Here’s a quick pre-Christmas round-up of what the mySociety democracy team has been up to in the last few months!

WhoFundsThem is our new project looking into MPs’ and APPGs’ financial interests. We want to improve the information available in TheWorkForYou, make better data available, and improve the standard of politics in the UK. 

We and our volunteers have been doing lots over the last few months – here’s what’s new.

New register of interests in TheyWorkForYou

A great development this year has been a big improvement in how Parliament gathers and publishes the Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). Information is now gathered from MPs in a much better format, making follow on analysis much easier. 

This is the result of a lot of great work by PDS, but we do also want to claim a win here. The way TheyWorkForYou publishes the register of interests has been highlighted for years (including by MPs) as an example for how Parliament can improve. We want to support people on the inside working to make things better. One of the ways we can do that is by demonstrating what is possible and helping win internal arguments and shift priorities.

Of course the downside of our “lobbying by demonstration” is that when you win you have to do work. In the last few weeks, the Commons have now turned off the old site, and the information is available on a new site and their API.  We’ve written a bridge to re-import this in a format TheyWorkForYou expects, to continue to power our comparison over time feature. This is now a lot more information than was captured before (which is great!) – so we’ve reformatted the page to make it clearer (to pick on my MP, here’s an example). 

While we’ve been doing this, we’ve also been planning out how we can improve how this information is stored in our database – and make it easier for our plans to get the registers for the other UK Parliaments in. 

We continue to publish the information as a set of spreadsheets – one is a re-publication of the official CSVs with some extra fields, and the other a backward compatible spreadsheet with all the information in a single cell. 

RMFI Crowdsourcing

Our volunteers have done a heroic job going through the registers of interests of all MPs and answering a set of questions for each. 

In some cases we were trying to gather more information about donations, or flag donations made from certain industries – but also in general we’re interested in how possible this exercise is – how are the rules working in practice, and how easy is it for people to easily parse the results?

We’re currently reviewing the results, and these will feed into two releases in February:

• A new section on TheyWorkForYou for each MP summarising what we found, and linking into the wider stories. 
• A report on the lessons we’ve learned, recommendations for improvement, and ideas on how we can go further from the outside. 

We have published the research that supported our question selection if you would like to know more. 

APPG information requests

One of the things we’re trying to do is use the new APPG rules to get more information in public. 

We’ve written this up in more detail in its own blog post, but the short version is we had mixed success with our pilot round of information requests. Some APPGs gave us the information, or were otherwise publishing the information they were supposed to – but others dragged their feet or didn’t respond. 

Given we’re going to have to spend more time chasing than we’d like, for the wider set of APPGs we’re going to reduce the scope to just getting the membership lists public. We’ve also got a planned escalation route for non-response through initially contacting the APPG chairs to encourage a response, and ultimately listing non-compliant APPGs.

What we don’t want is that rules brought in to reduce “bad” APPG behaviour are in effect only followed by “good” APPGs. We need to get more responses, and start highlighting when the information isn’t being published. 

Modernisation Committee 

One of the interests of the House of Commons new Modernisation Committee is on improving standards. 

We submitted a few practical recommendations based on what we’ve learned so far in the project:

• Chairs should enforce the rule that interests declared in debates should be clear.
• The details of conflicts of interests made when submitting parliamentary questions should be published.
• A few recommendations on new categories in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, to better structure common interests declared. For instance separating out payment or travel costs for media appearances, and gathering more information when MPs are receiving large donations to fund staff members for their offices.
• Parliament should gather and publish the required APPG information rather than just say it ought to be made available on request (to sidestep the problem described above). 

We are also developing a wider range of recommendations for release in February. 

As with the great new data coming out of the Parliament’s new register, there are big wins in getting Parliament to adopt better rules and publish more information. But also all of these are areas we think we can make progress on from the outside anyway – we just need support to do so. 

We can make a difference together

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in, and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed. 

But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or standing donation. It makes a difference. 

Our first round of information requests was a mixed bag: here’s what we learned and what we’re trying next. 

In mid-September we sent an information request to the 34 All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) that had been the first register of APPGs since the election.

As we’ve written about before, APPGs can be a source of really important cross-party working, but they can also be a route to unchecked access to Parliament. 

The Committee on Standards argued that “APPGs are a valuable part of how Parliament does its work; but there remains a significant risk of improper access and influence by commercial entities or by hostile foreign actors, through APPGs” – and as such recommended new rules. These new rules mean that APPGs either have to publish additional information on their websites, or they have to provide it on request. 

We saw this small group as a good opportunity to test our information request template that we want to send to all APPGs as part of our WhoFundsThem project.  

We want to discourage the use of APPGs as an unmonitored backdoor to Parliament, and encourage their core purpose: informed discussion on areas of shared interests.  Our goal in asking these questions of all APPGs is to ensure the baseline transparency made possible by the rules happens in reality.

