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

When we consider the impacts of a project like the Council Climate Action Scorecards, the obvious benefits are those we see in UK councils as they step up their efforts to decarbonise. On this blog, we’ve also frequently noted tangential effects too, such as better understanding and communication between local authorities and residents.

There’s a third, less obvious benefit, though, as organisations across the world become aware of the project, and are inspired to do something similar. We saw it happen in Canada, and now The Climate Reality Project Europe has taken the idea and adapted it for their own community.

In this post, Gosia Rychlik, a branch manager at the organisation, explains what effects the Scorecards, a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety, have sparked in Europe.

At The Climate Reality Project Europe, we work with a network of over 5,500 Climate Reality Leaders across the continent, supporting them to turn knowledge into local climate action. While covering the topic of climate emergency declarations and designing tools to help our community engage in the topic more effectively, we came across Climate Emergency UK’s work.

One of the projects was The Council Climate Action Scorecards: they immediately stood out as a transparent, methodic and very practical way to make local climate governance visible and accessible to citizens. The clarity of the methodology and the commitment to accountability deeply resonated with our mission. The project shows how citizens can help assess and encourage local climate action as informed citizens. 

A guidebook adapted for Europe

Inspired by Climate Emergency UK’s work, we created the City Climate Action Assessment Guidebook, launched in autumn 2025 as part of our Citizens for Clean Energy programme. The guidebook takes the idea behind the Scorecards and adapts it for cities across Europe. Despite the differences between datasets and local government systems, the need for transparency and accountability is the same everywhere.

The guidebook provides a clear and simple framework to help citizens see what their cities are doing and where more action is needed. We cover eight key areas: climate commitments, energy, transport, nature, community engagement, governance, and finance. It invites residents to observe, look for information, and start conversations with local councils. Our intention is to encourage citizens to take the first simple step toward better understanding and meaningful local action.

We launched the guidebook with a series of public webinars featuring Climate Emergency UK, Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate-KIC, reaching Climate Reality Leaders and community organisers from across Europe. 

What we’ve learned and what’s next

From the Scorecards, we learned that transparency and accessibility are key to accelerating local climate progress. We want to encourage citizens to start noticing climate policies (or lack thereof) in the real world and hope this will make them more likely to get involved, when they understand how to interpret their city’s plans and see where gaps exist.

We also learned that local engagement doesn’t always require large-scale campaigns — sometimes it begins with a few citizens paying attention, asking the right questions, and connecting dots between policies and lived experience.

Looking ahead, we hope that more members of our network take the first steps of local climate action with our Guidebook. Ultimately, our goal is the same as the one that inspired us: to empower citizens to hold councils accountable, celebrate progress, and accelerate the transition to climate-neutral, resilient communities.

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Thanks very much to Gosia for sharing these insights: we hope the guidebook has long-lasting and tangible effects.

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Image: Nuno Marques

At the beginning of the year, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: to help a group of small organisations working with marginalised communities to run Freedom of Information–based campaigns using WhatDoTheyKnow Pro’s batch-request and project features. We recruited groups working in areas as varied as domestic abuse, arts funding, youth health, SEND provision, parental leave, fuel poverty, and migrant justice. 

As the year draws to a close, we’re reflecting on the project and the lessons we’ve learned from it. It’s been a total privilege working closely with these organisations, because it gave us a front-row view of the real challenges of frontline campaigning and community support. 

What became clear early on was that the hardest part of a batch-request project isn’t actually pressing “send”.  Campaigners know their issues intimately, but FOI requires a specific kind of precision: pinning down exactly what data will answer their question, what format it should be in, and which public bodies actually hold it. Moving from “we want to understand this issue” to “we need these five questions answered from these 150 authorities” is a surprisingly big leap. 

Luckily, WhatDoTheyKnow’s knowledgeable  volunteers were able to help our groups go from vague policy areas to precise questions, and to understand what information was already out there. One of our groups didn’t end up submitting a big batch request, as in the course of their preparatory research they found an already-published dataset from an industry body they didn’t know existed. This is still a win — proactive publication by authorities makes everyone’s life easier.

In the cases where we had good questions and had identified the right authorities, we then still had to tackle the practical reality: for small teams already stretched thin, a large FOI project which asks a lot of questions requires capacity to deal with the answers. These can come in a diversity of forms: follow-ups, clarifications, refusals, delays, internal reviews. Our Projects tool helps to make dealing with the range of responses easier, but the scale of the challenge can still require serious commitment of time and resources. Zarino shared his experience of this on our blog back in October.

Just this week we had a moment that illustrates this: one of the groups we were supporting sent a batch FOI request to 133 universities on 5 July. As I write this in December, they are still receiving responses. The most recent one, a refusal, arrived five months after the original request! 

We’ve got two strands of thought here. On one hand, it’s good to be realistic. Although these moments are frustrating, they also teach us to be prepared for slow, unpredictable timelines, and that persistence is part of the craft. On the other hand, we feel strongly that citizens shouldn’t have to be quite so persistent, that pace shouldn’t be quite so slow, nor unpredictable. That’s why we’re advocating for upstream policy improvements, such as in our recent evidence to the Scottish Parliament, and in our upcoming FOI Fest conference.

Although it’s not always been straightforward, this year reinforced why FOI is worth the effort. A particularly strong example came from SCALP and Netpol’s From Scotland to Gaza report, which, with our help, used batch FOI requests to uncover policing practices around protests. Their methodical approach combined data from public bodies with testimonies to make a compelling case that has shaped media coverage and public debate. It’s a reminder that FOI doesn’t just extract information, it empowers communities to speak with confidence.

All of this left us with a clearer sense of what we can do in future to help make big FOI projects work. A few lessons stood out:

• Start smaller: a 10-authority pilot builds confidence and tests the strength of the question.
• Co-design the requests: working together on wording and structure reduces uncertainty: the organisations have expertise of their area, while our volunteers have second-to-none understanding of how to write a clear request.
• Prepare organisations for the long tail: follow-ups, delays, and refusals are, unfortunately, to be expected, not signs of failure of the project. 
• Volunteers can help with the volume of work: Climate Emergency UK have set the standard for how to train, empower and mobilise the cohorts they need to churn through large quantities of data.
• See FOI as a strategic, not administrative tool: it’s most useful when tied directly to campaign goals.

We fundamentally believe that every organisation can benefit from FOI; they just need the right scaffolding and resources. If you know what you’re in for, the whole process becomes far less intimidating.

What next? We’re refining our approach, watching what happens with our initial batch of projects, and constantly updating our guides and help pages to support our users in their big and small FOI projects. Every request is a small act of collective muscle-building. We’re excited to keep learning and keep improving the support that makes those acts possible.

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash