Here is our monthly round-up of news from the transparency organisations in the ATI Network. This month, we have updates from Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Hungary, Greece, South Africa and Latin America. What a global hum of transparency activity!

Access Info Europe have brought a joint legal challenge against the European Commission’s new internal access to documents rules, arguing that they violate the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), and Regulation 1049/2001. More here.

SPOON in the Netherlands have gained two new members of staff, saying, “These new shining stars are not full-time, but definitely promising. We’re really happy with this addition and feel like we’ve gained a superpower!”

Additionally, they completed a major piece of research this month, investigating eight recurring assumptions in the debate around FOI in the Netherlands. It was the first time someone took the time to actually look at the facts. “And what did we find? None of them are true.”

The results of this research were presented just two days later in a parliamentary debate about the Woo, the Dutch FOIA. Hopefully, this will help counter the looming restrictions on the right to transparency in the Netherlands.

SPOON also advised three journalists on how to hold to account the Minister of Agriculture, who unceremoniously intervened by phone during a court hearing. This case, including the intervention, is now with the judge.

Finally, they helped a local media outlet in Amsterdam with their objection to a FOI decision, with the result that instead of nothing being released, nearly everything became public. Great result!

Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska (SOWP) continued their intensive activities promoting transparency and protecting civic activism.

Together with Article 19, the Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, and the Polish Federation of NGOs, SOWP launched the anti-slapp.pl platform, which gathers comprehensive information about Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs).

This website offers access to legal analyses, reform recommendations, educational resources, and media coverage, thereby supporting journalists and activists in countering these threats.

SOWP also became heavily involved in the debate concerning the central register of public sector contracts. Their research across hundreds of local governments revealed that the Ministry of Finance’s proposed changes, raising the contract publication threshold from PLN 500 to PLN 10,000, would result in over 70% of contracts being undisclosed, undermining the effectiveness of the register.

They also re-ran their course “Hope(lessness) of Small and Large Municipalities,” enrolling 60 participants from across Poland, including councilors, local activists, village leaders, and public officials from 12 voivodeships. Over three months, participants will gain practical knowledge on civic oversight tools and local government operations.

Finally, SOWP also released two valuable podcast episodes this month: one addressing SLAPPs and another dedicated to successful actions aimed at protecting forests and local natural environments.

Handlingar, in Sweden, continue to apply for project funding and also looking into applying to be a part of incubators and accelerators. They want to focus efforts on getting Alaveteli much more well documented and easy to run and maintain and especially for the Pro features that can fund the public benefit free version of Alaveteli platforms. They’re looking to collaborate with all platforms and organisations in the FOIA networks! Get in touch at handlingar@okfn.se! 🙂

ImamoPravoZnati attended GONG’s annual Open Data Day conference on March 6 and 7. The event gathered institutional stakeholders, civil society organisations and data enthusiasts in a series of discussions and workshops, including one on digital tools for active citizens, where they presented their Alaveteli site Imamopravoznati.org.

KiMitTud, the Hungarian Alaveteli site, report: “In 2022, following an announcement, that the state had purchased N.S. Média és Vagyonkezelő Kft., the company that publishes the leading Hungarian sport newspaper (Nemzeti Sport), and designated a state-owned company as the entity responsible for exercising state ownership rights, Átlátszó submitted a Freedom of Information request for the contract related to the purchase of the Prime Minister’s favourite newspaper’s publishing company, but to no avail.

“They refused to release the document, claiming it was a trade secret.

“Since no such exemption applies to public funds and publicly relevant data, we took the matter to court. After more than two years of legal battles, we received the 33-page contract. The document revealed that the state had paid 3,479,756,000 forints in public funds for the publisher of Nemzeti Sport.” Read all about it here.

They continue, “Another court win from February, and quite an important one, as the court ruled in favour of the public in our case against a state railway company that hid its contract. The state railway’s maintenance subsidiary tried to withhold a 900 million HUF contract on the grounds that it “contains personal data that is subject to limited disclosure for GDPR purposes, as well as business secrets”. The court ruled, however, that as the company was managing public property and was therefore obliged to hand over the document to Átlátszó.” Read this story here.

Vouliwatch/Arthro5A The Greek organisation submitted two FOI requests this month. The first requested the publication of the members of the Ministerial Cabinet’s 2024 gift registry of (last May, following a successful appeal, VouliWatch had managed to get them to publish the registry for 2023).

The second requested information related to political parties and candidates’ finances from the Parliament’s audit committee, that is update on loans of each political party, election expenses of candidates and political parties, etc. The information in question, according to the law, should have been made public proactively.

Abrimos Info report that Mexico’s National Institute of Transparency for Access to Information and Personal Data Protection, INAI, is finally set to disappear this month, as secondary laws have already been approved.

Abrimos Info has secured a small rapid response grant to make a quick backup of parts of the national transparency platform, and continue to check on whether the data remains consistent after the switch.

They will be participating in the International Journalism Festival in Perugia in April, and participated in the OpenDataDay in México City. You can see a report on this here.

OpenUp ZA South African organisation OpenUp participated in the Africa & Middle East Open Government Partnership Regional Summit. “It was a lovely reconnection between our team and the stalwarts of the African FOI community in organisational partners like the Africa Freedom Of Information Centre, Uganda and the Media Rights Agenda, Nigeria”, they say.

mySociety: And finally, here at mySociety we have been working hard preparing for our TICTeC conference, after the whirlwind of the USA funding freezes – don’t forget to get your tickets!

We’ve also been drafting guidance around exceptions to the FOI act to support users from marginalised groups, and providing advice and support to two cohorts of people who are getting ready to submit their first requests.

 

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Image: Filip Mishevski

These are notes from a recent ‘fireside chat’ held by the ATI Network. For the sake of frank conversation and knowledge exchange, the session was not recorded, but you can read on for the main points.

Laurent and Xavier from the French Alaveteli site MaDada were talking about their learning process from working with Access Info on legal reform of FOI laws in France, as detailed in this post. This is part of the ATI Network project we’re working on across Europe to strengthen ties and skills between European Access to Information platforms.

The work began almost three years ago, when Rachel Hanna, Director of Access Info, and Helen Darbishire, the former Director, mapped all the FOI laws across Europe and organised them with high level recommendations and categorisation against an “ideal” law. From there, Access Info identified four different countries to work in depth with over the lifetime of the project to try and influence changes to laws or steps forward in campaigning.

France, with MaDada as its subject, was one of the countries identified, and there were a number of reasons for this which Laurent explained when we met: “The French context is difficult. The law is old, they tried to do some updating between 2016- 2018 with the internet in mind, but other than that it’s not changed since 1978.” However, one thing that has gained consensus from all politicians and lawmakers is that there is “constitutional value” to FOI in France, which is positive.

Laurent explained how Access Info dissected the law and broke it down into really distinct parts, separating which worked and which didn’t: “It was an interesting thing to see it dissected from the outside and get that perspective.”

They already knew that the law wasn’t a strong one, but viewing it through the eyes of people who work on improving these things really brought home how much work there is to do. For example, France did not sign the Tromso convention, despite being one of the key negotiators of the convention!

The law itself was revealed to be quite partial — there are a large amount of exclusions which are absolute, and no balance of interest is considered for release of information (like the public interest tests we have in the UK, etc). This is backwards compared to most of Europe. They do have an oversight body called the CADA, but apparently that body is weak both in resource and power.

Then, when it comes to implementation, this is even weaker than the law itself. And to compound this, barely anyone knows about the existence of the law either.

So, looking at Access Info’s three tenets of advocacy, lobbying and activism, MaDada set about defining what would be possible for them to work on.

Quickly, they realised that lobbying would be challenging. Right now France is in some political turmoil due to the dissolution of the parliament and subsequent failure of governments — they’re expecting another vote later this year, and this instability really puts a blocker in the way of discussing legal reform with politicians and getting legal change pushed through.

For the activism side of things, you need the movement behind you, and if not many people are aware of the law it’s hard to get together to campaign for this.

So advocacy was the route MaDada chose: promoting the law and increasing access. They had a slight chicken and egg issue with it. They desperately needed to find allies, but to find them, they needed to talk about FOI, and sell the law, which is tough when the implementation is so broken. They started down the training route and completed training with journalists which was positive, but also brought the realisation that this is a long-term endeavour.

