Last Thursday, a diverse set of people with a common interest came together at Birkbeck College in London for FOI Fest — a one day conference examining the successes, challenges and future of the Freedom of Information Act. We heard from a wide range of perspectives: those who use FOI, those who process requests, those who research the workings and effects of the Act, and those who oversee its application.

We couldn’t have wished for a better day: there was so much to discuss, with relevant and timely presentations, and real engagement in the room. As this was a kick-off event for the incipient FOI Network, the enthusiasm was gratifying; and there seems to be consensus that this should be considered the inaugural FOI Fest, rather than a standalone event.

We heard from both FOI regulators, listened to expert discussion, learned from an excellent set of skills sessions where experts shared insights on how to use FOI well; and enjoyed a set of short lightning talks where users explained how they had brought change through FOI. We’ve added links to each video presentation so you can watch any that are of interest.

Gavin Freeguard, longtime mySociety associate and FOI expert, was our host and co-organiser, kicking off proceedings by pointing out that the introduction of the FOI Act represented a “fundamental and vital change in the relationship between the public and government”. Our rights under FOI have survived two decades, and in the process an ecosystem of activists, researchers, campaigners, journalists and commissioners has arisen.

Information Commissioner John Edwards couldn’t be with us in person, but did send a video address, talking frankly about how the body is equally as stretched as they know many authorities are too — partly thanks to the increased use of AI. This was a theme that would recur through the day, from different authorities, although, as John was keen to point out, more FOI requests means more people accessing their right to information, and that, in itself, is a real positive.

Warren Seddon, Director of FOI and Transparency at the Information Commissioner’s Office, provided our first keynote, picking up on the theme of the increase in requests needing their oversight (they’re on track to receive more than 10,000 FOI complaints this year alone). AI-generated requests tend to be longer, contain inaccuracies and are less easy to understand. However, there was good news too: the ICO are exploring setting up an external monitoring system for public authorities outside of central government; Warren told us to watch this space.

Warren Seddon

Next, investigative journalist Jenna Corderoy, CEO of the Campaign for FOI Maurice Frankel, and Transparency International’s Rose Whiffen joined Warren for a panel discussion to interrogate the question “What has 21 years of FOI changed?“. 

Maurice began with the observation that the ICO’s powers are not strongly enough applied, resulting in many authorities experiencing no penalties for bad faith or late responses, albeit he’s detected some improvement since John Edwards took post. 

Jenna pointed out that times have changed since the introduction of FOI, but the Act hasn’t kept up, as can be seen for example by the government’s use of WhatsApp for messages that can be deleted and therefore cannot be publicly released. There’s an attitude issue, too: many authorities still see FOI as burdensome or even malign, when really we should all be supportive of this essential mechanism for transparency, allowing the vital uncovering of corruption and wrongdoing. 

Rose asserted that FOI has shifted public expectations, and built momentum for better government transparency, “rebalancing the information asymmetry which is where corruption thrives” and “shifting the risk calculation around corruption”.

Warren added that the things politicians were afraid of when the Act was first introduced have, for the most part, not been realised; and that it’s a great thing that any one of us can find out information from our local school, hospital or council.

Andreas Pavlou, Eleanor Shaikh, Isaac Beevor and Alex Parsons

In the next session, we enjoyed three ‘lightning talks’ – five minute presentations. Eleanor Shaikh, whose work you can read about in more detail in our blog post, used her slot to explain how the Act had given her the tools to uncover fundamental aspects of the UK Post Office Horizon scandal, many of which made front page headlines. She stressed the importance of taking your time to avoid being labelled ‘vexatious’, spacing requests out.

Isaac Beevor, from our Scorecards partners Climate Emergency UK, explained their use of FOI requests to obtain standardised datasets around councils’ road expansion plans, EPC ratings in social housing, energy procurement and more, as detailed in this blog post. He included a shoutout for WhatDoTheyKnow Pro and its Projects functionality, which meant they could share the work across a team of volunteers.

In the Q&A, an audience member expressed how very inspiring these two examples were, showing how one person can use FOI to bring real change.

