In case you missed it — or in case you want to watch it all again — here’s the video from our #Democracy2043 event of May 24.

Our insightful panel discuss what kind of democracy they’d like to see in 2043, and, perhaps more importantly, what we need to put in place in order to make it a reality.

Many thanks to our panelists for their brilliant inputs: Emma Geen, Disability Activist; Immy Kaur of CIVIC SQUARE; Joy Green, Systemic Futurist; Dr Kim Foale of Geeks For Social Change and our own Chief Executive Louise Crow.

Journalist Lucas Amin was one of the first to try out our tool for professional users of Freedom of Information, WhatDoTheyKnow Pro. 

Back in 2017, when Lucas put an early version through its paces, his feedback – together with that of his associate Jenna Corderoy – helped us shape the service to be as useful as possible for investigative journalists.

His comments were positive, but how do we know Lucas really found WhatDoTheyKnow Pro useful? Six years on, he’s still using the tool to help discover and inform his wide-ranging FOI-based scoops.

Lucas says, “I have made FOI requests for more than ten years. During that time I’ve made a few cool spreadsheets to help me track requests. But none of them provided anything like the convenience and power of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro – it has been a total gamechanger.”  

Lucas, working for OpenDemocracy, has recently been uncovering information around river pollution and how airlines’ lobbying has impeded the UK’s progress in cutting carbon emissions. The exposés broken on the platform are frequently picked up by mainstream media.

“Requests made via WhatDoTheyKnow Pro have made it into the Times, Guardian, Observer and Mirror this year alone”, says Lucas, sharing a selection of stories to underline this point.

In April, Freedom of Information requests revealed how water companies lobbied against their responsibilities to clean up rivers. The story broke on OpenDemocracy and was picked up by the Times. 

In this Guardian story from March, we learn that airlines’ submissions to government contested whether vapour trails contribute to the climate impact of flights – in contravention to the views of experts in the field.  

A second Guardian story that month also reveals how airlines lobbied for the cut in Air Passenger Duty on domestic flights, as brought in by Sunak in the spring budget. This story was also picked up by the Mirror.

It’s easy to see the link between the FOI requests Lucas has made, and facts that must be exposed in order for us to have a fully-informed public debate. Without the right to request such documentation, the public would be entirely unaware of the type of lobbying going on behind Whitehall doors.

We’re very glad that WhatDoTheyKnow Pro has made it easier for this to happen, and very pleased that Lucas is such a strong advocate!

“If you use FOI, WhatDoTheyKnow Pro is the only way to go,” he says, before making us blush with more praise: “I have nothing but respect, gratitude and admiration for the smart, hardworking team at mySociety! Congrats on 20 years; here’s to 200 more.”

Thanks Lucas, the admiration goes both ways. Long may you continue to bring vital facts into the public arena.

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Image: Paul Berry

Great news from the Copenhagen Democracy Summit this week, where AskGov, the Access to Information website for Georgia, was recognised with an award for Democracy Tech.

The civic tech organisation ForSet runs AskGov, using our Alaveteli platform, and you may remember that we had a valuable exchange of views and experiences with their cofounder Teona Tomashvili in London last year.

In Copenhagen, fellows of the the Alliance of Democracies’ Democracy Tech Entrepreneurship Program, of which Teona is one, were invited to ‘pitch’ their project in a Dragon’s Den-like set-up. Teona gave an excellent explanation of the website — which would apply equally to any FOI site running on our Alaveteli platform — and you can watch it for yourself in this video:

Along with the glory of winning came a very useful prize in the shape of a cheque for $10,000 to be put towards the project, as you can see in the image below. This was presented by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who founded the Alliance of Democracies.

Massive congratulations to Teona, whose pitching skills and determination were key to AskGov’s success in these awards.

Once again it’s time for our monthly roundup of what the Climate team has been doing in the last, er, two months. Plenty to write about at least.

