mySociety wants to help you use FOI in a campaign or advocacy project

mySociety has the capacity to support a limited number of organisations working with marginalised populations in the UK. We’ll help you to make and analyse Freedom of Information (FOI) requests so you can use the data in your campaigning and advocacy. 

Sounds good? Please read on, then fill in this short questionnaire to tell us about your organisation, your project and any timelines you are working to. 

Please note: this offer is only open to organisations, and specifically those working with marginalised groups in the UK*. 

A little context

Last year, mySociety carried out research into the use of FOI to support social change for marginalised communities in the UK. 

That research informed a small number of free training seminars explaining different facets of FOI use. We’re now starting phase two of this project, aiming to provide dedicated support to ten organisations, helping them use FOI in a campaign or advocacy project between January and July 2025. 

What can FOI do for you?

If you’re new to FOI, you should know that it can be used to great effect in campaigning and advocacy, from gathering data to prove the need for your work, to uncovering corruption or maladministration. To find out more, browse our case studies or watch the seminars from phase one: 

During this project we’ll set you up on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (if you don’t already have an account); we’ll give you advice and support on framing your FOI request, who to send it to, how to respond to requests for clarification or rejections, and if necessary, how to submit something for internal review.

For large-scale FOI investigations where you’d like to collaborate with other members of staff, we can also show you how to use our Projects software, which makes it super-easy to work as a team and extract datasets from FOI.

What will you get out of this?

Once the data starts coming in from your FOI requests, we’ll help you load them into our Projects tool so you can decide how best to analyse the data with your team.  You’ll end up with a spreadsheet from which you can draw conclusions to help shape your campaign or advocacy work. 

You’ll be working in a small cohort of 2-5 organisations, and we’ll keep you together as a group so you can share common problems and we can also see where each organisation might hit different hurdles.

There’s no charge for this service: all we’re asking is for you to attend calls with mySociety/your cohort to feed back to us how things are going, tell us what your pain points are and ask us lots and lots of questions about FOI! We’ll also want to write or record a case study about you for our reporting and communications teams. 

* What is a marginalised community? For the purposes of this project, this refers to any group campaigning or advocating in the UK with or for:

• People who are disadvantaged by their social and/or economic background or circumstances
• People with Black, Asian or other Minority Ethnic heritage
• People living with disabilities and chronic illness 
• And, within these groups, particularly those with low digital literacy.

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Image: Christina @ wocintechchat.com

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, how giving MPs more power over the timetable helps them keep promises to voters, and stand-in (or locum) MPs.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should commission a Citizens’ Assembly to write a job role for MPs and consider how Parliament, MPs and MP support staff should relate to each other.

A unique role

We think that being an MP should be a more normal and understandable job — and that creating more clarity and structure around the role is good for both MPs and their constituents.

The role of ‘Member of Parliament’ is, for legal and historical reasons, odd. MPs are appointed by 650 elections to 650 separate positions, with a legal status similar to being self-employed. There is no formal connection between an MPs employment and their party, and at the same time no formal idea that they’re supposed to be independent of their party.

While the devolved Parliaments have a requirement that representatives should ‘be accessible to the people of the areas for which they have been elected to serve and to represent their interests conscientiously’, there is no such rule for MPs. This gives a great amount of freedom to MPs, but is in its own way, a trap. In the absence of a clear direction on what they should be doing, it is easy for MPs to be squeezed between party leadership and constituent demands. A clearly defined job role helps evaluate and manage conflicting pressure, and defines the support necessary for the role.

The premise of TheyWorkForYou is in the name — representatives should, in a meaningful way, be understood to be working on behalf of their constituents as a whole, and society in general. But it’s also true that if we’re collectively MPs’ bosses, there are not the structures in place for us to be good employers. If we want to come to a clearer settlement on this, we need a constructive dialogue that goes further than infrequent elections and public polling. We need to meaningfully engage citizens in thought and deliberation about how we can have the best system of representation possible.

Setting standards

We need a way of involving a wider group of people in setting the standards and expectations for what an MP does. One way of doing this would be a Citizens’ Assembly, that brings together a diverse group of people from every part of the country and different ways of life. UCL Constitution Unit’s Democracy in the UK assembly provides a number of useful directions about ethical standards set by MPs (with solid support for a stronger code of conduct); we can go further down this route to explore different ideas of what MPs are supposed to be doing, and give them support to do so.

As a basic task an assembly could be used to define a job description for MPs. What evidence we have suggests this is unlikely to be hugely prescriptive (there is recognition that MPs need to slide between multiple modes of representation) but would be informative about how that better defined role can be supported – and a wider set of questions about the MPs’ role that we could clarify at the same time. Involve have argued that a citizens assembly should play an important part in setting the roles and standards for MPs’ behaviour, and potentially as part of the way that MPs are judged. Introducing deliberative democracy into this process helps fix processes where MPs both set and mark their own homework (seeing deliberation as part of the anti-corruption toolkit rather than a replacement for MPs).

Creating a new conversation

There are wider questions where there are different schools of thought on how Parliament should work. Having citizens weigh in on the balance would help advance arguments and unlock reforms. How much should the government control Parliament? How should MPs fit into that? What is the appropriate scope of casework? What should MPs be spending their time on? How do we make sure they have the resources they need to do that? How can we provide decent working conditions to the representatives and their staff who work on our behalf?