Finally, Andreas Pavlou, Lead at the Open Government Partnership Independent Reporting Mechanism, brought the good news of positive advances in Access to Information in countries such as the Netherlands and Brazil, banging the drum for one of our favourite watchwords, collaboration.

George Greenwood

Before breaking for lunch, we enjoyed three skills sessions.

George Greenwood, Investigations Reporter at the Times, shared ten tips from his long experience of using FOI, which you can see for yourself on our Bluesky thread.

Lucas Amin of Democracy For Sale shared his experience of using EIR (Environmental Information Regulation) to uncover big stories: he’s also shared these at one of our ATI Network online events, so you can rewatch that here if you’re interested. 

And Ben Worthy, senior lecturer in Politics at Birkbeck College, explained his research project which used FOI to dig more deeply into how FOI works, experimenting to see whether formal requests were more likely to get a response (they are).

David Hamilton

After lunch, we complemented the morning’s keynote with another, this time from David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner, who echoed his ICO counterpart’s observations about the rise in complaints — partly because of AI and partly because public recognition of FOI is “higher than it’s ever been” (partly due to the recent high profile inquiry into the First Minister). “If you see the rights, you’re happy to use the rights”, he said, noting that the Scottish Information Commissioner is on the front page of a newspaper on average every three days at the moment, and that transparency was going to be a massive issue in Scotland’s forthcoming May election.

David also ran through the FOI Reform Bill currently going through Scottish Parliament, noting the differences between this and the FOI Act (which covers England, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus UK-wide public authorities that are based in Scotland).

For our second panel of the day, asking “What next for FOI?“, David was joined by Director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland Carole Ewart, Ben Worthy, and mySociety’s Alex Parsons and Louise Crow.

David Hamilton, Louise Crow, Carole Ewart, Ben Worthy and Alex Parsons

Louise began by reminding us that not every user of WhatDoTheyKnow is making a Freedom of Information request: in fact, each response is viewed on average 160 times, massively multiplying the benefit of the information contained within it. The publication of responses also means that authorities don’t have to deal with the same requests multiple times, as the information is free for all to see. She then highlighted the importance of FOI adapting to the current rise of AI systems, and the necessity of record-keeping so that transparency about how they work is not allowed to become opaque.

Ben shared his research on the use of AI in requests, observing that in the last year the number of authorities indicating that they are receiving requests composed by AI has risen from 30 to 70%. 

Carole was frank about the blocks to reform, saying that the attitudes towards FOI needed to change so that it was no longer seen as adversarial or aggressive — but she welcomed the changes on the horizon for Scotland.

Then, in our second skills session, Maurice Frankel of the Campaign for FOI shared tips for success with FOI requests, not least around keeping them within cost limits; and Martin Rosenbaum, author of Freedom of Information: A Practical Guidebook and for many years BBC News’ FOI expert, explained the importance both of persistence and of wording your requests carefully. Finally, mySociety’s own Julia Cushion and Gareth Rees explained what we’ve been doing on WhatDoTheyKnow and Alaveteli recently, from our beginners’ guide to FOI, to this page showcasing what FOI has done around the world. 

There was just time for three more lightning talks: reshowing this video from Gabriel Geiger, Investigative Reporter at Lighthouse Reports, on their award-winning Suspicion Machines investigation that showed how machine learning algorithms were disproportionately targeting individuals based on ethnicity and gender; followed by talks from Alex Homer, Senior Journalist at the BBC Shared Data Unit who shared a live investigation around the National Police Chiefs’ Council; and Carole Ewart, Director, Campaign for Freedom of Information in Scotland spoke about their work aiding NGOs in the use of FOI.

Finally Louise Crow wrapped up the day, and before we knew it, it was time to repair to the pub to carry on conversations in a more informal setting. An all-round success – and, we hope, the start of a very useful new network that we’ll be progressing over the next few weeks. Please fill in this form if you have an interest in being part of it.

Thanks to all our speakers, and to everyone who came and helped make the day a success. We’re also grateful to JRRT for supporting this exploration of the network, and eCase for additional sponsorship. Special thanks to Ben Worthy and Birkbeck for providing the excellent venue for the conference, and to Gavin Freeguard for compering the day, and all his work bringing the network together.