Here’s what we learned when we sent our information request template to 34 APPGs:

1. Low responsiveness. Almost half of the APPGs didn’t get back to us at all – not even to acknowledge our email. We emailed 34 APPGs and had 18 responses back. We recognise that lots of APPGs are administered by charities, or by MP staff as part of their other work, so capacity is stretched. Nonetheless, the rules exist for a reason – APPGs provide outside influences access to Parliamentarians that should be monitored.
2. Difficulties in record keeping between elections. In many small APPGs, administrative services are provided by a member of staff from the chair’s office. These members of staff change jobs regularly – in and outside of election time. We had a number of responses to say ‘I have the files until this date, but before then, it was someone else who isn’t around anymore’.
3. Spreadsheets aren’t for everyone. Of the 18 groups who responded to us, only 6 filled in our spreadsheet template. Reasons for this went from technical issues to complaints about the volume of information it asked for. There was also advice issued that nothing required APPGs to fill out our spreadsheet as long as they were compliant with the rules (our view is that many are not). 
4. There is uncertainty about the new rules Parliament’s new rules say that APPGs must either respond to individual information requests, or make all of the information available on their website. We had several responses stating that the information we were asking for was available on the group website – unfortunately in almost all cases, it wasn’t. Some APPGs did improve this as a result of being asked however.

13 of the 34 APPGs we contacted don’t have websites at all. Of those 13 without websites, 7 didn’t reply to our email. No website and no email response means we really are left in the dark as to how these groups operate.

Thanks to the APPGs who did respond to our requests, and chat with us about their perspectives on how the rules operate. We’ve published the spreadsheets we did receive in a Google Drive folder, although something we want to be cautious of here is making the compliant APPGs the most visible. 

The current APPG rules are in a halfway house where technically a large amount of information is required to be released – but in practice very little of this is happening. What we don’t want is that rules brought in to reduce “bad” APPG behaviour are in effect only followed by “good” APPGs. We need to get more responses, and start highlighting when the information isn’t being published. 

What’s next?

This initial wave was a pilot to work out the next best steps. Unfortunately what we’ve learned is there are substantial obstacles to getting the full scope of information. 

Given there are issues around awareness of the rules, we’re going to reduce the initial effort of compliance. To get an initial bit of useful information from every APPG, we are going to narrow the scope of the exercise to just the parliamentary and non-parliamentary memberships of the group. At the moment, Parliament only publishes the four officers of each APPG, however in order to be ratified the group must have at least twenty members.

To get this information, we will review the websites that exist to determine if the membership list is already public, and if not, make a request for the information. 

If we do not receive a response, we will escalate by contacting the chairs of the APPG to highlight that the group is not being compliant with transparency rules, and will be publicly listed as such on TheyWorkForYou. 

From this point, we will re-evaluate approaches to getting the full scope of information that should be provided. 

Let’s make politics work better

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in, and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed. 

In this case: parliament has made rules to make APPGs better, but is being too hands off about actually making sure the rules are followed. This is something we’re going to work to improve from the outside. If you want to support us in this work, please consider donating. 

This analysis is part of our WhoFundsThem project – read more about how we’re working to make MPs financial disclosures better. 

If you’re trying to get the law changed, it can seem like a monumental task: where on earth do you start? 

One organisation that knows the answer is Access Info Europe: they have a long record of tirelessly working for better rights to information across the continent, and have systematised their approach. This month, their Director Rachel Hanna shared insights with the Access to Information Network, in a legal framework masterclass.

You can watch the video of this session for yourself, or read on for detailed notes.

The benefits of Access to Information

Rachel explained that Access Info are currently running a project to improve the right to information in four countries.

Access to Information (ATI) is a fundamental right, and recognised globally as such — but it doesn’t always work in practice. Countries may have a legal framework, but how it works is often different on paper and in practice. For example, one of the best laws in the world is Afghanistan’s, but it’s worth nothing if it’s not implemented properly. 

When ATI is in place but not functioning as it should, it can be extremely frustrating: it puts people off using it.

Rachel pointed out that the benefits to society of a fully functioning ATI are clear, and to underline this, she cited the important findings of the three finalists of Access Info’s recent Impact awards:

• The Lighthouse Reports uncovered discrimination in algorithms to detect fraud in benefits, based on gender and ethnicity.
• Altreconomia in Italy revealed the use of drugs to keep people calm in repatriation centres. 
• Eleanor Shaikh, who we’ve written about before, used the UK FOI law to help vindicate Sub-Postmasters caught in the post office Horizon scandal.