This last point is especially important. While the MP is the only office holder, they have a wider staff to help them support their work. While thousands of people are collectively employed by MPs, they are all employed by individual MPs in small groups. This makes it difficult to impossible for MPs’ staff to raise bullying or abuse issues. Staff groups have proposed staff should be employed centrally, rather than by MPs, but this was rejected by a Speaker’s Conference.

This is a dispute it’d be useful for MPs’ employers collectively to weigh in on. The Democracy in the UK assembly found strong support for the idea that “In the workplace MPs should be subject to the same sanctions as other employees regarding the treatment of staff. Bullying or harassment should not be tolerated.” A Citizens’ Assembly focused on the job role and structures of support would provide direction from the level above MPs on appropriate structures to both be supported and support their staff.

Healthier democratic conversations

For MPs who feel constrained, this is a forum to make the case on how they could be supported to do their job better. For those MPs who use the idea that they are accountable to “the electorate” as a justification that there should be almost no restrictions on their behaviour, citizens’ assemblies are a vital guide to the kinds of standards that citizens will and won’t accept from their representatives.

From our point of view, this would help clarify the approach TheyWorkForYou should take in holding MPs to account — but this would also be helpful as a reset in democratic relations. This debate is often put in “public versus elite” framings that lead to a number of unhelpful attitudes. Views from “the public” of what MPs should do are framed as incoherent and uneducated, in a way that elite discussion almost becomes resentful of the idea that the public are part of the discussion at all.

The ghost of the public is used to justify both underinvestment in democracy, and detachment from the idea the public have anything useful to say on the subject. At the same time, the public has no actual power here. Reforms stall, not because they are popular or not, but because of opposition from those who already have power.

Creating structures to meaningfully involve citizens in this discussion provides a way out of this problem, and could lead to a more constructive discussion on the relationship between citizens and representatives.

Image: Deniz Fuchidzhiev on Unsplash.

A key part of my job is to think about problems that exist in the UK, understand where technical approaches can make a difference, and help make pitches to funders who care about those problems (or who like technical solutions), that we’re a good place to spend their money.

A big part of that process is being turned down a lot! There are far more good ideas than there is funding. But as a result, a big chunk of my work is probably best described as “writing sci-fi for a small audience of grant managers”. I’d like to change that by talking a bit more publicly about the problems we think are important, and how we can make a difference in solving them.

In this case, we (working with brilliant partners in Democracy Club and The Politics Project) were putting together a bid for Google’s Impact Challenge around more resilient democracy. This was unusual in being a potentially large grant of €1 million, which both meant it was enough money to pick off a big problem and that there was a lot of competition. 340 organisations applied across Europe and there was only €15 million to go around. It was always unlikely we’d win – but I think the idea was good – so here’s more about that!

Improving civics understanding in the UK

The quick summary is that we were going to make better information about who is responsible for what in this country, and we were going to make sure it was available where it was needed.

If you think devolution is essential to the economic and democratic future of the UK, worried about youth engagement with democracy, or concerned about abuse in public life, a lack of civic knowledge is a common problem. We think it is possible with a relatively small amount of money to make a real impact on this problem.

A key benefit of devolution isn’t just making better decisions locally, but freeing up inherently limited capacity at the centre to deal with truly national issues. But the problem with spreading responsibility around multiple levels of democracy is that you make it harder for people to know the right place to go to when they need help. Part of MPs’ offices being overwhelmed is because they receive messages that need to be sent on to local government, and the Jo Cox Civility Commission highlighted that people being bounced around a system they don’t understand is a specific cause of frustration which results in abuse towards MPs and their staff.

This is a problem we can fix. We’re already one of the best approaches to this problem by accident — a big use of WriteToThem isn’t to write messages but just to find out who the local councillors are for your ward (see also Democracy Club’s Your Area tool) . We want to build a system that gets this information everywhere, and supports a much wider range of uses.

Our plan was a set of interconnected technical and educational approaches, working with partners Democracy Club (who are responsible for getting election information everywhere), and The Politics Project (a leading democratic education organisation).

Getting the data right, and getting it everywhere

At the foundation of this approach is better data. Democracy Club would build on their existing elections database to create a representatives database that could feed a “WhoDoesWhat” API.

We’d then use this centralised resource to improve information on our existing high traffic services. But that’s not how we solve the big problem. We need this information everywhere.

We don’t want WriteToThem to be how people get to the right place: we want every single MP’s website, local council, and news site to be able to say who is responsible for what based on where you live and how you get in contact. We’d do this following the Democracy Club model, of producing APIs and widgets that make it easy to put this information everywhere it’s needed.

(If you would be a potential user of this database – Democracy Club has a mailing list you can sign up to for more information if we can make progress on this in different ways.)

Get the right information to people who need it

There are lots of organisations working to get civics education where it’s most needed. We want to make every single one of them more effective, by creating tools that help make online and offline materials more responsive to local circumstances.

At the moment, if you’re The Politics Project, going into schools across the country, you need to adjust materials all the time. Does this area have a devolved parliament? Combined authority? Two tier council? When’s the next election; who’s currently running the council? Everything either needs hedging, or customisation.

One of the ways they customise their work is by using WriteToThem — but we can make something better! Our plan was to create a templating tool that builds on the WhoDoesWhat database to make it easy for educators and civics organisations to make materials that are instantly customisable — saving time and making materials more relevant to the communities they’re working with.

We were going to work with a range of organisations to design and test this tool and move huge amounts of existing materials across to this approach — creating a fantastic “last mile” tool for civics education.

Improved systematic information and signals

Once we’ve made WriteToThem less useful by scaling up a key feature, we’re going to reinvent it.

People should use WriteToThem not because it’s the best way of finding out who your MP or councillor is, but because everyone agrees communication using it is better than just sending emails (to the right person, clear, non-abusive). We want to have a big think about how we can best adapt WriteToThem to the problems of today.

We also have a unique position sitting between many people writing and many representatives receiving. We want to make more use of this: we want to understand more about the content of messages, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going, creating a ‘Zeitgeist’ view on constituent communication (without processing the text of messages).

This helps create more visibility of issues over multiple representatives (and different layers of government), but also helps highlight where the mailbag is systematically missing areas and groups. We know MPs use mailbag as a metric of constituency opinion — but also that they probably shouldn’t. We want to create tools that help understand distributions in the messages coming in, and create more interest in other ways of gauging constituency opinions.

Please give us £1,000,000

Google said no — but if you happen to have a lot of money and think any or all of this sounds like a good idea, please get in touch! (Always happy to share the longer concept note).

If you have less than this (say £10), this is also useful and helps keep the idea factory churning!

If you support our work and want to set up a regular payment, in the long run this helps make us more independent of big funders, and more able to make steady progress. Every little helps.

The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices.

We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take longer to work through. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to publish blog posts on long running issues where deeper changes would improve how Parliament works.

Previously we’ve written about how it should be easier for MPs to vote, and how giving MPs more power over the timetable ultimately helps them keep promises to voters.

Today we’re publishing our research into Stand-in (or ‘locum’) MPs. This is the idea that when MPs have a substantial period of absence (e.g. parental or long-term sickness) there should be a process to appoint someone who can temporarily fulfil the duties of an MP.

The need here is to find an approach that starts with the fact that MPs are people, and we need to be able to handle prolonged absence well —both for constituent representation and the wellbeing of MPs.

The idea of replacing absent representatives with stand-in MPs is (if not universal) certainly something that happens in other Parliaments. Generally these are in Parliaments elected by party-list proportional representation, and there is a good ‘next person’ on the list to appoint. We need an approach that works for the candidate-based system we use in the UK.

Our pitch is creating a new role with speaking rights in Parliament, while voting continues to be handled by proxy vote (over an extended period). But other approaches are possible, and what’s important at this point is trying to draw out objections and views, and trying to find ways forward.

The research is consciously not comprehensive, but we’ve sign-posted what we think the next set of questions is, and how it’s possible to get more answers.

You can read the report online.

For feedback, please email me at alex.parsons@mysociety.org.

Image: Yaopey Yong on Unsplash.

TICTeC will be returning in 2025:  10 & 11 June in Mechelen (Belgium), and online. 

Registration is open now. 

This year we are framing our call for session proposals around ‘pro-democracy technology’. This blog post contains information about the audiences, themes, and formats for the conference – and information on how to submit proposals. Read on to discover what we’re looking for in submissions, and guides to the different formats of sessions. 

What is TICTeC?

TICTeC, short for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, first launched in 2015 as an annual gathering. Since then, it has evolved into a programme of year-round activities through our current TICTeC Communities and previous TICTeC Labs projects. 

A key tenet of the civic tech movement is the idea that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible. This is what TICTeC is all about. We’re bringing together practical people and practical thinkers to talk about the impact of our work, and learn lessons in how we can go further.

TICTeC is all about sharing research, knowledge and experiences on how digital technologies are being used to defend and advance civic and democratic values across the world.  We want a future where technology strengthens democracy rather than undermines it, in order to build societies and technologies that serve the many, not just the few. 

TICTeC is a place where you can learn about everything from combating corruption and misinformation to empowering communities and enhancing civic participation, and is a unique platform where attendees connect and collaborate.

Attendees are a distinctive mix of small and big tech practitioners, civil society leaders, funders, users, civil servants, government representatives and academic researchers. Together we want to showcase cutting-edge pro-democracy innovations with a relentless focus on their real-world impact and effectiveness.

At previous TICTeC conferences, between 150-250 people have gathered in person and online, from more than 40 countries.

Conference themes

This year we’re shaping TICTeC around three thematic areas. 

• Access to information and open data
• Democracy, people and politics
• Climate change

In these areas, we’re structuring panels around ideas of defensive and constructive democratic tech. Read our blog post on pro-democracy technology to understand more what we mean by defensive and constructive technologies (there are also examples below). Proposals may in practice cover multiple areas. If your proposal does not fit either category, you can select both or neither. 

Beyond these topics, we will also have time for sessions that are interested in meta questions around ideas of civic tech and pro-democracy technology.

The examples below are not meant to be comprehensive, but give a sense of what we mean by each category. 