Gareth Rees, Julia Cushion, Martin Rosenbaum, Maurice Frankel and Gavin Freeguard

While the mapping services we’re most well known for are FixMyStreet, MapIt, and the Local Intelligence Hub, we do occasionally get the opportunity to collaborate with other organisations that share our ethos and could benefit from our expertise building flexible, easy-to-use data maps, for their internal teams or external supporters to use. One such example is a project we’ve just wrapped up with the Social Investment Business (SIB).

SIB is one of the UK’s largest social investors, coordinating over £800m in loans and grants to over 6,000 charities and social enterprises since 2002. Two of their core priorities are strengthening community assets and unlocking energy resilience, which got them thinking: what if some of the organisations they’ve previously funded could participate in energy flexibility schemes, to not only contribute to a greener electricity grid, but make a financial return that could be reinvested into their communities?

mySociety has previously explored energy flexibility. But for those unfamiliar with it, the concept is simple: the companies that operate the UK’s electricity network offer to pay organisations if they’re able to “flex” their electricity use (using less—or sometimes more—electricity) over certain periods of time. Any organisation is free to bid for these “flex tenders”, but typically they’d need to have large energy-consuming assets like industrial refrigerators, data centres, or heated swimming pools, which they could turn on or off, to really provide the “flex capacity” the network operators require.

The thing is, with more community organisations adopting new technologies like solar panels, heat pumps, electric vehicles, and battery storage, the barrier for participation in these flex tenders has dropped. Now your local community centre, or church, or school might be able to take part. We’ve even seen community organisations act as aggregators, utilising not just the flexibility of their own electrical assets, but also those of nearby householders who are willing to take part.

SIB has a built-in network of such community organisations. But the challenge is finding the sweet spots – the right organisations with the right equipment to offer the required flex capacity in a given tender area. And that’s where mySociety’s developers came in.

Over the course of a few weeks we built a tool that helps SIB identify organisations in their network who might have flex capacity, and who are based in one of the thousands of flex tender areas coming up in the UK over the next few years. Our tool also allowed SIB’s analysts to overlay data on energy poverty and deprivation, on nearby data centres, and nearby Warm Welcome spaces.

As with any data-heavy project like this, most of the difficult work was in finding and collating all of the data to populate the map. There is no one source of all flex tenders in the UK, so we had to collect listings from the six Distribution Network Operators (DNOs) individually. Some of these DNOs provided clean, structured data on the estimated geographical boundaries of each tender, while others provided only lists of postcodes, for which we then had to estimate rough boundaries, using the open data work of our much-loved former colleague Mark Longair. Add to this the complexity of each tender potentially having subtly different boundaries, or conversely, sharing identical boundaries, and we started to see why nobody had done this before.

But once the data was collected, and then mapped with some of the tips we’d learned through building the Local Intelligence Hub, SIB’s analysts were able to see exactly where their network overlaps with flex tender areas, and even identify the specific community organisations they could contact to explore the potential for participating in flex tenders.

More generally, the map also provides SIB with a persuasive policy tool – demonstrating the untapped potential for the UK’s third sector to support the country’s transition to a modern energy network, and the benefit that could be unlocked if this grassroots movement were to be supported by forward-thinking funding and regulation from central government.

Thomas Crabtree, Energy Analyst at SIB, said: “It’s been great to work with mySociety on this mapping project. Energy flexibility will play a big role in bringing cheaper, greener energy to the UK, and we want the community sector to lead this transition. This map represents an important first step in this work.”

We’re looking forward to seeing how our tool can contribute to the democratisation of the UK’s electricity network. In the meantime, if you have any similar projects you’d like to explore with us, just get in touch!

Photo: Kristian Buus / 10 10, CC BY 2.0, via Climate Visuals

In July 2024, we published our AI Framework, a first attempt at setting guidelines on how we utilise AI in our work at mySociety. The basic principles running through that framework can be summed up as “Use AI responsibly, and only when, all things considered, it is the best tool for the job”.

