TICTeC is wrapped up for another year. The roller banners are stowed away, the lanyards saved for next year, and now we’re back home from Belgium with memories, insights and enough hope to keep us going ’til next time. 

It’s always energising to come together with the global civic tech community and share everything we’ve learned. We had attendees from 34 countries, bringing together their experiences — and judging by the comments we’re seeing, we’re not the only ones to have found it both enjoyable and valuable.

The two days were “fabulous and thought provoking”, allowing for “the exchange of experiences and coordinated actions”, and delegates said they returned “inspired, with new insights on civic tech trends and promising collaboration ideas”.

Perhaps Hendrik Nahr from make.org, summed the whole experience up best when he said, “It felt like a family gathering of the civic tech community from Europe and beyond. I’m grateful for the energy, the open exchanges, and the motivation to keep pushing forward tech for democracy.”

We are grateful too: TICTeC is not just about mySociety creating an open space for such discourse; it also depends on the people who participate and the insights they so generously articulate.

What we talked about

It’s hard to provide a full summary of such a packed event, but fortunately we’ll soon be able to share videos of the majority of the presentations, along with slides and photographs, so you’ll be able to choose what you’d like to see. 

The overall theme of the conference was tech to defend and advance democracy, and within that there were strong strands around tech to tackle the climate emergency; citizen participation and deliberation; transparency and access to information… and across everything we heard of the seismic changes to society, to tech and to democracy — both already seen, and expected soon — by the emergence of AI. 

To pull out a few high points from so many thought-provoking moments:

Marietje Schaake, delivering her keynote remotely because of last minute train strike issues, still managed to enthrall the auditorium and ignite our two days of conversation with an incisive overview of how big tech is overtaking democratic governance globally, with oversight lagging dangerously behind. We posted a summary on Bluesky in real time, if you can’t wait for the video.

Fernanda Campagnucci‘s day two keynote (summarised here) sliced up the different approaches government can take to citizen participation, from citizens feeding into decision-making processes, to citizens being invited to co-create both the data and the governance systems, featuring a nice story about an elderly lady who grumbled that everyone was talking about APIs (a way for software systems to communicate with one another) at a town meeting but she didn’t know what it meant. Once someone had explained to her, she turned up at every subsequent meeting to request APIs of every department’s output.

Colin Megill used the opportunity provided by TICTeC to launch Pol.is 2.0 to a highly relevant audience. This is a paid version of the open source decision-making platform — the basis of Twitter’s “Community Notes” functionality — which contains a ‘superset’ of new features. Its enhanced LLM capabilities allow it to break sprawling conversations into any number of subtopics, making them easier to moderate and removing blocks to overall consensus that can be created by small sticking points.

Panels brought people together to talk about aspects of parliamentary monitoring and access to information from around the world – discussions we will be continuing through our communities of practice work. 

There was a useful session on the importance of, and methods for, measuring impact — after all, TICTEC’s foundational purpose — from OpenUp South Africa, Hungary’s Átlátszónet Foundation and SPOON Netherlands.

We wrapped up the conference with an examination of how mySociety is navigating AI in recent and near future work, and an open forum about how TICTeC can evolve and continue to be useful to the global civic tech community. 

We presented how we’re thinking about, utilising and navigating both the positives and potential dangers of AI. Such considerations are also preoccupations for others in our field: several organisations are experimenting with AI to achieve or work more efficiently toward their pro-democracy aims; others are foreseeing problems that AI may bring, from amplifying misinformation to algorithm-based decisions that affect individuals’ lives. 

There wasn’t an organisation at TICTeC that isn’t thinking about AI in one way or another, as evidenced in diverse sessions across the entire conference. There’s a sense that the conversation has matured from last year, moving on from hype to clear engagement on practical uses, and for scrutiny of both model creators and government uses. We’ll write more about this in a separate post.

And also, watch this space for videos and photos from TICTeC 2025, which we’ll share as soon as they’re ready. That should keep us all going until next year.

The 2025 Scorecards launch today

Wondering how your local council’s doing around climate? With today’s launch of the 2025 Council Climate Action Scorecards, you can check their progress right now. 

And because this is the second edition of Scorecards, you can check not just your council’s scores, but also how they compare with last time. Are they doing better or worse in each of the vital 93 areas for meeting the challenges of the climate crisis?

Today, you can:

• Search for your council by name
• See at a glance how their overall score compares with others across the UK, overall and within each section of activity
• Click through for an in-depth breakdown of every question and how they scored
• See at every level of the Scorecards how their performance compares with the 2023 assessment.