They also tried publishing a report — which was met with silence. It’s disappointing but for the team it also felt expected, so they’re looking at the easy low hanging fruit for their next steps.

They came into this process with quite high expectations. They wanted to change something, propose new legislation or make a visible immediate difference, but actually going through the process they have realised that this is a long journey and they’ve taken the first step in a series of continuous action. Now their goal is to look back years from now and say “in 2025 we said this, and look at us now”. The first battle was won in 1789, with the drafting of the constitution, and it’s taken 200 years for it to become law, so MaDada have got to take a long view and set milestones which they can achieve and look back at and say how they’ve got there.

What are the key takeaways from working with Access Info?

A long view is needed, the law will never be “perfect” and will never get there immediately but small milestones and steps are the way to go. Also, you can really break this down and organise it like an engineering problem.

The transnational view was so helpful: they hadn’t realised how much it would be, but it’s good to have the feeling of “we’re in this together”. Finally, they made a list of what documents you can actually request in France and even they were surprised by how many it was!

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Image: Mathias Reding

If you’ve been holding off from booking your place at TICTeC until the full schedule is announced, this is your sign to act!

You can now see all the sessions, together with info on who’ll be presenting and what they’ll be talking about on the TICTeC 2025 page.

We’ve already introduced our amazing keynotes, Fernanda Campagnucci and Marietje Schaake. Now you can enjoy looking through the rest of the two days’ offerings, with a global spread of speakers from US, Nigeria, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Thailand and many, many more, representing organisations including  MIT GOV/LAB; Global Data Barometer, OpenUp South Africa, Manchester City Council, Delib, Code for Pakistan, Polis, Mzalendo Trust, Google, Tainan Sprout… and lots more.

Responding to our theme of pro-democracy technology, sessions cover topics as diverse as: tech for better elections; AI-powered deliberation; tracking climate finance to curb corruption; measuring the impact of Access to Information, and much, much more.

The world is going through ‘interesting times’ just now. TICTeC is all the more important in the face of these multiple threats, as we get together, forge new alliances and learn from one another. We’ll return home stronger, with new knowledge about the myriad ways in which civic tech can help us to preserve and further democracy.

Book your tickets for TICTeC 2025 now.

At the start of the month we made a major update to TheyWorkForYou coverage of registers of interests. 

This added enhanced registers of election donations and gifts (using volunteers to add more details and summaries to disclosures made after the last election) and a highlighted interests page. 

We have also released a major report looking into how the Register of Interests system in the UK Parliament can be improved. 

With this release we’ve shifted our focus away from Westminster, and are publishing the registers of interests for the Scottish Parliament, Senedd/Welsh Parliament, and Northern Ireland Assembly.

On Thursday 10th April we will be running an event to run through the data we publish how journalists and researchers can access and make use of it — you can sign up now. 

What’s new

Registers of interest on MSP/MS/MLA profile pages.

For members of the three devolved Parliaments and Assemblies, you can now see their current register of interests on their profile pages, and we have made the underlying data available as spreadsheets.

To find the registers for your representatives, the postcode search on TheyWorkForYou.com will show you your devolved and national representatives. 

For users in Wales, there is a Welsh language version of the site and the registers. 

As time goes on, our register comparison tool will start to be able to show the change in these interests over time. 

Register-wide view, showing what’s new

Each Parliament now has a register of interests page where you can see all entries in the current register. For Parliaments where we have this information (which is all of them except the Senedd) you can also choose to highlight entries that are new in the last few weeks. 

Devolved register of interests spreadsheets

We have also made all the information for the devolved registers of interest available as spreadsheet and raw data downloads (both per Parliament, and a single spreadsheet that covers all our current information). 

Like all our datasets, this is searchable through an online Datasette interface. Learn more about all the data we publish. 

Ministers’ gifts and hospitality

While we’re here, we’ve fixed a transparency problem in the Government’s gifts and hospitality registry for ministers. 

This has recently all been bought together on one gov.uk page, but in the form of dozens of files (many of which are empty) per month for different departments. 

We’re now republishing this as a single spreadsheet for gifts and hospitality that will update whenever there are new releases. This is similarly accessible through a Datasette explorer. 