If ATI is not working does it still have benefits? Access Info carried out a campaign in Malta when a person was told they couldn’t submit an FOI request because they were not residents of Malta. They took the case to court, using pro bono lawyers; the court agreed with them and said that the way the law was being implemented was discriminatory.

They also fought against a law in Montenegro that would have lowered standards.

Groundwork

Rachel described their ATI Network project to equip participants with three strategies:

• Advocacy – the act of persuading or arguing in support of specific clause or policy. The audience here is the general public and policymakers. For example, Access Info published research highlighting gaps and areas of improvement in the implementation of the EU’s ATI.
• Activism – this refers to physically active advocacy: getting out in the street, getting noticed. Here, the audience is public and communities. For example, in India a 40-day sit-in in a small town, demanding the creation of an ATI law, was successful.
• Lobbying – this means persuading decision-makers to take a particular action. The audience is policymakers and lawmakers. For example, in Mexico a multi stakeholder group influenced legislators to pass an ATI Law.

All three tactics can be used in combination. You can work systematically by first building the foundations, then creating visibility and finally converting the mobilisation into law.

They are currently carrying out four national advocacy campaigns with the same initial approach for each country, then tailored activities depending on the specific state of the law, the skills the partner has, and how these can be adapted to the situation in the country. The steps are as follows:

1. First they analyse the national context in which the ATI law is working: what are the strengths and the gaps; is it aligned with international standards? Is it Tromsø convention ratified? If so, has there been a recommendation from the Group of States Against Corruption, GRECO? Are they part of the Open Government Partnership (OGP)? Is there a promise to advance the ATI law under OGP?
   
   All of these factors can be used to hold governments to account. There might also be legislative considerations: for example in Spain, ATI did not fall under the fourth action plan as had been expected, and probably won’t be under the fifth now, either. While the will had been there, but the political context changed, making it very hard to pass laws right now.

As part of this process you should perform some stakeholder mapping: do you have any good allies in the government? Are there civil society organisations, private sector, campaign groups, media that might support the cause? They performed this research and evidence building for each country.

1. They then designed an advocacy plan, deciding what their goals were: would they push for better law, or higher use of the existing law? Better implementation? Making this decision helped them decide what sort of activity would be most effective: advocacy, activism or lobbying.
   You can build a coalition with lawyers, academics, journalists. Craft your message according to who you’re talking to. Always make your message about its recipient: why should they care about it?
2. Finally, you need to anticipate and adapt to challenges. Obstacles might be resistance from stakeholders, your own limited resources or a lack of public interest, to name three. 

National campaigns

Access Info did baseline research on the legal frameworks within each country. They crafted their own methodology that goes a little further than the Tromsø convention itself does, because some areas, like Article 8, don’t go into much detail: this recommends a ‘quick and inexpensive review process’ but doesn’t g into any detail about a body overseeing this and what powers they should have — so Access Info have added what an ideal body would look like and the powers it would have.

After examining all countries that run an Alavateli-based site, they decided to work in four countries, each with different states of legal framework:

The Netherlands adopted a new law in 2022, and not signed or ratified Tromsø. The legislation is strong on paper, but weak in practice. There’s an opportunity in that certain aspects of the law will be under review at certain stages; and they would also like to push them to sign the Tromsø convention.

Access Info partnered with Spoon, and they formed their plan in this context: their goal is to improve implementation and strengthen oversight.

They plan to create guidelines for officials handling requests, alongside with the committee that has oversight over the law. There is a lack of guidance, so Spoon can step in, and Access Info will advise

After five years there will be an evaluation of whether there should be a commissioner, and they will definitely say yes – this is the most popular model for oversight worldwide.

They will also promote the use of Alaveteli at local level, with the aim of influencing those at the national level: they’re not keen because they’re concerned about data protection, especially the issue that the officials’ name are published on the request. So they’re going from the bottom up to show how local government is using it in a way that doesn’t encroach on personal data protection.

You don’t always have to go to the national government:, see where you can have the most impact, which is usually not the ‘top top’ — the middle might be better. By working with the government to create guidelines, making material that will be useful for the five year review, there is a great opportunity for impact.

Moldova has a strong law, but there are concerns: in 2023, an update broadened the scope of exceptions and lengthed the timeframe for responses; and the oversight body is not strong. It has been Tromsø ratified, however.

Specific issues are a low usage of the law, and poor implementation compared to a strong law on paper.

Here, Access Info partnered with Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) who manage the Alaveteli platform for Moldova.

The goal is to bring the law into line with international standards: it’s a new law, but LHR are performing strategic litigation on issues around its implementation. For example, the Evaluation Committee is an independent body which evaluates the integrity of judges and prosecutors: they have ruled that they don’t fall under the ATI law, which is a bad interpretation, so LHR are taking the matter to court.

They’re also litigating against the over-redaction of personal data in court documents.