Access to information and open data

This thematic area applies to people working with access to information/Freedom of Information laws, or open data. The tech side may be innovations in running ATI platforms, improved government efficiencies, or projects that produce subsequent analysis or tools as a result of the data. 

Defensive tech

This category is looking at the use of access to information laws/platforms or open data as part of anti-corruption projects or platforms. This might include how data from ATI requests have been used as part of wider initiatives, or meta-investigation about how technology can make anti-corruption use of ATI more effective. 

Constructive tech

This category is looking at how open data or access to information laws can be used to build new data and tools, and the wider social (or commercial) impact of making it easier to access information. 

Democracy, people, and politics

This section covers projects concerned with mainstream democratic structures, or technical approaches to democratic processes involving people directly. 

This might include democratic transparency projects, e.g. those that create/rework public information about democratic institutions/politicians to improve transparency, accountability, standards, or efficiency. This includes Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations, but also extends to projects looking at elected politicians in other contexts that are Parliaments (such as city governments), or other democratic processes such as deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies. 

But it might also look like technology that directly involves people in democratic processes, such as toolkits of deliberative processes, consultation approaches, conditional commitment etc. 

Defensive tech

This covers a range of uses of technology to safeguard and investigate democratic processes. For instance: electoral violence monitoring, political donation tracking and broader anti-corruption work. 

Constructive tech

Here we are looking for empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity. These approaches are less of a zero-sum game, but are looking at the potential for technology that enriches democratic life. 

This covers technology that may be trying to improve processes and understanding of electoral democratic institutions. It might include new forms or innovations in PMOs applying machine learning to existing problems. It also includes innovations in new forms of technology, and the uses of technology in deliberative processes.

Climate change

The climate crisis is a massive practical issue that requires urgent action — and like all practical issues it’s a democratic question. We’re interested both in where action on this issue is being actively disrupted by anti-democrats, and where we need to build democratic capacity to solve these problems. 

At TICTeC we want to explore practical approaches to facilitating and delivering democratic action on climate change. 

We need to develop defensive approaches — but we also need to bring the full cognitive and relational capacity of democracy to bear on the problem, – pushing decisions away from a few big levers in the middle, to understand how to reshape our environments and communities to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Submissions in this category may also fit into one or both of the other two. 

Defensive tech

In this area, defensive tech may take the form of anti-corruption approaches focused on the influence of fossil fuel companies and petrostates. This might include monitoring of fossil-fuel sponsored narratives repeated by politicians, or fact checking for climate conspiracy theories.  

Constructive tech

Constructive tech in this area is trying to bring the cognitive and relational capacity of democracy to bear on the problem, – pushing decisions away from a few big levers in the middle, to understand how to reshape our environments and communities to respond to the effects of climate change. 

This might be participatory approaches to shaping policy, directing local changes, or collaborative approaches to mixed public/private decisions home upgrades and retrofit. 

Session types

This year we’re looking for three session types.

• 20 minute presentations
• 35 minute short workshops
• 75 minute long workshops/panels

For workshops, we really want to see a strong interactive element that involves the audience in working through a practical activity, sharing information and experiences. 

Short workshops may (but don’t have to) take the form of a short presentation, with structured audience participation. 

Long workshops may take the form of a panel (where multiple speakers are involved), but there should still be a strong interactive component. For these, we would want to see panellists from a range of expertise and backgrounds. 

Structured participation doesn’t have to be complicated. When we run sessions, we tend to use the 1-2-4-all method to structure conversation around questions. Sessions in the past have used slido or similar. What we’re looking for in evaluating workshops is:

• A clear sense of the kind of discussion and questions you want to have.
• A sense that participants will have something to say, and get something out of these discussions (so being clear which subset of the TICTeC audience and themes you are talking to). 

When submitting workshop proposals, the key thing to bear in mind is that we have fewer time slots and can accept fewer of these proposals.

You are allowed to submit multiple proposals if you would like to pitch a presentation and a workshop (but both are unlikely to be accepted). 

We have a limited number of travel grants available to support speakers to attend, you can apply for this via the submissions form.

While we will favour speakers to be in-person, there are a limited number of slots for people who cannot travel to present remotely. Please indicate if you may need to present remotely when filling out the submission form.

Submission details

Submit your proposals via this application form by 15 Jan 2025 at the latest. 

Those selected for inclusion in the conference programme will be notified by 31 Jan 2025. 

Presenters will be required to register for the conference by 14 February in order to confirm their slot (the registration fee will be waived for individuals presenting; people who have already booked will be refunded). 

What is a good TICTeC presentation?

TICTeC is a practical and reflective conference. We encourage presentation submissions to focus on specific impacts or usage, rather than showcase new tools that are as yet untested.  We’re less interested in speculative uses of technology, but more in people’s practical experiences of working with tools and technical approaches. Technology does not have to be new, and we welcome retrospectives on long running projects.

A tool doesn’t have to have mass usage to be worth talking about – we’re equally interested in qualitative stories on the impacts of technology; their impacts on official processes; and how users have used platforms to campaign for change. We’re also interested in stories about obstacles and barriers to having impact. The main work of your organisation does not have to be technology centred: we are interested in experiences and impacts of adopting new approaches in less technical organisations. 

TICTeC attendees are a mixture of practitioners and researchers. Presentations should expect audiences to include different levels of technical knowledge. 

We score proposals according to their alignment to the conference themes, as discussed above. 

Use of AI in writing proposals

You may use ChatGPT or similar to sharpen ideas for proposals, better highlight alignment with our themes, or improve written language. However, proposals and sessions that are entirely AI-conceived will not score well. 

Last year we saw a number of proposals we suspected were AI-written because while they were at first appearance well crafted, they ultimately only spoke in vague and general terms about the themes we asked for. Because we prioritise experience and impact, such submissions will score poorly. If using these tools, ensure the result is an accurate and truthful account of your own experiences, research, or impact. 

More information

The TICTeC 2025 Eventbrite page contains further information about the conference, including FAQs. If you still have any questions after reading that, please email tictec@mysociety.org.

Speaking opportunities through sponsorship

TICTeC 2025 sponsors receive a guaranteed speaking slot, with no need to participate in the open call. Find out more about sponsoring TICTeC 2025.

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You can follow updates as they are announced over on the TICTeC website. If you’d like to be the first to receive TICTeC 2025 updates, please sign up for our emails.

And in the meantime, if you’d like to see what TICTeC is all about, you can browse all the resources from previous events over on the TICTeC Knowledge Hub.

We look forward to welcoming you to TICTeC 2025!

Citizens Assemblies are processes that bring together a representative group of citizens from different walks of life to discuss problems. These can be used to overcome political gridlock and to use diverse perspectives to improve policy approaches. 

Assemblies in the UK have been held by several of the UK’s Parliaments, by local authorities, NHS Trusts, and by academic institutions. 

To help us add citizens assemblies to CAPE, we have done upstream work in making it easier to find and keep track of citizens assemblies. We have:

• Created a dataset to keep track of assemblies
• Updated our guidance on publishing citizen assembly reports to reflect this archive, and guidance around licensing reports.

An archive of Citizens Assemblies

Because citizens assemblies are not standardised processes, there isn’t one place where you can see all the assemblies that have been held, or read what they concluded. Involve has maintained a tracker, but this has fallen a few years out of date.

To add information about local citizens assemblies on climate change to our CAPE website, we needed to create a good up-to-date dataset.  To do this in a sustainable way, we now host a register that aims to cover citizens assemblies held in the UK.

Using an automated trawl of all local authority websites, which we then reviewed to remove false positives, we identified ten new citizens assemblies in addition to the one’s Involve had already collected.

But that turned out to be the easy part. The bigger problem was due to local government website changes, many of the links that had worked a few years ago were broken, and needed to be added manually. 

We’ve found updated links, and where possible links directly to the PDF final report. We have added a cache of these PDF reports to our registry – meaning we’re preserving a record of reports, and that services using our register can fall back on our backup if a future re-organisation breaks the links again. 

(This may have fallen out of date by the time we publish the blog post – let us know if we’re missing yours!)

Licencing democratic documents

Citizens assemblies as new democratic processes do not have standardised forms for publishing recommendations or reports. Part of that lack of standardisation is inconsistency on how the final report is licenced (meaning the terms under which someone can reuse or share the report).

Our view is that for Citizens’ Assemblies held by public authorities, or funded with public money, the results of the assembly should be released under either the Open Parliament/Open Government licence – or the equivalent Creative Commons licence (CC BY 4.0).

This wouldn’t just clarify “it’s fine to rehost in a cache or archive” but would allow explicit re-use and re-publication in other forms. Most reports are only published as PDFs, meaning there would be added value from a site that did for Citizens Assemblies what TheyWorkForYou does for Parliaments – bringing all the information together in one place.  It would also be permissive to translations of citizens assembly reports into other languages, or for re-publication and compilations of recommendations on similar themes. 

Reviewing the 39 reports we have in our database: 24 had no information on copyright or licensing, 4 were published under Open Government/Equivalent CC licence, 7 were published under a slightly more restrictive CC licence (not allowing commercial usage), and 4 explicitly claimed general copyright in some shape or form. 

These differences are generally explained by different facilitator organisations writing reports. Shared Future’s template report consistently uses the same CC licence. Organisations that work with a mixture of public and private clients may retain copyright boilerplate sometimes without thinking about it, and for smaller organisations, there may not be awareness of the benefits of permissive licensing of democratic documents.

In other cases, there may be an attitude that licensing is something that is none of the facilitator’s concern – they produce the information for the client who should release it themselves however is appropriate. As a result, the document itself is silent on the copyright status. In practice authorities will just rehost the file that the facilitator provides; so what is eventually published is similarly silent on the status of the document. 

GIven this, our recommendation is that  facilitators should establish a standard view on a default licence for public sector clients, and have that conversation with the public authority. 

Due to the public benefit in maintaining an archive of the results of citizens assemblies, we include the complete set – including those that are explicitly copyrighted – in our cache.

The explicitly copyrighted entries are:

• Oxford City Council 2019 Climate Assembly – 2019 Ipsos MORI – all rights reserved.
• City of Wolverhampton 2020 Climate Assembly – Marked “Private and Confidential” by BritainThinks
• Blaenau Gwent County Borough Council 2021 Climate Assembly – Marked copyrighted by Cynnal Cymru – Sustain Wales, 2021
• UCL’s Constitution Unit – Democracy in the UK – Copyright – The Constitution Unit and Involve 2022

We are happy to have conversations with any of the organisations involved.