First on the list is another milestone in the journey towards Climate Emergency UK’s Council Climate Action Scorecards – the start of the Right of Reply process. All the marking of councils’ climate actions has been completed by CEUK’s small army of volunteers, and now it’s over to councils to have a look at the results and provide any feedback. We’ve also pulled in the data from Freedom of Information requests which was gathered using our WhatDoTheyKnow Pro platform so they can check that over too.

A second launch is the Local Intelligence Hub project we’ve been working on with The Climate Coalition, to help climate campaigners across the UK wrangle climate related data. There was a bunch of work in the run up to this to improve how we were displaying information on the map to make it more accessible, plus adding yet more data. Now that TCC members have access to this we’ll be gathering feedback to decide on future work, as well as adding more data, before a full public launch.

Meanwhile, our Neighbourhood Warmth project with partners Dark Matter Labs has been moving gently but steadily forward. We’ve been meeting with organisations in our three chosen pilot areas, and fleshing out some basic content and design before we put together a very minimal working alpha, to test out with real neighbours on real streets. We’ve been thinking critically about some of our initial ideas on how to connect people interested in making energy saving improvements to their home, and have broadened out our definition of “neighbourhood” from people on the same street to people nearby – to capitalise on the connections people might have across a slightly wider local area. Alongside this we’ve been working out how we’re going to get this in front of users to gather feedback once we have something to show. You can read more about this in our first set of Neighbourhood Warmth monthnotes.

We’ve also had an update on what our second Innovations in Climate Tech grantee has been up to.

In the background we’ve been moving forward with plans for our Festival of Debate session (book here) and doing some thinking about what our Climate Programme will look like in 2024 and beyond.

Finally, with the spring new councils have bloomed which means updating CAPE to include these new councils, and to guide people looking at the old councils to their replacements.

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Image: Olli Kilpi

What if you could reshape democracy for the better – and you had twenty years to do so?

That’s the question our panel will be tackling at our #Democracy2043 event, part of the Festival of Debate – and we’ll be asking for your thoughts and ideas, too. Join us in person in Sheffield, or online on May 24. Either way, you can book your free tickets now.

We’ve assembled a panel of really insightful speakers, each of whom will bring a new angle to the question of what we want a better, fairer, more vibrant democracy to look like, and what we need to put in place to get there by 2043.

• Dr Kim Foale, Founder & Studio Lead, Geeks For Social Change
• Emma Geen, Interim Manager, Bristol Disability Equality Forum
• Joy Green, Systemic Futurist
• Immy Kaur, Co-founder and Director, CIVIC SQUARE
• and mySociety’s own Chief Executive Louise Crow

Why are we looking forward twenty years? Well, this is mySociety’s 20th anniversary, and we’re using the opportunity not just to look back on what we’ve done, but to understand what part we must play in the future. The world looks very different now than it did at our beginnings in 2003, and undoubtedly there are seismic societal changes to come.

This event is one part of our ‘futures’ process, helping us to ensure that the services we provide are still relevant and that we can work together to help shape the kind of democracy in which everyone can thrive. We hope you’ll join us and help tackle these complex, but compelling questions.

Have you used our Freedom of Information website, WhatDoTheyKnow, for something noteworthy? Or do you have fond memories of it that you’d like to share? Please tell us all about it here.

Perhaps you’re:

• A journalist who used FOI requests sent via the site (or the Pro service) to inform news stories
• A campaigner who changed hearts and minds with facts you uncovered through FOI
• An activist who requested information that was of use to yourself or a wider community
• A request-maker who used the site independently to discover information you wanted (or needed) to know
• A developer, volunteer or supporter who remembers the launch of the site or some other milestone in its history
• An organisation that’s used WhatDoTheyKnow’s capabilities within your own app or site

Or maybe none of these labels apply, but you’ve got something to tell us about your use, or memories, of WhatDoTheyKnow. See yesterday’s post for a look back on its 15 years so far!

Also, perhaps you have a vision for where we should go next: new features we could consider adding; partners we could work with; or ways in which we can advocate more effectively for transparency from our public authorities.