In Moldova a second goal is to increase use of Alaveteli platform, by highlighting success stories, partnering with journalists to highlight positive outcomes from requests, for example when requests showed that the level of bullying in schools was growing, they were able to get anti-bullying programmes implemented in schools. Other findings have been around gender based violence and malpractice by doctors: basically, “what can’t be measured can’t be improved”.

LHR are providing legal support to requesters whose requests are refused, and fighting against the misinterpretation of the law, in the hope that all these approaches will combat the underuse of ATI in the country.

France has a weak law: they have not signed the Tromsø agreement, and there’s a lack of awareness and implementation from both civil society and journalists.

At this time there is no room for reform of the law, but they will push for signing the Tromsø  convention.

As with Moldova, the main aims are to raise awareness of the law, and increase its use via the Alaveteli platform (Ma Dada). They’ll train French civil society organisations and journalists and create an FOI community to build the foundations for when there’s an opportunity for legal reform. They’ll create a practical guide so that individuals can understand what FOI can do for them.

Greece has a very weak ATI legal regime: there’s no one law that covers everything. Rather, rights are scattered across different laws and it is a very confusing legal framework. When a request has been refused, the appeal needs to be sent to one of a range of different bodies. They are not signed up to the Tromsø agreement.

Here, they have partnered with Vouliwatch at the national level, and are pushing for legal reform, better implementation and public awareness

Their goal is for a new legal framework, and to get Greece Tromsø ratified.

Vouliwatch has already lobbied the parliamentary committee to discuss the amendment of the law. They’re working to build a coalition to push the campaign forward, and have trained civil society organisations and journalists in a workshop. They’ll use this coalition to help them with joint statements, open letters, social media, media articles, et cetera.

General advice

Know your audience It’s about persuasion, advocacy and lobbying. Know who you’re talking to and why they should care. In messaging you can consider three types of argument, using Aristotle’s three types of persuasion:

• Ethos: establish your credibility: why should they listen to you? For example, in the Netherlands, the government weren’t aware of Access InfoEurope, so they worked to create allies in government and got them to introduce them to the person they wanted to talk to.
• Pathos: make your audience care emotionally, for example by storytelling  — showing how ATI can do good in society, and why we need it.
• Logos : make logical arguments supported by facts. “You signed up to Tromsø, but your law is out of line with that”.

Make your arguments valuable to the person you’re speaking to Public officials care about the levels of public trust in government, for example, so that’s a good angle to come in on.

Policy briefs Keep them short. Use short paragraphs of less than 20 words per sentence, and four sentences per paragraph for maximum impact.  

Make your brief persuasive and valuable to the reader: locate problems in their communities and offer the solutions.

Common errors are to include too little evidence or research; and to use too much jargon – keep it simple.

Be adaptable to change Impact can come in different shapes and forms — you might not have realised that what you’re seeing is impact, but for example, journalists getting access to new stories counts as impact.

Be prepared Create networks that will be ready when there are legislative opportunities.

And finally: don’t give up.

Q&A

There were then questions from the audience.

Q: “Building a coalition” sounds great, but difficult. What is the least it can mean? 

Rachel: Being reactive to a specific situation. For example, when the authorities were closing access to beneficial ownership registers, we could use that moment when there was outrage. We could gather different people and organisations who cared about the same issue — even though they were all coming from different angles.

It’s very valuable to bring people in who have completely different angles: they help you to see, and prepare for, what the opposition would say. So for example we have some strong data protection advocates in our ranks, who might argue against disclosure on those grounds. Having this sort of discussion with your allies helps you to get the arguments clear in your head before taking the campaign public.

Q: Could you go into more detail on who was running the campaign and who you communicated to when using public outreach, classic media, social media? Who was in the team for each country and what roles did you have?

Rachel: Vouliwatch are really good at public outreach: so they already knew who to reach out to. On the other hand, in Moldova they haven’t done something like that before, so we are helping them. Basically it depends on the national context.

Q: What heuristics are you using to know where you are? For example, if your aim is to ‘build credibility’, how do you know when you’ve ticked that box and are in a position to take the next step?

Rachel: It’s very difficult. In some places we already have credibility with the national institutions, so for example in Greece Vouliwatch have already had conversations, and feedback says they’ve been taken on board. That sort of thing helps you see that you’re making progress.

Q: Are there things we can do internationally to help national level organisations? Our connections are all in the UK, and they each have their own goals, constraints and focuses.

Rachel: it can be helpful to bring in the  international angle: for example the Council of Europe has an oversight group that looks at the laws of all countries that have ratified Tromsø. Even the fact that they exist at all sends a strong message.

It can be disheartening waiting for the moment to act. Your followers will get fatigued, so be strategic about when and how to use your voice. Channel your energies into activities that could have the most impact.

Q: Is there a regular schedule for updating the country’s policy ratings (the global RTI rankings) or does it depend on when you get the funding to do so?

Rachel: Yes, it is funding-dependent!

—

Image: Tromsø by Harry Jaschhof

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, stand-in (or locum) MPs, citizens assemblies’ to set standards, and fixing the public ombudsman.

This week our pitch is Parliament should learn more from the devolved Parliaments on simplifying terms and procedure – with the goal of the how Parliament works being more easily understood by both the public and MPs.

Strangers and personalities

Parliament has a jargon problem, and that makes it hard for the public and MPs themselves to understand how Parliament works.

All workplaces make their own words and culture, but democratic institutions should also aim to be welcoming and accessible to the public as a whole. In Hannah White’s book Held in Contempt, she points out that it was only in 2004 that Parliament adopted the term ‘members of the public’ (e.g. ‘us’, the people they represent) to replace the previous ‘strangers’.

The guide to Parliamentary procedure (“Erskine May”) was finally opened up to free and public access in 2019, but its actual content remains written in archaic English and some sections are misleading without an understanding of the period in which it was written. For example, the rule on MPs not using each other’s names is explained as avoiding “personality”, which is an old term for “personal insult” rather than a belief that MPs should talk robotically.

The problem isn’t just a historical legacy. In 2012, MPs renamed Parliament’s famous clock tower the ‘Elizabeth Tower’. This has led to changes in how the building and its history are described on the Parliament website, reflecting the new 150 year history of ‘Elizabeth Tower and Big Ben’. The exception is the part of Parliament with the keenest eye on clear communication with the public: the gift shop. This beacon of clarity continues to describe the tower, primarily and correctly, as Big Ben.

From this, we suggest a ‘Big Ben’ rule: the publicly accessible and understood term should be the official term. Parliamentary trivia is for the tour guides, and no one should need to know it to understand how Parliament works.

The UK’s newer Parliaments use different ways of working. MSPs in Scotland and MSs in Wales address each other by name, talk about stages of legislation (rather than ‘readings’), and instead of accumulated jargon (Hansard, Erskine May), use terms like ‘The Record’ and ‘Parliamentary rules and guidance’.

This is not just about being legible to the outside world, but about clearer working within Parliament. MPs having a lack of clarity over complicated procedures makes it harder for them to do their job. Amendments to legislation are often presented as impenetrable lists of text being deleted and modified in other legislation, rather than a clear “track changes” that makes it clear to MPs what the effect of the change is (the US House of Representatives has made progress on an approach to this). Making how Parliament works clearer makes it a more effective institution.

What can mySociety and TheyWorkForYou do?

While the best approach is to fix problems at the source, TheyWorkForYou has some capacity to adopt this approach in the language it uses itself. For instance, because this is a change already provided by the Hansard data, the convention of not referring to MPs by name is already broken in TheyWorkForYou. We could introduce more annotations that undo ways MPs are required to make themselves unclear.

Additionally, we can provide extra analysis and search over documents like the Parliamentary rules and guidance to make it a more understandable guide to the public and MPs.

If you’d like to support us in trying to fix problems from the outside, we can always do more with more funding – one-off or standing donations are appreciated.

Image: Huy Phan on Unsplash.

As part of our TICTeC work bringing together civic tech practitioners, we are running a community of practice for Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations (“PMOs”).

The other week we ran a session looking at “Subnational PMOs”, and this blog post is to work through what I’ve learned from the speakers, why that was a bad name for the session, and how it’s shaping my thinking on our future UK and international work.

Finding projects I want to learn from

As the name suggests, a Parliamentary Monitoring Organisation is a civil society/non governmental organisation that observes and monitors what happens in a Parliament. It’s a term that’s used internationally to help draw together and network organisations doing this work in different places.

My key interest here is that we run TheyWorkForYou, seen internationally as one of the first civic tech enabled PMOs (and it’s a delight to see new projects like Thailand’s Parliament Watch continue to cite us as an inspiration).

The trouble I’m having is in jumping between international work (where we say ‘PMO’ a lot), and long term planning for our UK services —where I see some of the key democratic problems/opportunity areas as further away from Parliament, but still something that logically fits within TheyWorkForYou.

I’ve got two “problems” here.

In the UK, I’m trying to think about what our approach should be to new levels of devolution in the UK. For international readers, the UK is an unusually centralised state, with a few layers of weak local government and a semi-federal arrangement in some areas of the country, but not others. In recent years, there has been more devolution to the larger cities and elected mayors. But this is a structure that doesn’t fit well within the framework of TheyWorkForYou, and needs new approaches.

Internationally, I’m trying to understand how we can add value in joining up organisations that wouldn’t otherwise know about each other. Joining up PMOs isn’t a new idea, and we don’t want to duplicate work with other regional networks. So part of looking subnationally is trying to learn more about organisations that may or may not consider themselves to be PMOs, and may be less discoverable (to us and each other) through the channels that already exist.

Ideally these two problems have some overlap in the solution. But the first step was to find some organisations doing what can badly be described as “subnational PMO” work. Fortunately, we found two (more detail below)! And this has helped me refine our thinking about what we’re actually trying to do here, and how we might better discover these groups in future.

Moving beyond Parliaments

I think the first thing we need to do is generalise PMOs: the term I’m thinking about is ‘Democratic Transparency Organisations (DTOs)’. Here’s a working definition:

Democratic Transparency Organisations are projects that [rework / create] public information about [democratic institutions / politicians] to improve [transparency / accountability / standards / efficiency].

The important bits of this definition for me are:

• DTOs will generally build on existing data from one or many institutions, but can also create new analysis or data.
• Their focus is democratic institutions – generally elected representatives, but could include scrutiny/transparency of citizens assemblies.
• Their role isn’t passive —it is to change the democratic system they are a part of. While the theory of change may differ, the goal isn’t to just record, but make things different.

This captures what I generally consider to be a PMO, but is also language that captures projects that share the same spirit. The tools of PMOs are a strategy that DTOs adopt when faced with democratic institutions that look like parliaments. But lots of democratic institutions do *not* look like parliaments —and these need a different approach.

Subnational DTOs

When we talk about subnational DTOs, there’s a lot of things that can be covered with the language of PMOs. Many state/devolved legislatures fit perfectly into the general model of elected representatives who are in parties and have debates, votes, etc.

But there’s a transition to entirely different forms of democratic institutions that the PMO model works less well for. The forms of democratic institutions become more varied, and the number of institutions to deal with increases.

DTOs aimed at the sub-national/municipality level have a different set of problems and these are in some respects harder problems. If your goal is to explain subnational democracy in a country, you have massively increased the scope of the work. This now involves thousands of politicians rather than hundreds, and hundreds/thousands of institutions rather than one or two.

This means a huge amount more foundational work and that changes the kind of project that’s viable. As such, even when PMO tools might be appropriate, the scale of the work makes them more inaccessible than other approaches.

Benefits of local DTOs

The scope of decisions made below the national level means improving the flow of data and understanding can have a substantial impact on public policy and the lives of citizens. Often the policy changes that have the biggest impacts on people’s day-to-day lives are made at the local level. Huge amounts of decisions and adaptation in climate especially involve local action.

The theory of change of local DTOs is the same as national ones: improving democracy through usage by citizens, civil society and official institutions.

• Citizens: Creates better feedback loops between citizens and representatives — better principal-agent alignment.
• Civil Society: Gives new tools to infomediaries (journalists, academic, CSOs) to understand, share information, and take action.
• Institutional: Creates internal efficiencies for the representative organisation(s) by making their own information more accessible/inspire improvements.

For each of these, national PMOs can hit a sweet spot of effort/cost to impact. But for each of these paths, different approaches may be more cost effective at the local level.

Going wide – Querido Diário

Querido Diário is a project that aims to bring together and make searchable the government gazettes for every city in Brazil (of which there are over 5,000). The goal is to create a national level database of decisions made in every municipality.

This evolved out of Open Knowledge Brazil (OKB)’s national level projects looking at public spending data. There often isn’t great data at the national/federal level, but this gets worse the more local you go. However, if information is technically available but horribly fragmented, this is something that civic tech can try and address from the outside. As there isn’t an API of government decisions available, OKB are building it themselves.

When you’re trying to build a project covering hundreds or thousands of different institutions, you have to do more work further down the value chain just bringing the data together before you can analyse it. For instance, in the UK, we’ve ended up being the holders of the best list of local authorities, because we needed that to power our climate analysis. The uses of that base layer are a bit abstract,- but it is the foundation that is required for highly impactful services.

In the case of Querido Diario, Diários do Clima builds on top of this base layer to create a service specifically looking at new environmental and climate regulations in all municipalities covered. Having this information in one place makes cross-city comparisons of climate action possible. As well as making gazettes easier to search for local journalists or civil society, this dataset enables subject areas journalists and researchers to do new cross cutting analysis.

Lowering the cost of accessing all local information helps people and organisations with subject matter expertise do work that would otherwise be unviable or incomplete. The scope of Querido Diario shows the challenges of scale when going wide —but also the big rewards of joining up the data.

Going deep – Datos que hacen Ciudad

An alternative to covering lots of municipalities is to build a service catering to one.

Datos que hacen Ciudad’s goal is to create better information about Santiago de Cali, a city in Colombia. The project includes familiar PMO approaches of displaying information about representatives, but is also consciously aimed towards getting better information to those representatives. The theory of change here is “If we give our leaders more information, it will lead to better decisions.” Through councillors sharing information on their areas of focus/problem areas, Datos que hacen Ciudad can both provide that information to citizens, and shape the information to be sourced and created.