What next?

Great — so you’re up to speed on the areas where your council’s doing well on climate action, and where it could be doing better. 

Start a conversation If you have thoughts about these, you can use the Scorecards to open up conversations with your local councillors — our website WriteToThem makes that super easy. (Want more data? Type your postcode into Local Intelligence Hub for lots more climate-related local info!)

Use Scorecards in your work If you’re a council climate officer or councillor yourself, we hope the Scorecards will show where you could be making improvements — and give you an idea of which other councils are doing well in those areas. You can even get in touch and swap notes! Take a look at our case studies to see how councils have been using Scorecards to learn and improve.

Help us do more

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.
If you value the work that we do to make it easier to hold authorities to account for climate action, please consider making a donation.

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Image: Alastair Johnstone / Climate Visuals

A few weeks ago, I was part of a panel giving evidence to the House of Commons’ Standards Committee on ‘outside employment and interests’ (second jobs).  Here’s the video, or the transcript. 

My evidence was based on our findings and recommendations from our WhoFundsThem project and our Beyond Transparency report. We worked with volunteers to go right through the register of members’ interests, to add new information to TheyWorkForYou, and to draw some conclusions on reform from what we learned.

The relevant section on second jobs is here in the report.

Here’s a quick summary of what the session was digging into, and what our evidence was about. 

How to handle rules

The meta-question of the session was if you are going to have rules, what form should the rules take? Should they be:

• Transparency-based – do what you like, but you have to tell people.
• Limit-based – don’t take up jobs that earn more than X, or take more time than Y. 
• Principle-based – don’t take up roles with conflicts of interests
• Role-based – don’t take up certain kinds of role

In practice, you want some combination of these – but in general we think that looking at role is a good foundation to be supported by other approaches. 

Transparency is not enough

We love transparency here at mySociety Towers – but the title of our report (Beyond Transparency) is our general message here – it’s not enough on its own even if done well, and it’s not currently well. 

If you are relying on transparency to make this system self-enforcing then the transparency needs to be really good. It’s not! We brought a group of volunteers together because we wanted humans to be able to go through the register and add extra context through research (for example, researching what a named company does) but we just ran into massive obstacles with what wasn’t there. Contradictory information, information that logically should have been updated that wasn’t. Simple questions like “is this person still a councillor” were difficult. 

Fixing this needs a systematic approach. You can’t just say it’s an MPs responsibility to do a good disclosure – you need systematic efforts (validation, prompts and audits) to make this data strong enough to be load bearing. 

Reasonable limits struggles to make practical recommendations

The limit-based approach fell apart immediately because the main proponents of “reasonable limits” (Committee for Standards in Public Life) also decided they couldn’t commit to recommending what these limits should be. Requirements on time might cause problems for medical people who need to do minimum practice, and requirements on money would cause problems for people earning book royalties. So given this, you need to have a sense of roles otherwise you end up in the situation where people do not have to defend lucrative law careers outright, but hide behind the nurses. 

Org-based risk, rather than taking people’s word 

One of the things the committee is considering was principle-based rules proposed by the Parliamentary Commissioner.

Our concern with these is they quite heavily imply that a range of activities is impermissible without actually making it so – making it vulnerable to people just actively lying or non-disclosing. 

For example, a principles-based approach: would struggle to catch an MP being given a semi-fake job, where the actual work is insider contacts and using parliamentary questions. Everyone involved is smart enough to keep what the real deal is out of the contract. They might certify there is no conflict, but there is not a good way of verifying or challenging that.

If we’re trying to prevent outright corruption (while allowing other activities), the risk is not in the role, but the organisation who is paying. The question isn’t “do you as an MP certify this job isn’t corrupt” but “are you taking a job with an organisation that poses corruption risks?” Do they supply government services? Do they separately lobby Parliament?

You want factual questions that don’t rely on any particular role, that can be independently investigated and challenged. The risk is posed by who is paying, not what they say they’re paying for.

The simplest solution (just ban things) has a lot going for it

As a TheyWorkForYou person it feels partly my job to highlight that the majority view is clearly against almost all forms of moonlighting.  By YouGov polling the only professions there was majority public support for allowing was doctor/nurse or author. And even then, a survey experiment by Rosie Campbell and Phillip Cowley found a penalty in support for a hypothetical GP decreased as the extent they continued to practice increased. The conversation in Parliament naturally reflects lots of specific examples of people this would cause problems for, but starting from the public position of almost nothing – the problem should really be trying to justify limited allowances rather than slightly increased restrictions. 