We’re all ears

It’s mySociety’s twentieth anniversary year, and like any organisation celebrating a significant milestone, we want to reflect on what’s been achieved. Just as importantly, we’re also taking the opportunity to set our course for the future.

Over the course of the year, we’ll be inviting your memories, thoughts, ideas and stories around everything we do — and we’re starting with WhatDoTheyKnow.

If you have something to share, please go ahead and fill in our form here; or if you want more detail of the sort of things we’re looking for, read on.

Looking back

WhatDoTheyKnow was launched in 2008, after a 2006 call-out to our supporters and followers to suggest what project mySociety should work on next. The chosen suggestion, originally conceived as the Freedom of Information Filer and Archive, was a response to the UK’s rights under its then-fairly-new Freedom of Information Act.

The vision has changed surprisingly little since then: as Tom Steinberg said at the time:

We think that the best way to build a top quality archive is to simultaneously build the best possible “File an FOI request” tool, and then publish both the requests and the responses made through it in the archive. From the private desire to easily file FOI requests we hope that we can generate the public benefit of an easy to use archive.

Were you following mySociety’s blog at the time of that call-out? Were you one of the first people to use WhatDoTheyKnow when it was launched? Have you been a volunteer at any time in the site’s history, and if so, has that affected any other areas of your life for the better?

Great uses of WhatDoTheyKnow

Over the years, we’ve heard about some truly gratifying and impactful uses of the service: we’ve written up many of these as case studies.

There’s the campaign to find out how much asbestos is in our schools, another to turn empty shops into premises for start-ups, and not to mention a dogged – and successful – attempt to get the West Ham stadium contract released.

More recently, you may have seen the account of one organisation’s effective campaign against surveillance cameras which seemingly send worrying data back to China.

We’re always hungry to hear stories like these, and even more so in this anniversary year. Please do fill in the form to let us know if you’ve changed the world, in big ways or small, by using WhatDoTheyKnow.

To the future

As part of our thinking around #Democracy2043, we’d love to hear which way you think transparency is headed in the UK, and what mySociety’s place is in that future.

This one requires a bit more head-scratching, but there are no wrong answers, and we’d love to hear thoughts about how we as an organisation need to adapt, or what wider society needs to put in place to allow for healthier, more transparent public institutions.

And so, if you have thoughts about any or all of these areas, please go and fill in our form now. Thanks!

2023 is a momentous year for us, marking not only mySociety’s 20th anniversary but also the 15th birthday of our flagship Freedom of Information (FOI) service, WhatDoTheyKnow.

For over a decade and a half, we’ve been working to empower journalists, activists and campaigners, researchers, and tens of thousands of curious citizens to access information from UK public authorities.

Fighting your corner

It’s hard to imagine what the UK’s FOI landscape would look like without WhatDoTheyKnow, but in the early days, we faced many important battles to establish the right to have requests responded to via our platform at all. 

And they’re not over: even today, we face fresh challenges, such as from public authorities who are putting barriers in the way of our users by refusing to answer valid requests unless these are submitted using a particular form. We are determined to continue to highlight poor practice and defend users’ information rights.

Half a million pieces of information

One of the advantages to using WhatDoTheyKnow is that it serves as a permanent archive of requests and responses. Any information that you get released using WhatDoTheyKnow is accessible to others to share and build on. From humble beginnings, there have now been over 500,000 requests that have resulted in the release of at least some information, turning this into a valuable resource.

Given the depth and breadth of the information on the site, it’s hard to pick a few examples to illustrate the impact of requests made through the service but here are some notable releases:

A 2013 request revealed the existence of the Home Office’s Interventions and Sanctions Directorate (ISD), which was responsible for overseeing the controversial hostile environment policy. Working with public and private sector partners, the ISD restricted access to benefits and services for irregular migrants, ensuring that sanctions were enforced. Four years later, the Windrush scandal exposed the devastating human consequences of this policy.

A request to the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) uncovered a dispute with HMRC. This made front page headlines, after it was revealed that certain MPs had sought to utilise public funds to employ experts to complete their expense claims for them.