One of the complexities of local governance is that they are best understood as a patchwork of different institutions. This project makes that complexity an advantage —it’s a partnership of different local institutions, pulling on resources and knowledge from different places, with a key anchoring in the university.

This feedback loop between decision makers and different groups helps create highly localised information. Data collection and analysis catering to the exact needs of decision makers can be more sensitive to local patterns than generalised national data.

The different approaches use expertise and technical knowledge in different ways, and can work constructively together:making the data of different cities more accessible helps local analysis pull on other polices and data better.

What can we learn from this?

A key takeaway, in terms of finding other organisations to connect and learn from, is that we should be looking for examples based around cities and municipalities (rather than language around ‘subnational PMOs’). This isn’t always what we’re trying to apply it to,- but they’ll be more discoverable and the approaches might be more generalisable.

In terms of work in the UK, ‘deep’ vs ‘wide’ represent different approaches. Our natural inclination at mySociety is to do ‘wide’ projects and be a foundational service. But funding wise, it’s difficult to score well in competitive bids with this approach (we’ll keep making the case, but it’s a recurring obstacle).

For new levels of devolution, it’s not just a transparency problem but a place-making problem, which requires tailoring approaches to different areas. Doing a better job in current and future devolution means more partnerships with local institutions that can shape the work towards what is most useful. Alongside that, less abstract work with a clear place based approach might be an easier sell.

In new mySociety projects, we tend to work with partners to pull in greater expertise and have a bigger impact. In our core democracy work, we’re getting back towards partnering with volunteers. We’ve thought about being accessible to students in our crowdsourcing approach (and have a few in our current cohort)– but this could go further: for instance, a more direct partnership with a London or Manchester-based university would be good for anchoring how we treat covering the respective mayors.

In general the future of TheyWorkForYou’s devolution approach may need an element of partnership with existing organisations, or incubating new groups. Going local means scaling up — and we need to find sustainable ways of doing that.

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If you’d like to join our global Community of Practice on parliamentary monitoring, then feel free to email us on tictec@mysociety.org

Image: Mateus Campos Felipe on Unsplash.

As this will be the last monthnotes of 2024 (because on New Years Eve we’ll be looking back at the past year and toasting to the wonderful strides we’ve all made in our work in 2024) we here at mySociety’s transparency team wanted to wish you all a happy holidays and a fantastic new year celebration. Let’s take a look at what November brought us!

FragDenStaat: won the right for digital media to be considered media in the courts! This is a huge step forward for a slightly archaic system that previously had only considered printed media to be “the press”

mySociety: are pushing forward with our support to marginalized communities and are starting some cohorts of groups using our projects service in early January. We’re also excited to be mentoring SPOON on their impact measurement work !

Access Info: are working in depth with MaDada and SPOON on their legal reform Projects, and helping NI work on their OGP action plan. We also just delivered a Legal Framework Reform Masterclass for the ATI network and are looking forward to sharing more about our work in this area in 2025. 

SPOON: are preparing for next year! We defined our focus for 2025: leaving the building. Going out into the woods getting to know our users, what they need and how we can help. One of the ways we will do this, is by launching a Woo-forum in January and proactively answer all questions we receive via that forum. This also means changing our workflow(s) from a ‘we know what you need’ to a ‘tell us what you need, we don’t know’ approach. Introducing ‘intakes’ and looking for other organisations and professionals to work together on facilitating the needs that come forwards from thos intakes.

Also we are happy to announce to be one of the few lucky ones to team up with mySociety on their Impact Measurement Mentorship starting in 2025!

Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska: sent approximately 2,500 public information requests to schools, courts, and county offices. We organized local meetings about transparency. Together with other organizations, we advocated for anti-SLAPP legal reforms in Poland and took a stance on amendments to the law on assemblies. 

Ma Dada: have been working on a call for individual donations from our community, and a grant proposal for tech work together with mySociety (around GDPR/search). Work is ongoing  on our FOI observatory. We also had a brief internal conversation around a law proposal to bring back a 50€ stamp fee on court appeals (which would include FOI court appeals).

ImamoPravoZnati: Gong has been educating journalism students about FOI and demonstrating the uses of the IPZ platform.

KiMitTud: started a campaign with hashtag #kozadatbesztof (articles and social media postst) covering the most interesting freedom of information request of each month in 2024. We published two short animations: what does public data means and how to make a FOI-request (full article covering the topic in Hungarian here).
Some legal challenges for FOI in Hungary: the government has stuffed new legislation into a bill that removes the Ministry of Agriculture’s obligation to publish contracts with the National Land Center.
One of our latest successful complaint to the Hungarian National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information: a state-owned company has finally sent the impact study for the port of Trieste – the only problem: most of the document’s contect is covered with black marks.