That position will serve us, and any organisation, for life — but, with such a fast-moving field and such speedy integration across so many of our areas of work, the consideration of  ‘all things’ must happen at regular intervals. It’s important that we keep checking in, to ensure that the framework is still providing timely and relevant guidance that reflects the current circumstances.

With this in mind, we’ve implemented a three-pronged approach:

• The AI Framework itself: this basic set of principles and questions is designed to act as a resource that staff members can keep referring back to if in doubt — and is a living document which we regularly update to reflect these fast-moving times.
• Our AI register: an internal spreadsheet, where staff are required to note new uses of AI, so that we have an up to date picture of how it is being deployed in areas across the organisation. This has already collected diverse use cases, from generating the transcripts of our podcasts with third party AI-based tools, to our own experiments with LLMs, like detecting inappropriate use of WhatDoTheyKnow. Where we think there are learnings for others to benefit from, we’ve written up these use cases here on our blog.
• A regular ‘Generative AI and Machine Learning’ meeting: this gives us the opportunity to discuss entries on the register, ask questions and consider any issues that have arisen.

So, with all this analysis going on, what are the changes we’ve seen since the first iteration of the framework? As you might imagine, they’re far-reaching, both in our own practices and in the wider world.

In our development: There’s been increasing experimentation and use of coding agent tools from our developers, always with an eye to whether these are producing valid outputs that genuinely save time, or solve problems that other tools couldn’t.

Some of the datasets we create now rely on LLM processes, where flexibility in interpreting and transforming language helps us create and combine data in ways not possible through other methods. These include the collection of data on APPGs; and our WriteToThem Insights work. 

We’ve experimented with some AI-based problem-solving on our websites and infrastructure: for example, screening for personal immigration requests that have mistakenly been submitted on WhatDoTheyKnow (a longstanding issue); and we are in the early stages of exploring machine learning approaches to help us understand potential ways of handling any abusive messages sent through WriteToThem. 

As for the external landscape: increasingly, we’re seeing funding opportunities that centre around the responsible deployment of AI for the good of democracy or transparency; and in our international community, via our Communities of Practice and TICTeC, we’re hearing of both more and more innovative application of AI to civic tech tools; and ways of monitoring its use by the state.

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Image: Steve Johnson

Submitting evidence to Parliamentary inquiries is one of the ways in which we can have an effect on the way things work in this country.

As you may recall, we recently contributed to the Scottish Parliament’s Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee on Freedom of Information reform, and now we’ve submitted written evidence to the UK Procedure Committee’s inquiry on Written Questions.

This time, we’re making the case for more alignment between FOI requests and Parliament’s Written Questions system. Written Questions are a mechanism by which MPs and Lords can hold Ministers to account, in much the same way that the public can request information from government authorities through FOI.

We have recommended that a rejected parliamentary question should be retrospectively converted to an FOI request to allow making an appeal; and that given the influence of FOI in Parliament (both by parliamentarians, and in how they use FOI requests made by others), government statistics on FOI effectiveness should be scrutinised alongside Written Question statistics.

Finally, reflecting one of the findings in our WhoFundsThem work, we think that when a Member submits a Written Question and declares an interest, they should be required to say what that interest is.

For much more detail on each of these points, you can see our submission on the Parliament website.

WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, our Freedom of Information service for users such as journalists, researchers and campaigners, now comes with Projects bundled in at no extra cost. That means that, as well as sending batch requests more easily, you can also bring in colleagues or volunteers to help you refine and analyse the data you receive in response.

How WhatDoTheyKnow Pro can help you

WhatDoTheyKnow Pro is a useful tool for those sending the same FOI request to multiple authorities: what we call ‘batch requesting’. Often, when embarking on an investigation, or gathering data for research or to inform a campaign, it’s helpful to gather data from many sources to create a full picture.

For example, in this recent blog post, Zarino described how he used Pro to ask every local authority in the UK how many safeguarding referrals they had received from schools that they manage. Climate Emergency UK have also used Pro to good effect, gathering data about councils’ climate action that wasn’t otherwise publicly available.