This work fixes a flaw identified by Transparency International: 

The Government recently introduced their promised gifts and hospitality register but it’s not what most might consider a register, rather its a series of 20 odd CSVs on one webpage. Whilst its useful these are now published together, this approach still requires researchers and journalists to download and analyse dozens of files per month, making it difficult to track patterns or identify trends. mySociety have fortunately stepped in and addressed the shortcomings of the register by making this data set accessible and searchable.

This is one of those low-hanging fruits that took about an hour to make a big improvement. We think there’s a lot more we can do in this area to build on sometimes half-hearted publication processes to make the most of data that is released. 

Learn how to use our data

On Thursday 10th April we will be running an event to run through the data we publish how journalists and researchers can access and make use of it — you can sign up now. 

We’ll cover features on the website, spreadsheet downloads, data explorers and where the raw data can be found. 

Help us go further

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

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

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

The Council Climate Action Scorecards were recently mentioned in East Sussex County Council’s Written Questions (see question 12, on the council’s score for mitigation and adaptation). When we spot that the Scorecards are helping to inform councils’ conversations like this, we often make contact to find out more.

East Sussex were happy to fill us in with more details of how the Scorecards have helped them, and how they’ve been able to feed into the process with their own experiences:

“For local authorities, climate change is an evolving area of work with few statutory responsibilities. As a result, we can struggle to see what ‘good’ looks like, both for individual areas of work and holistically across the council. We’ve therefore found the Climate Action Scorecards useful to help identify areas where we’re doing well and those where we may need to pay more attention. The results of the Scorecards have been briefed to senior officers and elected members.

“Officers have also used the Scorecards as a research tool. When we review an area of work (or our Climate Emergency Strategy as a whole), one of the first questions we ask is what other local authorities are doing. The Scorecards provide an easy way to identify leaders in particular fields for further investigation.

“Finally, the marking process behind the Scorecards has encouraged us to look at our website and the information it provides on our climate change work. As a result, we’ve made changes to place important information front and centre and make the climate change pages easier to navigate.

“Climate Emergency UK have taken an inclusive approach to the Scorecards, and we’ve appreciated the opportunity to attend briefings and feedback on scoring through the right to reply. Through this, we’ve explained some of the issues faced by largely rural authorities such as East Sussex, for example in areas such as public transport.

“We’re pleased to see some of that feedback taken onboard in the latest round of scoring. We hope the CE UK will continue to evolve the scoring criteria to make the exercise even more useful for both local authorities and the public we serve.”

Thanks very much to East Sussex for giving us the view from a County Council. Scorecards are a joint project between Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Neil Mark Thomas

The Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which assesses local councils on their climate action, is only possible thanks to a large number of people who give up their time to volunteer. Their job is to source and analyse data from a variety of places, analysing more than 40 different possible pieces of climate action that councils should be taking on their path to Net Zero. 

It’s very worthwhile work, and the project has tangible results (just see our previous case studies) — which is obviously a great motivator for volunteers to get involved. But going through the process of training, and then the actual marking, has other benefits too: it adds to their knowledge, giving them a new, comprehensive overview of the climate sector and its many component parts.

We spoke to Scarlette, who volunteered as part of the 2025 cohort. Scarlette told us how she got involved, and how it took her down a new avenue.

“I’d been looking for a job in the environment sector following my Masters,” explains Scarlette, “and since this had been a long and slow process, I decided to look for volunteer opportunities to do alongside my temporary job. 

“I came across the advert for the Scorecards and felt it really aligned with my interests, particularly in the area of transport.”

While helping to assess councils’ action on transport, Scarlette came across a novel concept. Question 2.3 in the Scorecards asks “Does the council have enforced school streets across its area?”, with points awarded to councils with more than ten such streets year round, and bonus marks available for those with more than 30.

A school street is a road outside a school that is effectively closed to motorised traffic at drop-off and pick-up times. As the School Streets website notes, such schemes help tackle air pollution and road danger, encourage a healthier lifestyle and active travel to school for families, and lead to a better environment for everyone.

Once Scarlette found out about them, she was keen to get involved:

“I started volunteering as a School Street Marshal at a local school for a six month trial period. Prior to volunteering on the Scorecards I had never heard of the School Street initiative, and certainly wasn’t aware of any near me. The Scorecards led me to seek out this new role, and has encouraged me to get involved further with local campaigns.

