the many ways in which Scorecards have helped the authority’s Climate Hub team in their work. She began by explaining how the council came to understand that a council taking climate action is one thing; while communicating that action is something else.

“We first came across the Scorecards following Climate Emergency UK’s assessment in 2021, and through the subsequent publicity which usefully highlighted the areas of work where our actions were not publicly communicated”, says Marina.  

“We’ve found the independent and external assessment of our council’s climate action not only allows us to systematically mark our progress in tackling climate change, but helps us to maintain and strengthen our accountability to the public. 

“The Scorecards have helped us strive for greater transparency and accessibility in our climate action efforts. Following that initial assessment, we realised that a lot of information about the work we were doing was not readily available to the public – hence our initial low score. 

“A key example is our Climate Action Plan, which draws all the information we are doing together on climate-related work and is now publicly available in one place on a dedicated part of the council’s website. Previously, information was in committee papers which are publicly available but often not easy to find, or knowledge was internal rather than shared publicly.

“Since then, we’ve brought together this information and evidence on the council website, making it available and accessible to Norfolk’s citizens and businesses, and indeed more widely.” 

The benefits go more widely than communication, though — they resonate through many aspects of the council’s work, as Marina explains: “We’ve found the Scorecards valuable as a way to check the comprehensiveness of our Action Plan, ensuring that we’re taking a well-rounded approach to addressing climate change. 

“At a senior management level, the Scorecards provide an overarching view of our climate action and comparative performance, which our Climate Board has integrated into its review process, using them to assess our actions and identify areas for improvement.”  

Talking of comparative performance, Marina adds, “We benchmark our performance against other councils. This comparison helps us identify areas where we need to improve and informs discussions with other councils on what further actions we can take.” 

And the bottom line? “Ultimately, the Scorecards have provided a useful means to review and benchmark our climate actions and provided a stimulus to improve the way we communicate what we do to the public.” 

That’s great to hear — and as we near the publication of the 2025 Scorecards, we were gratified to learn that Norfolk see their use into the future: “We plan to continue using the Scorecards as a monitoring tool, ensuring that our climate action remains ambitious, transparent, and effective.”

Thanks very much to Marina for sharing Norfolk County Council’s experience with the Scorecards, which are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Nathan Nelson

If you’ve been holding off from booking your place at TICTeC until the full schedule is announced, this is your sign to act!

You can now see all the sessions, together with info on who’ll be presenting and what they’ll be talking about on the TICTeC 2025 page.

We’ve already introduced our amazing keynotes, Fernanda Campagnucci and Marietje Schaake. Now you can enjoy looking through the rest of the two days’ offerings, with a global spread of speakers from US, Nigeria, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Thailand and many, many more, representing organisations including  MIT GOV/LAB; Global Data Barometer, OpenUp South Africa, Manchester City Council, Delib, Code for Pakistan, Polis, Mzalendo Trust, Google, Tainan Sprout… and lots more.

Responding to our theme of pro-democracy technology, sessions cover topics as diverse as: tech for better elections; AI-powered deliberation; tracking climate finance to curb corruption; measuring the impact of Access to Information, and much, much more.

The world is going through ‘interesting times’ just now. TICTeC is all the more important in the face of these multiple threats, as we get together, forge new alliances and learn from one another. We’ll return home stronger, with new knowledge about the myriad ways in which civic tech can help us to preserve and further democracy.

Book your tickets for TICTeC 2025 now.

The Council Climate Action Scorecards were recently mentioned in East Sussex County Council’s Written Questions (see question 12, on the council’s score for mitigation and adaptation). When we spot that the Scorecards are helping to inform councils’ conversations like this, we often make contact to find out more.

East Sussex were happy to fill us in with more details of how the Scorecards have helped them, and how they’ve been able to feed into the process with their own experiences:

“For local authorities, climate change is an evolving area of work with few statutory responsibilities. As a result, we can struggle to see what ‘good’ looks like, both for individual areas of work and holistically across the council. We’ve therefore found the Climate Action Scorecards useful to help identify areas where we’re doing well and those where we may need to pay more attention. The results of the Scorecards have been briefed to senior officers and elected members.

“Officers have also used the Scorecards as a research tool. When we review an area of work (or our Climate Emergency Strategy as a whole), one of the first questions we ask is what other local authorities are doing. The Scorecards provide an easy way to identify leaders in particular fields for further investigation.

“Finally, the marking process behind the Scorecards has encouraged us to look at our website and the information it provides on our climate change work. As a result, we’ve made changes to place important information front and centre and make the climate change pages easier to navigate.

“Climate Emergency UK have taken an inclusive approach to the Scorecards, and we’ve appreciated the opportunity to attend briefings and feedback on scoring through the right to reply. Through this, we’ve explained some of the issues faced by largely rural authorities such as East Sussex, for example in areas such as public transport.

“We’re pleased to see some of that feedback taken onboard in the latest round of scoring. We hope the CE UK will continue to evolve the scoring criteria to make the exercise even more useful for both local authorities and the public we serve.”

Thanks very much to East Sussex for giving us the view from a County Council. Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Neil Mark Thomas