WhatDoTheyKnow Pro helps with two of the more difficult elements of bulk requesting:

• finding/compiling a list of all the relevant authorities’ email addresses; and
• keeping track of which authorities have responded, and which need following up.

What Projects adds

Now, the inclusion of Projects eases another big challenge of bulk requesting: sorting through the masses of responses to pull out the information you need.

Even when you frame your request to ask for data in a certain format, as permitted by the FOI Act, experience suggests that you’ll rarely receive responses that fit neatly into a spreadsheet for your instant analysis.

As Zarino noted in his follow-up post on requesting safeguarding data, much depends on how the authority are storing the information at their end: “We think, in reality, very few of the authorities held this data in a format structured enough to count as a ‘dataset’, but a few did send over their data in spreadsheet format, which was nice to see! Others, however, sent us tables in Word documents, in PDFs, SharePoint links, even ASCII-art tables in raw email text.”

These days, AI might be helpful with some data-refining tasks; but as we discovered with our WhoFundsThem project recently, sometimes humans are the best bet for combing through responses and pulling out the parts you need, in the format you need. Climate Emergency also took the time to train large cohorts of volunteers to ensure the assessments they were pulling out of their FOI responses for the Council Climate Action Scorecards were fair and accurate. Both projects made good use of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro and Projects.

What can Projects do for you? 

If you have one or more associate working with you, or if you can assemble a team of willing volunteers, you can share the work of going through the FOI responses as they come in. Projects makes collaboration easy. 

You can use Projects to give your team an online interface where you describe the aims of your investigation, and set out the questions you need answers to. Your helpers will then go through each response in turn and identify the parts you need, putting them into your standardised format. At the end, all their inputs are pulled into a nice, tidy spreadsheet that allows you to do the analysis you need.

Contributors don’t need a Pro membership themselves, so there’s no extra cost to you, and the only extra effort required is in setting out what data it is that you need to pull out from the responses — something it’s useful to have straight anyway!

No team to help you? Projects can also be used solo, and still helps you keep track of the information you’re pulling out — helpful if there are lots of data points.

Subscribe to WhatDoTheyKnow Pro (with Projects included), or see the Help page for more detail.

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Image: Kylie Haulk

As we’ve seen in our recent case studies, the Council Climate Action Scorecards — a joint project between Climate Emergency UK (CE UK) and mySociety — rely on the power and energy of volunteers. 

Most volunteers get their start when they help to mark councils’ climate action for the Scorecards; and then some, it seems, get the bug and go on to become even more deeply engaged.

These keen folk are known as Ambassadors. We’ve heard from Lucy, who told us that working with the Scorecards had given her a deeper appreciation of the hard work councils have to do; and Mat, who’s used the Scorecards to communicate with both the public and his own council. Now let’s meet Helen John, a very active campaigner based in Sutton.

Helen did, indeed, begin as a marker, helping to score councils’ action over the summer of 2024: her work fed into the 2025 Scorecards. Then, in November 2024, she joined CE UK’s Local Climate Academy, a six-week training course in which CE UK train participants in how to use the Scorecards to win further support for climate action. 

Helen has taken that advice and run with it, which is a win for climate; also, because Helen is happy to share her experiences, it’s a win for anyone who might want to do more but doesn’t know where to begin.  

For example, shortly after the new results were published, Helen submitted a public question at Sutton council’s Local Committee meeting, asking: 

“What is Sutton Council going to take away from the launch of the 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecards, and what actions are going to be taken to make sure climate action is reprioritised across the whole of the council?”

And you could do the same! Here is Helen’s advice on how to get started:

“Get on your local council’s mailing list, so you’ll be notified when meetings are happening. Usually you can sign up via a page on their website called “Local Democracy”, or similar, and then you should also find a section called something like “Have your say at meetings”.

“This is a right for every resident of every council — anyone can ask a question at a committee meeting (usually one main question, and then a follow-up). Generally, between the notification of the meeting and the deadline for submitting a question, which you have to give in advance, you’ll have around 48 hours. 

“They’ll locate the right person to answer your question, which can take a little time; I find they tend to give you an initial response 24 hours before the meeting. This gives you the time to prepare your follow-up question.” 