A 2021 request to the Science Museum revealed that the museum had signed a sponsorship agreement with Shell, where it gave an undertaking not to do or say anything that could damage the reputation of the oil company. The existence of this ‘gagging clause’ was reported by Channel 4 News and the Times among others.

Empowering others

Whilst it would be tempting to try to measure the platform’s success by the remarkable volume of information that has been released, or the myriad of news stories that have been written as a result, for me, WhatDoTheyKnow’s true strength lies in its ability to empower individuals. By simplifying and demystifying the requesting process, WhatDoTheyKnow has made it more accessible to individuals who might have otherwise never considered submitting a request for information.

The impact of WhatDoTheyKnow has stretched far beyond the United Kingdom. WhatDoTheyKnow gave rise to Alaveteli, the open-source FOI software that’s helping to open up governments across six continents. In addition to our core platform, we’ve also developed WhatDoTheyKnow Pro. Specifically tailored to journalists, this service enables users to keep their requests private while they work on their stories, before sharing the source data with the world.

None of this would have been possible without the dedication of our volunteer team, who have worked tirelessly behind the scenes to offer guidance and support to our users, as well as managing the day-to-day running of the site. We’re immensely grateful to them, and all of our donors and funders over the years, whose continued backing has ensured the ongoing success and growth of the service. 

We are excited about the next 15 years and we look forward to building on what we have already achieved to help more people to access more information more easily than ever before.

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Image: Cottonbro Studio

This is the first in a short series of monthnotes about our Neighbourhood Warmth project. It has also been crossposted on the blog of our project partner, Dark Matter Labs.

Month 0: It’s getting hot in here

Here’s a question posed by Immy Kaur at the Retrofit Reimagined event last year:

“What if the climate transition and retrofit of our homes and streets were designed, owned and governed by the people who live there?”

This is one of those simple questions that holds within it the potential for amazing, transformative consequences. And perhaps the first of those consequences? Dark Matter Labs and mySociety are kicking off a new partnership, with this proposition at its heart.

For the next few months we’ll be exploring how we might realise the Transitioning Together hypothesis, developed by Dark Matter Labs. Together, we’ll build on lessons from testing mySociety’s Neighbourhood Warmth prototype, developed during a series of prototyping weeks in 2022 (pictured below). And we’ll co-create solutions with communities, to test our riskiest assumptions about how collective action on home energy could be catalysed through civic technology.

mySociety’s first Neighbourhood Warmth prototype

The spark

But how did we get here?

mySociety’s prototyping weeks allowed their Climate Programme to quickly dip a toe into several potential areas where their skills and experience could have an effect. The purpose was to understand the potential of civic technology to propel local climate action in each field. External participants generously made time to share their experience and wisdom, guiding a path through jungles of challenges and opportunities. mySociety built prototypes and tested these on the final day of each week to gather feedback. These were synthesised into tentative insights, which were woven into reports.

Home energy felt like a particularly complex domain to navigate, despite benefiting from the hard-earned knowledge of pioneers like Jonathan Atkinson during the second prototyping week. This spurred additional research and engagement, to deepen mySociety’s analysis and to explore collaboration.

Eventually, the idea coalesced that collective action on home energy could overcome critical limitations of the default, individualist approach: from the user experience and motivations, learning, risk and its perception, to level of ambition and the economies of scale. This aligns with the first of three shifts in mySociety’s current strategy – to design for the needs of society, not just provide tools for individual citizens.

mySociety discovered a handful of trailblazing initiatives that gesture towards the power of coordinated efforts: for example, Carbon Co-op’s Levenshulme Area Based Retrofit Scheme and Connected Places Catapult’s Community Retrofit Service prototype — but no sign of a mature digital infrastructure to support a shift away from atomised action.

As mySociety edged forwards with their route of enquiry, one organisation’s work proved particularly illuminating: Dark Matter Labs, who suggest that a “systemic shift can be achieved by testing strategic interventions in the ‘dark matter’ of the retrofit ecosystem: through piloting and proving out new infrastructures, new standards, new legal patterns, or new institutions.”