Updating our guidance

In 2019, we published a set of guidance on useful possible features to host on a website for a Citizens Assembly before, during, and after the assembly. We have updated this with clearer sections on licensing approaches, and inviting depositing a copy in our dataset as a long term archive.

Header image: Photo by Glen Noble on Unsplash

The TICTeC conference will be returning next year: on 10 & 11 June 2025 in Mechelen (Belgium), and online. 

In light of the exceptional political times we’re living through, and that 2025 marks 10 years since TICTeC began, TICTeC 2025 will have a renewed focus on what we’re calling “Pro-Democracy Technology”.

TICTeC 2025 will bring together people working on defensive technology against threats to democracy, and those who are using technologies constructively to enrich and strengthen the heartbeat of civic and democratic life. Read more on our thoughts on reframing civic tech for the current moment.

If you’re working in this area and have things to share, or want to understand how technology can be applied to the democratic needs of our age – sign up now, we’d love for you to join us. 

What is TICTeC?

TICTeC, short for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, first launched in 2015 as an annual gathering. Since then, it has evolved into programmes of year-round activities through our current TICTeC Communities and previous TICTeC Labs projects. 

A key tenet of the civic tech movement is the idea that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible. This is what TICTeC is all about, we’re bringing together practical people and practical thinkers to talk about the impact of our work, and learn lessons in how we can go further.

TICTeC is all about sharing research, knowledge and experiences on how digital technologies are being used to defend and advance civic and democratic values across the world.  We want a future where technology strengthens democracy rather than undermines it, in order to build societies that serve the many, not just the few. 

From combating corruption and misinformation to empowering communities and enhancing civic participation, TICTeC is a unique platform where attendees connect and collaborate.

With a distinctive mix of small and big tech practitioners, civil society leaders, funders, users, and academic researchers, we want to showcase cutting-edge pro-democracy innovations with a relentless focus on their real-world impact and effectiveness.

At previous TICTeC conferences, between 150-250 people have gathered in-person and online from more than 40 countries.

Why do we host TICTeC?

We run TICTeC because we think there is important work being done, and that we are stronger and smarter together.

Threats to democracy and civic power are rising across the world. Anti-democratic actors aren’t standing still – and are constantly learning how to use technology to extend their power and control over people. 

Democracy’s reaction to this needs to be not to reject technology but to use it to evolve and compete, particularly in addressing society-changing issues like climate change. 

Democracy needs to be fast, effective and popular, and digital technology can and is helping to achieve this. 

That’s why TICTeC exists – to highlight and examine these pro-democracy technologies, in a collaborative and safe space. This not only strengthens our work at mySociety but also contributes to a global movement harnessing technology to protect and advance democratic values around the world. 

TICTeC 2025 themes

The 2025 TICTeC conference will focus on exploring the impact of pro-democracy tech innovations across several critical themes: Access to information (ATI), Democratic Transparency, and Climate.

In each of these areas, we want to explore what we’re calling ‘defensive’ and ‘constructive’ approaches. Defensive approaches safeguard the openness democracy needs to operate – while constructive approaches build the capacity of the engine of democratic progress.

Call for Proposals

We’ll soon be launching our Call for Proposals, giving more information and the opportunity to pitch your session ideas on the above themes. Be sure to sign up for email updates to be the first to know when submissions open.

Register now- Early Bird tickets available

It is essential to register on Eventbrite in order to attend TICTeC 2025, whether that’s in person or online. Early Bird tickets are available until 3rd March 2025, saving £100. More practical information and FAQs can be found on the TICTeC 2025 webpage.

If you have general ideas or questions about TICTeC 2025, or are interested in sponsoring the conference, please get in touch. 

We can’t wait to see you at TICTeC 2025—either in person in Mechelen or online. Let’s come together again to explore how technology can be leveraged for a resilient and proactive global democratic future.

Image: CC Visit Mechelen. 

In how we’re framing TICTeC and our wider work, we’re talking less about civic tech and more about what we’re calling Pro-Democracy Tech (PDT).

The reason for this is we’re finding civic tech is a less helpful term for the kind of convening work we want to do. It won the argument of its time, and there is much less need to make the basic case for technology as part of the civic tool kit. But as a result, it has less to say about the situation we’re in now. Instead, we need framing that better talks to the range of people and institutions who are doing civic and democratic work with technology today. 

What is Pro-Democracy Tech?

Pro-Democracy Tech describes digital tools aimed at realising and defending democratic values. 

A key motivation of this approach is that authoritarianism isn’t standing still – and is learning how to use technology to extend its surveillance and control over people. Democracy’s reaction to this needs to be not to reject technology but to use it to evolve and compete. Democracy needs to be fast, effective and popular, while not conceding that the only way to do this is by becoming more centralised and authoritarian itself.

Within this, there are two key activities:

• Defensive democratic tech –  defending the open society: anti-corruption, anti-misinformation, etc.
• Constructive democratic tech  – empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity: participation and deliberation, community tools, civic response tech. 

These are interconnected, and not hard divides. Defensive approaches safeguard the openness which democracy needs to function, while constructive approaches build the capacity of the engine of democratic progress. 

There are tools and approaches that apply to both. Access to Information laws are both vital anti-corruption tools, and part of capacity building through lowering costs of accessing information. Democratic transparency organisations (PMOs and similar) are both about increasing anti-corruption surveillance, and transforming the capacity and connections of democratic institutions.

Where they differ is in their approaches to new technological tools. Defensive democratic tech is in an arms war with anti-democrats. We have to keep moving and innovating to stay in place.  It is reactive against a well-financed opponent, and needs to understand how to bend tools (often developed by those with deep pockets and their own motives) to democratic purposes.

Constructive democratic tech is less of a zero-sum game. Just as there are technological approaches that make authoritarianism much more effective, there are approaches that make democracy much more effective. Here the enemy is less organised but omnipresent: inertia, low expectations, and a belief that things can’t be better. The goal of this approach is developing civic capacity, and taking us on the path from “citizen sensors” to “citizen thinkers” – where the extraordinary capacity and cognitive diversity in a democracy are fully enabled to work together to solve the big problems of the age (such as climate change). 

Why do we need this shift?

Going back twenty years (or even just ten years to the first TICTeC), what the “civic tech movement” is trying to get across is that there are civic-minded people who are using technology to create new kinds of organisations and services. Civic tech is a term to describe this novelty, make the case to funders, and advocate for this idea that technology isn’t just about online shopping, but can help people work together to improve the society they’re in. 

The good news is that these people mostly won. Governments, journalism and NGOs have generally taken on the lessons of the early civic tech movement. A wider range of governments and organisations understand the value of technology in helping them achieve their purpose, and there are more outlets for the kind of people who originally would have founded civic tech organisations. 

As a result, when we look internationally, we see very few organisations where the core identity is “civic tech” and that run a range of services in the same way that mySociety does. Instead, we tend to see organisations more tightly focused on an area of work (like access to information), and tech is one of a range of skill sets represented, or where civic tech-like work is part of a broader portfolio of more traditional research and advocacy work.

As civic tech is speaking to problems that no longer exist in the same way, the phrase doesn’t apply well to the problems we have now.  We need language and terms to bring together people who are using tech as part of the work to defend and enrich our democratic societies. 

Putting this into practice

The purpose of this framing is to create practical language. At TICTeC 2025, we’re exploring how we’ll use constructive/defensive framing to structure the conference – across specific areas of work we have a focus in: democratic transparency, access to information and climate change. We also want to use it to be clearer about the broader range of organisations and projects we ‘d like to see there. 

Pro-Democracy Tech reflects both the purpose of the technology, a general attitude that pro-democracy tech is possible, and a recognition that there is anti-democratic technology out there. It was really helpful putting this together to see some similar language and divides in this NED/IFDS essay collection.

Leaving the tech aside, the spirit of civic tech is about challenging low expectations of how things are, and demonstrating that things can be done better.  As mySociety, we still see ourselves as a civic tech organisation, and the idea of a civic tech movement as important to understand ourselves and our history. But we also need language that helps us understand how we relate to others that don’t share that history.

A feature of the current moment is that ideas of democracy are under attack, and authoritarians have embraced and made technology core to how they work. What is up for debate is the orientation of the pro-democracy side towards technology. We think ceding the ground would be a mistake and through TICTeC we want to incubate the best version of the pro-democratic tech argument. At the same time, we want to stay true to an important value of the civic tech movement: that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible.

Header image: Photo by Bhushan Sadani on Unsplash

We are thrilled that the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation has chosen to support our work for another year, enabling us to put technology and data to use in service of a fairer society and a more sustainable future. 

This funding will enable us to:

• Improve our democracy sites to make them more effective in helping people understand democratic processes – including using machine learning approaches to enhance TheyWorkForYou and upgrading our WriteToThem platform with better tools and prompts around abuse, as well as creating a stronger systematic understanding of the subject of communications and challenges navigating access, closing the loop with higher quality information flowing both ways. 
• Enhance the Local Intelligence Hub and amplify public data collaboration for scalable solutions. With the Hub beginning to deliver value for the climate sector, we’re now exploring if it could be used in other sectors, providing data to supercharge other policy work, e.g. within health or human rights. There are often intersections, such as campaigns that highlight the joint health and environmental benefits of making homes warmer and more energy efficient, so we are eager to explore how we can put data to the best use to bring about wider societal impacts. 
• Utilise Freedom of Information to enable urgent climate risks to become known, and action to be accelerated with public accountability. And to offer the ‘projects’ functionality we build to facilitate this to the 20+ sites across the world who use our codebase to run their own sites – enabling greater transparency in increasingly hostile environments.  

Through our work we have already demonstrated that technology can be used to prise open closed doors, and make decision-making more transparent. We have empowered those working for openness inside and outside the system – now we want to go further! If you want to join this mission please consider becoming a donor to enable our work to grow.

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Image: Gaelle Marcel

In our WhoFundsThem work, we want to make MPs’ financial interests much easier to understand and more transparent. One of the ways we think our work can make a difference is in highlighting processes that don’t make sense, and prodding Parliament to see what happens.

In this case, we’ve noticed an issue in how declarations of interests by MPs on Written Questions are handled — and raising this has triggered a review of the process.

We have also released a new dataset of Written Questions where an interest has been declared.

What’s the problem?

When submitting parliamentary questions, MPs should say if they have any relevant interests, and if so what they are. In the guide to submitting Written Questions online, MPs are told “If you have an interest to declare, click the box saying ‘yes’ and explain what the interest is.” Similarly, on the offline form, members are told to email the Table Office to say what the interest is.

However, only the ‘yes/no’ bit of this gets onto the Written Questions section of the Parliament website. The actual interest being disclosed is never released. The problem is this is a lower level of public disclosure than contributions to debates, where the standard is now (in theory) that it should be clear what the interest is as well as the fact that it exists. For oral questions, that interests need to be declared on the form is explicitly given as a reason there is no need for further declarations in the chamber. This would be reasonable if the information was available to be added to Hansard later – but as stands it is not.

Both in the chamber and on the form, MPs may refer to interests they have already declared, or raise something with a closer connection to the topic that doesn’t otherwise need to be disclosed. As well as financial interests, this might represent more personal interests (for instance, a health issue they have an interest in because of their own experiences).

Because we only have ‘an interest has been declared’, different types of disclosure are lumped together. This requires more work from anyone who wants to understand whether a declaration has further financial implications, or simply added context/personal background. In this case, it’s not even that the MPs are at fault: they’re disclosing information, but the process means that it’s not going anywhere.

Asking for more information

To see what would happen, we made a Freedom of Information request for this information that’s being recorded but not released.

As we mostly expected, this was withheld under the exemption that gives Parliament control over publishing its own proceedings (we can’t compel extra information to be published even if it exists). However, there was a recognition that this gap was a problem and as a result the process is being reviewed:

Nonetheless, while there is no statutory right to this information, Mr Speaker considers greater transparency would be desirable and has commissioned an urgent review of the publication policy. The review may well lead to the information you seek being provided on a non-statutory basis, but it will take a little time to carry out.

This is great news, and better future publication would help make disclosure more uniform and effective.

This response also confirmed that the current process is a bit of black hole, with it being inappropriate for officials to screen questions as a result of interests declared:

It is Members, not officials, that are responsible for deciding what to register or declare, and deciding whether or not their interests are of a sort which should prevent them asking a particular question or taking part in a debate.

As such, the disclosures MPs make as part of this process are functionally going nowhere (except as an honesty exercise for the MPs involved): they have no public visibility and no internal decisions are made as a result of information disclosed.

Why this matters

We’re interested in Written Questions because they’re both an important part of how Parliament holds the government to account, but also a potential way that MPs can use their public position for private gain.

MPs have privileged access to government information. Written Questions are both faster than Freedom of Information requests (normal reply of five days rather than 28 days), and can ask questions that might require producing new information (while FOI only applies to data and information that already exists).

In the 90s, there was a Cash for Questions scandal, and there is reason to suspect that some version of this continues. Simon Weschle found a statistical connection between a group of MPs with second jobs (especially those in the “knowledge sector”) and increased numbers of questions asked. Looking at the content of these extra questions, he found these MPs asked more questions about internal department policies and projects. While Weschle is careful to avoid suggesting impropriety by any single MP highlighted, this suggests a slightly less immediately transactional version of cash for questions. Companies that can hire MPs have the ability to extract more information about government work, that may enrich the company, even if the MP’s formal role is tangential to this work. In general, MPs should strive to avoid even the appearance that this is what is happening.

What can we do in the meantime?

We’re going to keep an eye out for changes made as a result of this review, but there’s more we can do in the meantime.

The first thing we’ve already done is make the dataset of questions with declared interests more accessible. Using the Parliament website’s Written Questions service, you can’t easily pick out just those with a declared interest. We’ve set up a process to republish Written Questions with declared interests as a spreadsheet and through a data explorer.

If we decide to start weekly summaries of interests declared in debates, we could similarly keep track of new questions with declared interests and try and reconcile them to information elsewhere. The volume is low enough we could email MPs to ask what they’ve declared if unclear.

Something we considered was categorising questions with interests disclosed as part of our crowdsource of the register of interests, but we left this off to keep the scope of the exercise manageable. However, the real issue to dig into is not the relatively small number of questions with interests disclosed (around 256 last year), but understanding whether there are interests undisclosed in the 40,000 other questions submitted.

This is too great a volume to easily crowdsource, but we’d like to explore whether we can pair the task with a machine learning approach to narrow the problem down to a smaller list of entries for manual review. As part of the current crowdsource, our volunteers are collecting information about associated companies. This might be a first step in exploring this problem.

Help us go further

This is part of our wider WhoFundsThem project – where we are building new datasets and crowdsourcing information about MPs’ financial interests to improve what we list on TheyWorkForYou.

Under pretty much every rock we turn over, we find something that needs more attention. We would like to do a lot more work like this: finding ways to apply new technology to make parliamentary monitoring more comprehensive and sustainable.

If you’d like to help us do more, please consider supporting us with a one-off or monthly donation.

Image: Jon Tyson on Unsplash.