And if the response is not as enthusiastic as you might like it to be, or fails to commit to any activity? Helen sees the wider picture: 

“You need to continue to ask as many questions as possible to the council. If you’re a member of a campaign group, you can take it in turns. It shows that there is an interest, and a continued scrutiny of the council’s action.”

Sutton council’s reply stated that it “recognises that there’s still more work to do”, and, as Helen sees it, that created an opportunity. She has been working with Sutton’s sustainability team, holding a workshop on how to improve their Scorecards results; and has given a presentation to the Environment and Sustainable Transport committee, as well as a wider group of councillors.

We have the feeling this is just the beginning — because, as made clear by Helen’s nuanced view of how climate work fits into the council’s other priorities, communication doesn’t need to take place solely with the staff who have a climate remit.

“When they surveyed Sutton residents about their priorities, health provision came out top. But let’s not forget that decarbonisation is also something that has a positive impact on health across the board — I’m really keen to push that more holistic way of seeing things.”

Thank you so much to Helen for the ideas, not to mention the practical advice on using the Scorecards to push for better climate action at the local level. We hope that it gives our readers the inspiration to do something similar.

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Image: Ian Simpson

Today we’re launching a new report: Shifting Landscapes: A practical guide to pro democratic tech.

This report builds on the conferences, seminars and conversations we’ve been having in our TICTeC programme over the last few years, to present a comprehensive picture of where pro democratic tech is now. We explore how technology can strengthen and defend democratic life, and how civic tech practitioners, pro-democracy organisations, and funders can make effective choices in a rapidly shifting landscape for both democracy and technology.

The result is a report of eight chapters in four thematic areas:

Pro-democracy tech: this extends our definition of pro-democracy tech, to explore how  technology can be joined to wider democratic movements working to both defend and extend democracy using technology.

Communities of practice: what we’ve learned about how we can best work together with our communities of practice around Access to Information and democratic transparency, balancing efficiencies of scale with unique circumstances and needs.

Shaping the landscape: Civic tech sometimes needs to adapt to changing times, but should be trying to shape the times. These chapters look at changing distribution methods (video and AI chatbots), but also how we can create infrastructure that makes democratic projects easier and more effective.

Using technology effectively: These chapters are aimed at practitioners thinking about how to use technology, with examples and frameworks for practical approaches to AI technologies, but also other examples of tools that can be effective in ways that AI approaches can’t. 

The report can be read online, or as a PDF. 

Header image: photo by Kalen Emsley on Unsplash

A new feature has been released for FixMyStreet giving users the option to start their reports with a photo, the data from which can be extracted to speed up the reporting process.

As well as making the reporting process quicker, this new functionality should also increase the accuracy of reports, removing the need for users who can’t or don’t want to report the problem at its location to remember exactly where it was at a later point in time.

Photo-first reporting is available on both desktop and mobile devices.

Where a photo has been taken using a smartphone with geotagging enabled, FixMyStreet can now use the data stored in the uploaded photo to identify the location of the problem the user wants to report. 

Once uploaded, FixMyStreet will display a map with a pin dropped at the location identified. Users then have the option to either move the map pin if necessary, or continue with the report.

FixMyStreet shows users on the map where it detects the photo was taken. The pin can be moved if necessary.

If a user does not have photo geotagging turned on, or the device they are using is not compatible with this functionality, they can still begin reports with a photo, but they will also need to identify the location of the problem either through GPS (if currently at the location) or using a postcode, street name or area.

Users can still report problems on FixMyStreet without using a photo if they can’t take one or don’t have one.

Photo-first reporting has been rolled out across the FixMyStreet website and app, as well as to all instances of FixMyStreet Pro.

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Banner image: Dextar Vision

It was with immense sadness that the mySociety team learned of the death of our much loved ex-colleague Mark Longair.

Mark first came to mySociety as a volunteer, contributing his time and coding knowledge to build scrapers and parsers that brought Scottish Parliament data into TheyWorkForYou. Knowing a good developer when we saw one, we subsequently offered him a more official position, and he was a member of our permanent staff from 2012 to 2018.