Dark Matter Labs’ explorations around the entanglement of home energy with questions of democracy and justice chime with core concerns for mySociety — for a flavour, check out ‘A Right to Retrofit’.

Their approach is a perfect fit for mySociety’s experimental spirit, and together we’re excited to be exploring how our work could be greater that the sum of its parts.

A vision of street-based retrofit, from Dark Matter Labs’ earlier work in the space

Friction leads to fire

Right now we’re crafting a plan to build a functioning version of our Neighbourhood Warmth prototype. This is geared to answer the immediate question that we’re trying to address by the end of May:

“How can we support communities to organise locally around a simple and achievable home energy action?”

We believe there is a role for a civic digital platform that supports the process of community coalescing and organising, to open doors to the benefits of collective retrofit.

Once we’ve built something that people can interact with, we’re planning to test it in a few communities — a mix of places to learn how different contexts make for different outcomes.

In the final phase, we’ll analyse these lessons and start thinking about where this might go next — perhaps we’ll carry on and build some sort of fully-functioning digital service in this domain.

If we do, questions will inevitably arise about how people might discover it. We’d love to hear thoughts on that and on this work as a whole, so please get in touch and share this in any relevant communities. Thanks!

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Image: Belinda Fewings

Our second Innovations in Climate Tech grantee was im23 (previously known as Better Futures), working in collaboration with Sandwell Council. They put forward a proposal for researching and scoping a database to share climate projects from councils across the UK. 

We were excited by the possibilities of this project, which is all about councils learning from one another so that the best ideas can be copied and implemented elsewhere — a theory of change which has some parallels with our work in collaboration with Climate Emergency UK on CAPE and the Council Climate Scorecards.

In principle it sounds reasonably simple — find the case studies; publish them! But how have they been getting on? Rob Hale gave us this update:

“We set out to build a website that could bring together real examples of climate adaptation work to act as a knowledge hub for local government and communities. 

“Our idea was that by showing what others had done, it could act as both a catalyst for the adoption of climate adaptation solutions, in the form of a searchable project database, but also bring people together to share ideas and challenges.”

So, have there been any surprises along the way? 

“We knew from the outset that building a way for people to access key information quickly and easily would be really important, so we focused a lot of effort on making the site really clear and easy to use. 

“What we found interesting is that the need for a way for council officers to share info openly and candidly seems to be as important as the projects database. To respond to this we’re adding a form and chat tools to the site from the outset so that we have a mix of projects and a place for the community to talk to each other!”

Part of the project was to scope the landscape. Has it become clear that there is a need for the site?

“Over the course of the project we’ve received nothing but positive reactions and support,” says Rob. “This has been from the local government teams – infrastructure, transport and climate – and also from trade bodies such as the Local Council Roads Innovation Group (LCRIG). Along with mySociety, LCRIG have added resource to the project and enabled us to get further and much closer to a sustainable project going forward.”

And have there been any stumbling blocks?

“So far the biggest challenge — or rather surprise — has been the difficultly in sourcing examples of varied climate adaptation projects. 

“From the outset we knew that there was a need for a site like this to showcase projects to act as a guide for others, but we genuinely thought there would have been a far bigger resource to draw on and pull together. 

“It may be that we’ve been looking in the wrong places — and we’re certainly asking everyone we can  — but the response has been far more of “This is a great idea and just what we’ve been looking for!” rather than “Great, we’d love to share what we’ve done!”. 

“Still, either way it’s good to know that what we’re building will be useful, and even if it starts with fewer projects then at least these are shared and we can play a small part in helping accelerate the takeup of workable climate adaptation solutions.”

Rob tells us the website will be live soon, so keep an eye on our social media and we’ll be sure to share it when it is. And one more thing — if you’re a council with a great climate adaptation project you could share, do let im23 know.