Vouliwatch/Arthro5A: sadly didn’t win their funding pitch to google to look at the use of AI in parliaments, but they’ll still be exploring this topic in the future. 

AccessInfo Hong Kong: will be relaunching our website with a new portal and name in Jan 2025! We also have published a manual on how to use the Code on Access to Information in Hong Kong in English and Chinese. https://civicsight.org/access/accessinfo/

Abrimos Info: are continuing the fight for the access to information right on multiple fronts. The reforms are on the verge of being approved without significant modifications or meaningful debate.  We have signed this joint statement with more than 200 CSOs. https://articulo19.org/mexico-dejara-de-ser-un-referente-en-el-mundo-en-materia-transparencia-para-convertirse-en-uno-de-opacidad/

OpenUp ZA: are working with KiMitTud on the impact measuring mentorship

Other news: 

In the Civic Tech Field Guide, we’ve aggregated network-wide Access to Info impact measurement metrics Thanks to everyone who shared their stats.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash

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, stand-in (or locum) MPs, and using citizens assemblies’ to set standards.

This week our pitch is that Parliament should make all the casework passing through MPs offices more efficient by completing previously abandoned reform of the Ombudsman system.

Systems for dealing with things that don’t work

Part of an efficient layered democracy is helping people who feel let down by public services to raise their issues in the right place. Currently in the UK, too many complaints go through MPs to be referred back to local councillors, and the network of different complaints processes and ombudsmans* is confusing and difficult to access.

An Ombudsman is an independent official who investigates and resolves complaints from the public. Another term for ombudsman is ‘public advocate’ and in the UK system, hundreds of MPs and thousands of staff are engaged in helping constituents resolve problems dealing with government departments or agencies (and post-privatisation, the same services being delivered by private organisations). The intervention of an MP can lead to extra external and internal scrutiny and changed outcomes for the people who raised a complaint.

There are different schools of thought about how to improve this situation. Some see this as a core part of the post-war MP’s job, with an MP as a vital bridge between citizens and the technocratic state, which should be better supported with more resources. Others see this kind of advocacy as being a distraction from the national legislating duties of an MP, and believe that more of this should fall to local councillors (or more fundamentally, that things should just work without intervention).

Both these perspectives could find common ground in the idea that better systems can both ease the workload and increase the systematic effectiveness of complaints made.

Fix the ombudsman

Following years of reports recommending a change, in 2016 there was significant progress made on proposals to merge several ombudsmen together to create the Public Services Ombudsman – with the goal of reducing complexity to the citizen, and modernising the structure.

Functionally, this meant removing the “MP filter” from complaints made to the Parliamentary and Health Services Ombudsman. Currently PHSO has to turn away complainants who have not gone through their MP for non-health complaints, but can just accept health-related complaints (no one thinks this makes sense). The proposed reform also gave it a new role in improving complaint handling and promoting good practice through issuing recommendations.

Despite getting as far as a draft bill, this process has now stalled, and the PAC Committee in 2023 said that “it is disappointing that the Government has again failed to recognise the importance and urgency of sector-wide ombudsman reform. The current arrangements are outdated and needlessly complex and prevent the public from effective access to justice in cases of wrongdoing.” The PHSO continues to call for itself to be replaced, and points out the efficiency savings of replacing it. This is an area where the basic problem is agreed and the details hammered out: what is missing is Parliamentary time. But a little investment now can lead to both improved outcomes and lower costs.

A more efficient ombudsman would become a vital complement to MPs’ current work. The existing public service ombudsmans for Wales and Scotland both process comparatively few pieces of casework compared to MPs, and the mailbag volume isn’t diminishing any time soon. But the goal of the ombudsman isn’t to fix 1,000 problems individually – instead we want it to make one recommendation that fixes 10,000 problems that haven’t happened yet. Completing this oven-ready reform is vital to lighten MPs’ workload and improve public services (and people’s lives) by turning complaints into long-term solutions.

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*Because I’ve had such fun writing this footnote before: there’s no settled gender neutral pluralisation of Ombudsman. The original Swedish term (ombudsmän) is gender-neutral, and it’s fine to apply English rules and assumptions once something has become an English word (ombudsmen, or ombudspersons). Alternative approaches include shorting to ‘Ombuds’. The International Ombudsman Institute sidesteps the problem by referring to multiple ‘ombudsman institutions’, which also reflects that the idea is often localised using a term that is more descriptive in the local language (public advocate, etc). It’s not the main reason, but if we keep merging ombudsmans, it does help avoid this problem.

Image: Sear Greyson on Unsplash.

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.