During those years, he worked on a variety of our projects, helping to build brand new codebases from scratch, and contributing to existing ones, with his commits running through Mzalendo, Pombola, PopIt, EveryPolitician and TheyWorkForYou. One way in which his legacy lives on is in the elegant code he wrote for those projects, some of which continue to make transparency more accessible in the UK and in sub-saharan Africa.

He was also a dedicated volunteer with our friends at Democracy Club, making immense contributions — both in terms of hours dedicated and care taken — to their candidates crowdsourcing platform. This is a crucial piece of infrastructure for the digital democracy sector, and one we still benefit from ourselves, most recently when integrating election candidate data to the Local Intelligence Hub. And to many, Mark is best known as the originator of the UK’s only open geographical dataset of postcode boundaries, which also continues to find its way into mySociety’s mapping projects, even to this day.

He brought a remarkable level of care both to every aspect of his work, and to the connections he forged while working here. Words which are cropping up repeatedly as colleagues recall Mark include kind, humble, intelligent, remarkable, and generous. 

This generosity extended to the ways in which he shared knowledge: his clear and considerate explanations were a hallmark of any piece of work he contributed to; these often persist as a learning opportunity for anyone who returns to the code in later years. Mark was a naturally gifted teacher, both as a peer and mentor. 

He was a deep thinker about all aspects of life, reading widely and sharing what he discovered with colleagues; and he strove, especially, to improve the joy of working life for us all, with ideas and systems to make mySociety’s remote set-up more functional, agreeable and humane.

But he was by no means always serious — or perhaps one could say, he was equally serious about having fun. Contributions to the culture of mySociety include a karaoke habit that still persists; a lasting recognition of the importance of lunchtime naps; and his impassioned recommendations of Pixar films. Mark also introduced at least one colleague to the joy of cryptic crosswords, something he was serious enough about that he was a regular contributor to the blog Fifteen Squared.

After mySociety, Mark joined mySociety alumnus Robin Houston at Flourish, turning his considerable talents towards making data into compelling visualisations that brought out the underlying stories for all to see. 

The world is poorer for his not being in it; but richer for his long-lasting contributions to coding, and to all of us who were lucky to work with him or call him a friend. Contemporaneous colleague Steve Day and Democracy Club’s Sym Roe have also written tributes.

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Photo: Struan Donald

As part of our WhoFundsThem work we want to make better information available about money in politics. 

Last year we released a report Beyond Transparency – looking at the UK Parliament’s register of financial interests, and wider arguments about how we fund politics. 

Today we’re releasing a follow-up report: Leaky Pipes (read online or download as a PDF). This covers what we’ve learned (and what we think could be better) about the systems for reporting election donations. You can also re-watch the launch event on YouTube. 

This report started because we were a bit confused about the different ways data could be declared and reported.  And to be honest, we’re still a bit confused – but we have more diagrams to explain why. 

What we explore in this report are the multiple routes for declarations, different thresholds for disclosure, and uneven public access. This makes cross-checking difficult and leaves gaps where information can vanish depending on how a donation flows (direct to candidate vs via party), how large it is, and whether the candidate wins.

The result is that candidates and agents face complex reporting requirements, electoral administrators hold paper-heavy returns that are hard to inspect, and the public (and sometimes regulators) struggle to build a consistent picture of who is funding whom.

From this, we’ve made recommendations on making reporting easier to do correctly, faster to publish, and simpler to scrutinise:

• Move to a “report once” process that informs multiple systems
• Harmonise public disclosure at £1,000
• Create a comprehensive public database above that threshold
• Create a safe private database below the threshold for research and evaluation purposes

Building on this, we suggest three practical avenues for follow-up work that would strengthen the case for reform and help design better systems:

• User research and prototyping to map how a “report once” service would work for candidates, agents, administrators, Parliament, and the Electoral Commission. 
• Sampling local authority returns to demonstrate the scale and type of inconsistencies between routes.
• Exploring a data-sharing agreement for controlled research access to the Electoral Commission’s small-donor/return data.

The report can be read online or downloaded as a PDF.

Header image: Photo by Meg on Unsplash