Transparency International’s position is a tight ban, with exceptions for jobs “that maintain a professional qualification, are political activity or provide an essential public service, such as army reservists”. This seems like a good starting point! There are going to be some more fiddly exemptions that need to be argued about (I’d separate out the dual mandate discussion) – but I’m much more comfortable with a list of exemptions than trying to define a list of bad jobs. 

This list of exemptions can be nuanced – and this is an area where using citizens’ panels or assemblies can be useful in really getting into the details (see other examples of select committees making use of deliberative processes). You need broad principles, but you also need to be translating that into specific rules on roles, and have processes for updating these over time. 

This needs collective decisions, not individual discretion

Whatever the approach, it is important that Parliament takes a collective view, rather than seeing this as a matter between MPs and their constituencies. This stretches from better audits of transparency, to just banning activities that are bringing Parliament into disrepute. 

Most MPs are doing the maximum individual action they can – they are not taking these jobs. Meanwhile a small number of MPs have second jobs that cause reputation problems. They get most of the private gains from this, while everyone bears the cost of the headlines. It’d be really great to have one less political trust scandal going around every few years – and a simple approach is in reach. 

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For more on the *other* problems with the current approach (especially on gifts) – please read the report!

As part of our WhoFundsThem project, we released a big report detailing what we learned while working with volunteers to explore the MPs’ Register of Members Financial Interests (RMFI). 

Many of our recommendations are for changes Parliament should make, but we always want to think about what we can do from the outside to keep things moving. 

In this post I’m going to quickly recap our recommendations, and what we think we can do to improve things and work to enable reformers in Parliament to go further. 

Better data collection

We recommend that Parliament review the categories of the register to better reflect common interest types, and capture appropriate information for different kinds of democratic problems. Whether this is making the categories easier to parse for constituents, or collecting data that is easier to compare in bulk – we need the most relevant information to be recorded for different kinds of interests. 

What we can do from the outside

While we cannot create information from thin air, we can rework and expand on what is published to make it more useful. Our enhanced election summaries are an example of how this data can be expanded through matching to other datasets and volunteer crowdsourcing. 

There is also value in making messy data more easily available – we can scale our existing spreadsheet approach to registers of interest beyond the House of Commons. We’ve now added the devolved registers of interest – but there’s a lot further to go, for instance to local government and the House of Lords. 

Stronger checks

There need to be better processes to improve the quality of the data released – through more validation rules, data audits, and enforcing Parliament’s own rules on disclosure. Parliament as an institution should stop seeing poor quality disclosures as the MP’s problem, but instead treat it as something that affects the standing of the institution as a whole (and that the majority of MPs want to see working well).

What we can do from the outside

We can more actively flag where information needs to improve – and use our position to create better correction pipelines.

For instance, we can produce automated validation approaches to flag entries with missing/conflicting information and send these back to the MP/Parliamentary Commissioner for review. 

Similarly, where disclosures in debate are not being followed, we can promptly pass this back to the MP in question and the chair of the debate who did not enforce Parliament’s rules during the debate, and keep track of incomplete disclosures in public.

Tighter rules

These recommendations aim to achieve more disclosure through lowering thresholds, and to make more interests impermissible – for instance, lower disclosure thresholds for gifts, shareholdings, or family members’ interests.

What we can do from the outside

We cannot change Parliament’s rules to capture information we think is missing, but we can demonstrate where those rules are out of step – and the specific implications of that. 

For instance, our highlighted interests page flags interests related to industries with low public support and governments of not free countries, and offers MPs opportunity for additional context. We can focus on aspects of this that produce the most benefit for least effort.

Systematic reform

Ultimately, we see systematic reform of political finance as being necessary to reduce the dependence of parties on big donors – enabling caps on political donations.  Here we recommend a citizens’ assembly on money in politics as a way of progressing arguments about public funding that have been stuck for decades. 

What we can do from the outside

While ideally an assembly would be commissioned by Parliament itself, it doesn’t have to be – and would have a lot of value if convened by civil society to move the debate forward. 

For our purposes, sharper information about public preferences (and importantly trade-offs) would help inform the rest of our work. Joining civic power to deliberative democracy provides power in one direction, and legitimacy in the other – a powerful force to engage with conflicts within Parliament to shift official rules and responses.

Help us do more

Key to our work is the philosophy that we don’t have to wait for a better political system to be given to us – we can work together to make it happen now.

If you want to support our work, please consider making a donation, or sign up to our newsletter to hear more about our work and other opportunities to volunteer. 

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Header image: Photo by Dan Senior on Unsplash

If you’re someone who’s concerned about the climate but not really sure what to do about it, this webinar is definitely a good place to start.

Our event this week brought together investigative journalist Lucas Amin of Democracy for Sale; Anne Friel, Head of Just Societies at Client Earth; and Joschi Wolf of the German transparency project Frag Den Staat – all sharing their knowledge around Freedom of Information as an invaluable tool for tackling the climate crisis.

It was very encouraging to hear practical tips and thoughts that made FOI-based activism seem within reach, even to the beginner. And all from your own desk!

Watch the webinar on YouTube. We’ve also compiled the responses to the questions from the audience that there wasn’t time to answer during the session: you can see those here.

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Image: Matteo Miliddi

Today we’re launching TheyWorkForYou Votes – our new vote information platform. 

Our goal with this service is to create and support better analysis of decisions taken in the UK’s Parliaments. We want this service to both be directly helpful to the general public, and indirectly by providing new tools and data to specialists.

We ran an online event to talk about the new site and the context of this work that you can watch on the event page.

If you like our work, and want to see us go further – please consider donating to support mySociety and TheyWorkForYou.

What’s new in this site

Vote analysis

For each vote we show:

• Breakdowns for and against the motion by party/government/opposition. 
• A searchable voting list with party alignment – how far off an individual MPs vote is from the average position of their party.
• Which of eight common ‘parliamentary dynamics’ the vote falls into – reflecting who was proposing, divisions among opposition parties, and levels of participation. 

Here is an example of this for the approval vote of the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill.

We calculate this daily for all new votes we know about, but for House of Commons votes this will be calculated and published within minutes of the vote being published on the Commons Votes site.

Motions and legislation tags

The day after a vote, we automatically link up decisions with the motion that is being voted on. From this we can link deeper into debates, and add extra explainers for common types of motions.

We also automatically tag votes that seem like they’re related to the same bill to make it easier to find amendments or significant stages of the bill (because of naming variations, sometimes some are missed). 

Here’s an example of that for the Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill.

 

Divisions and agreements

For the House of Commons and Scottish Parliament, we extract from the official record references to decisions made without a vote (“on the nod”) and create ‘Agreements’ from these, linking to the related motion. 

We do this to create a canonical reference for agreements. When a high profile issue may be passed without a vote, it can be hard for people to find. By extracting these from the official record, we show more of how the parliamentary process works, can tag them as being part of the process of passing legislation, and include them in voting summaries (in rare cases). 

Here is an example of an amendment made to the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill that was accepted without a vote.

Voting summaries by time period

TheyWorkForYou Votes now powers our voting summaries – where we group related votes together to show a record on TheyWorkForYou. 

Building on last year’s change to how we approach scoring and vote inclusion, our new technical approach gives us more flexibility in calculating voting summaries for different time periods. We now show voting records in TheyWorkForYou by ‘all time’ but also by the different government tenures since 1997. 

By creating a view for the current Parliament, we can make recent decisions easier to discover and include, while reflecting that the implications of votes can be long running, and the record is not reset at each election. 

The voting summaries are currently updated up to the end of 2024 – we will do an update covering the first part of 2025 in early June. 

Annotations and whip reports

An impact of TheyWorkForYou has been more public explanations by representatives of how they’ve voted.

We want to start recording this, to make them more accessible to people viewing their representatives’ voting records.

Divisions, agreements, and votes by individual representatives can be annotated with additional information or a link. We can also record information about party voting instructions (the whip). 

Initially, we will be testing this out on specific votes, but our plan is to make this directly available to representatives to annotate their own votes, and have this information feed through to TheyWorkForYou. 

A hub of voting information

Over time, we will make more of the information in this platform more directly accessible on TheyWorkForYou to reach our wider audience. 

But our goal is generally to raise the standard and ease of analysis of parliamentary data for everyone. We make all our data available not just through an API, but as bulk downloads that make it easy for researchers and analysts to get the benefit of the work we’re doing to join up different data sources. 

Support our work

Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK. Over the last two decades we’ve shone  light on UK democracy by tracking MPs’ votes, publishing registers of interests, and sending email alerts—making sure those in power know the public is watching. Because we don’t have paywalls – charities, community groups, and everyday citizens can access unbiased political information without cost.

To keep the service running and continue to innovate and adapt to changing times, TheyWorkForYou relies on supporters. A monthly contribution of £5 (or what you can afford) helps cover core costs, safeguards its independence, and lets the team keep innovating for a fairer, more transparent political system.

If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or monthly donation.

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Header image: photo by Christian Boragine on Unsplash

The Council Climate Action Scorecards are helping climate officers across the UK to understand which elements of their path to Net Zero are working well, and which areas need improvement.

Marina Ebbage, Procurement Policy Officer at Norfolk County Council, explained the many ways in which Scorecards have helped the authority’s Climate Hub team in their work. She began by explaining how the council came to understand that a council taking climate action is one thing; while communicating that action is something else.

“We first came across the Scorecards following Climate Emergency UK’s assessment in 2021, and through the subsequent publicity which usefully highlighted the areas of work where our actions were not publicly communicated”, says Marina.  

“We’ve found the independent and external assessment of our council’s climate action not only allows us to systematically mark our progress in tackling climate change, but helps us to maintain and strengthen our accountability to the public. 

“The Scorecards have helped us strive for greater transparency and accessibility in our climate action efforts. Following that initial assessment, we realised that a lot of information about the work we were doing was not readily available to the public – hence our initial low score. 

“A key example is our Climate Action Plan, which draws all the information we are doing together on climate-related work and is now publicly available in one place on a dedicated part of the council’s website. Previously, information was in committee papers which are publicly available but often not easy to find, or knowledge was internal rather than shared publicly.

“Since then, we’ve brought together this information and evidence on the council website, making it available and accessible to Norfolk’s citizens and businesses, and indeed more widely.” 

The benefits go more widely than communication, though — they resonate through many aspects of the council’s work, as Marina explains: “We’ve found the Scorecards valuable as a way to check the comprehensiveness of our Action Plan, ensuring that we’re taking a well-rounded approach to addressing climate change. 

“At a senior management level, the Scorecards provide an overarching view of our climate action and comparative performance, which our Climate Board has integrated into its review process, using them to assess our actions and identify areas for improvement.”  

Talking of comparative performance, Marina adds, “We benchmark our performance against other councils. This comparison helps us identify areas where we need to improve and informs discussions with other councils on what further actions we can take.” 

And the bottom line? “Ultimately, the Scorecards have provided a useful means to review and benchmark our climate actions and provided a stimulus to improve the way we communicate what we do to the public.” 

That’s great to hear — and as we near the publication of the 2025 Scorecards, we were gratified to learn that Norfolk see their use into the future: “We plan to continue using the Scorecards as a monitoring tool, ensuring that our climate action remains ambitious, transparent, and effective.”

Thanks very much to Marina for sharing Norfolk County Council’s experience with the Scorecards, which are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

 

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Image: Nathan Nelson

Here’s an update on some upcoming TheyWorkForYou projects, and how you can help us make them better. 

TheyWorkForYou has also joined Bluesky – so follow us there!

Come to the launch of TheyWorkForYou Votes

TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. 

Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19 May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.

Crowdsource APPG information

We’re working to create a list of APPG memberships, but to do that we need to double check we’ve identified the APPGs that don’t have a website (so we can ask for the information directly, using Parliament’s rules). 

Here’s more information about that, and what we’ve learned about changes to the APPG register. 

Crowdsource MPs’ views on the Assisted Dying vote 

This Friday (17 May) the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill may have votes on its report stage (accepting/rejecting amendments made by committee), and its approval stage (third reading). If it passes approval, it will go to the House of Lords. If time runs out, amendment votes and the approval vote may move to another week. 

One of the things we want to do with our new TheyWorkForYou Votes sites is to collect when MPs give extra explanations or justifications of how they vote — and this is especially important in free votes such as this one, where parties do not instruct their MPs how to vote. 

If you see an MP making a post or public statement about their planned or actual vote on the overall bill, please add links to this spreadsheet. 

Follow us on Bluesky

TheyWorkForYou is now on BlueSky, where we’ll be posting about new data, analysis, and how to get the most out of TheyWorkForYou.  After the launch next week, we’ll be posting links to House of Commons vote analysis as they happen. 

While we’re talking about Bluesky, we’ve also added links from MPs’ pages on TheyWorkForYou to their Bluesky accounts (based on a list that PoliticsHome has put together).

If you use Bluesky, you can help us by following and raising the profile of our work. 

Donate

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 monthly donation. It makes a difference.

Header image: Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash

We’ve built a tool that helps us release a lot more useful information about All Party Parliamentary Groups, but we need humans to help us with membership lists. 