“We’re still very much looking for projects,” says Rob, “and will always be going forward, so please let us know if you’d like to share your knowledge with the community!”.

Thanks to im23 for the update — we can’t wait to see this project in all its glory.

If you’ve been keeping up with our blog, you’ll have seen a series of new projects rolling out over the past few couple of months: these are the concrete outcomes of the TICTeC Labs programme. You can access them all here.

TICTeC Labs was a new and, in retrospect, quite bold project for mySociety, involving many moving parts, the generous participation of people from a huge variety of organisations, and with collaborators in several different countries — and crucially, support from the National Endowment for Democracy.

Last week, in a final wrap-up event, we looked back on the programme as a whole, with presentations from our subgrantees and reflections from the steering group. If you’d like to watch for yourself, you can do so on YouTube, and there’s a transcript here (automatically generated, so be prepared for some typos etc).

The process

Each TICTeC Surgery began with a question and ended up with a finished product or service several months later. At any one time, the six projects would be at various overlapping stages, from the initial discussions, to the Action Lab deciding what and whom to commission, to the work being undertaken and finally launched.

Click to see at a larger size

Despite this complexity, and thanks to the hard work of so many, each project was completed on time. Each one is a solution to an identified issue within the global civic tech community. And the benefits don’t stop there: everything is open source, and can be accessed, used or replicated by any group that may need them.

Outputs

The wrap-up event began with presentations from the groups who had created these final outputs:

People Powered, on showcasing public-private civic tech success stories. Pam Bailey spoke about the importance of placing a human interest strand at the centre of the stories we tell. The output for this Surgery was a set of case studies highlighting notable examples of such projects.

Technoloxia, on a toolkit to help the global civic tech community fix common accessibility challenges. Yosr Jouni described the challenge of making a topic like accessibility both fun and indeed accessible in itself. The output here was an online, illustrated guide that’s available to all.

Open North, on data governance and quality. Christian Medina described how they used the international scope of the Labs to ensure that their offering was relevant to everyone, not just the global north. The resulting online course is in French and English and free for anyone to access.

Fundación Multitudes, on storytelling and reach. Stephani Paliza also shared thoughts on how they ensured their output would be relevant to communities anywhere in the world. Their offering was in the form of training for civic tech organisations across several continents, equipping them with effective tools to get stories about their projects and successes into mainstream channels.

The Demography Project, on driving impactful societal change. Richard Muraya described some crucial outputs around water in Kenya: educating, monitoring, and ensuring better water quality during a critical period for the country. The President of Kenya even attended their event for World Wetlands Day. You can see more about their several digital outputs here.

Policy Lab Africa, on civic tech in hostile environments. Charles Ikem described how, in just two months, they were able to map a huge amount of data showing where polling stations — often just unremarkable addresses in rural areas — were located, and launch an app for reporting electoral violence in time for Nigeria’s presidential elections.

Reflections

mySociety’s Chief Executive Louise Crow and Steering Group members Isabel Hou and Matt Stempeck discussed to what extent the programme had met its aims to ‘strengthen civic tech networks and the exchange of ideas’, and ‘develop new initiatives and collaborations that expand the civic tech evidence base, address issues and challenges facing the sector, and enhance the effectiveness and potential impact of civic tech projects.

Matt encapsulated our thoughts neatly when he said: “The value of the unexpected community that was built in this process was important — so the direct, formal partnerships; but also, seeing who’s doing what, the diverse approaches to similar challenges, while at the same time finding that community.

“People really liked the ability to have repeat engagement on the theme and the ability to keep working on things over time rather than one off events.”

Finally, a Q&A allowed audience members to add their thoughts. This is a programme that’s been all about knowledge-sharing, and it’s notable that this spirit also persisted in our conversation: already, participants were talking about more translations of some of the assets, and invitations to speak at planned global conferences.

Everything we learned during the TICTeC Labs process will be very useful as we consider the next phase of TICTeC and what form its offerings will take as we go forward. This event allowed us to take a step back and understand our progress, learnings, and lessons for future programmes.