The new stuff

For each new APPG register (which are released approximately every six weeks), we now produce lists of new APPGs, removed APPGs and updated APPGs.

• New and removed APPGs

In the latest edition of the register (published 7 May) there were 32 new APPGs added, including Wine of Great Britain, Snooker and Hadrian’s Wall! In this edition, no APPGs were removed. 

That means the total number of APPGs now stands at 482, which is roughly the same as this time last year (535 in 13 May 2024 register). However, the total remains significantly lower than the 722 figure from March 2024 (the final register before new rules were introduced).

• Changes to APPG web pages

One of the tricky things about keeping track of APPGs is spotting what has changed. Who received money, which secretariats have new staff, which officers have resigned or changed? Our new tool does that for you. Here’s what we found when we compared the newest edition with the previous one:

• Several APPGs have lost an officer leaving them with only three officers, one short of the number required, according to the rules. In the case of the Pro-Life and the SME Housebuilders groups, this has also left the groups in breach of the requirement to have an officer from both the Government and Opposition parties. 
• Some groups have new organisations acting as their secretariats, whilst others have had changes to the people who are the public enquiry point at their secretariat. Devo Agency now provides secretariat services to four groups- Liverpool City Region, North East, Greater Manchester and Northern Culture. 
• Income: More than £70,000 of new financial benefits have been declared in this register, including £20,000 to the Engineering Group and £35,000 to the Environment Group.

As with the Register of Members’ Financial Interests part of this project, we’re coming up against two big problems: bad data and Parliament not enforcing its own rules. First we want complete datasets, but then we’re going to report our findings on the quality of this data. 

Over to you: help us with membership lists

Arguably the most important question about an APPG is: who’s in it? APPG membership lists help constituents and campaigners to understand which policy areas MPs are interested in, and they make it clearer who is benefitting from the resources given to groups as a whole. However, membership lists are not routinely made available.

The APPG pages on the Parliament site list the four officers, but not the wider membership. For a group to be established, it must have at least 20 members – so there’s at least 16 names we’re missing per group.

By the new rules, we should be able to ask for this information. But if groups publish their membership lists on their website, they don’t need to respond to our requests. If they don’t have a website or don’t publish their membership lists, then they do have to tell us.

So we need to a) find all the APPG websites, and b) see if they publish members lists before we can then C) ask the ones without published lists to send them to us.

Alex has built a tool which has got us most of the way there, but we need human brains to check.

We want to find out:

1. Are there websites we haven’t found?
2. Are there membership lists we haven’t found?

Right – over to you!

1. Open up the spreadsheet.
2. Choose a group, then click the link in column D (google_link), which sends you to a Google search result for the name of that group. We’re looking for independent websites run by the APPGs, not the listing on the Parliament page and not the listing on parallelparliament.co.uk.
3. If there is a website for that group, paste the URL of the website into column E (appg_website). For some groups we have found the website already, but we need you to do the next steps. 
4. If there’s no APPG website, please enter NONE for column E and column F (appg_members_page).
5. If there is an APPG website, the next thing we’re looking for is a membership list. If you can find one, enter the URL into column F. If you can’t find any membership info, enter NONE.
6. When you’ve finished, put ‘done’ in column G (review_status) and your initials in column I (reviewer_initials)

Thanks so much – this really does make a difference! No time but still want to help? Please consider donating so we can do more of this work. 

Photo by Frank on Unsplash

TheyWorkForYou Votes is mySociety’s new platform that provides more information than ever about how MPs (and other elected representatives) have voted. 

It’s launching on Monday 19th May, and we’re running an event where you can learn all about it. 

Votes in the UK’s Parliaments determine the laws that we all live by, and we want the information about who voted for what to be as accurate, easy to use and easy to understand as possible.

Whether you’re a data whizz who wants to get into the details, or a citizen who wants to know whether your MP has been paying attention to your emails, we think this new service will be helpful to you. Thanks to TheyWorkForYou Votes, we’ve been able to make improvements to our own websites (like TheyWorkForYou and the Local Intelligence Hub), and also, true to our open source principles, we’re making more data available in more formats that you can use and re-use for your own clever tools! 

Join us for our launch event at 12pm Monday 19th May to cover both why we publish votes, and what you can get out of the new platform.

Register on Eventbrite now to hear from:

• Louise Crow, mySociety’s Chief Exec 
• Dr Ben Worthy, Birkbeck University
• Alex Parsons & Julia Cushion, mySociety’s democracy team

See you in a couple of weeks!

 

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Image: UK Parliament (CC BY 2.0)