“Volunteering with the Scorecards and the School Streets initiative has further cemented my passion for working in the environmental sector. I’ve been able to build on my academic knowledge within environmental law and have had the opportunity to gain more experience working in my local community with an environmental charity. I continue to look for further volunteering opportunities elsewhere to build on these experiences.”

We’re really glad to hear this, and wish Scarlette all the best in finding a permanent role in the environment sector: it certainly sounds like she’s acquiring some really relevant experience.

Scorecards are a joint project from Climate Emergency UK and mySociety.

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Image: Hammersmith and Fulham Council (CC by-nc-nd/2.0)

Our front-end designer Lucas Cumsille Montesinos highlights some of the work he’s been doing recently to make FixMyStreet and all integrated co-branded versions of the service running on FixMyStreet Pro more accessible – a crosspost from the SocietyWorks blog.

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Over the past year we have been collaborating with users of FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro to enhance the solution’s accessibility, making improvements to the user experience for people using assistive devices. 

One of our clients, Transport for London (TfL), shared an accessibility audit of their installation of FixMyStreet Pro with us. The document listed issues detailing information regarding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and some improvements that could be applied.

Here are some of the points they shared with us:

• Description of the issue.
• Level success criteria using the WCAG standard: Level A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest).
• A link to the page and location of the component where the issue can be found, along with instructions for replicating the problem if necessary.
• Status of the issue: Pass, Pass with comments, N/A, Fail.
• They also provided recommendations made by the auditor.

What improvements did we make?

The report from TfL allowed us to work on different areas of improvement, for example:

• Meaningful Sequence: We focused on making the order in which assistive devices present the information match the order in which the page is visually presented.
• Non-text Content: We hid purely decorative elements from screen readers, reducing unnecessary clutter for users when navigating the site.
• Info and Relationships: We improved and updated the role and attributes of some HTML elements so assistive devices can better understand the context and how to use those elements.
• Focus Order: When someone is tabbing through a website (using their keyboard instead of a mouse), everything should flow naturally and make sense. It’s making sure that when you hop from one thing to the next, the order matches how you’d understand the content – no jumping around to random spots that leave you scratching your head.

What did we learn?

• Include the WCAG conformance level (from A to AAA), where level A is the minimum. Ideally, you would like the website you are working on to comply with all Level AA success criteria. Using the conformance level makes it easier for you to prioritise which issues should be tackled first and which ones can be done later.
• Some issues won’t require a lot of time to fix. This can be your second factor when it comes to prioritising which improvements to make first. For example, easy fixes like adding aria-labels or increasing the contrast between the text and the background colour can be done in little time and greatly improves the user experience of your website.
• If you find an accessibility issue, always try to provide as much detail as possible, especially if someone else will be doing the work to fix it. The TfL document made solving the issues much faster and minimised any back-and-forth. Even sharing which browser you were using when experiencing the error can make a difference.
• One of the most interesting experiences was solving issues that didn’t seem like an issue (at the time), but once you deprive yourself of literally looking at the screen and using an assistive device, then the problem starts making sense. For example, the action of a button can make sense when you are looking at the screen and the elements that are surrounding it, but if you can’t see the context, the elements around the button, then the button might not make much sense. Adding further instructions like an aria-label that provide the context that the eyes are missing can help users understand where they are and what they can do much better.
• Finally, it is a great exercise to be more conscious when designing a website. Yes, a certain text, link, or button colour can look great, but can it be read easily? What about colourblind users? You can install plugins in your browser to help you see the page the way they would see it.

Our accessibility improvements were rolled out to the national FixMyStreet site and all co-branded FixMyStreet Pro sites. However it is worth noting that FixMyStreet Pro is designed to accommodate the branding and styling of each authority that uses it, which can mean that some of our accessible default settings are overridden. This is why we always recommend that authorities carry out an accessibility audit on their own services.

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Thanks for sharing, Lucas!

Read more about how we design accessible digital services, or browse more posts from the SocietyWorks team.

Last year we undertook a major overhaul of our approach to the voting record summaries on TheyWorkForYou. This was aimed at creating a sharper and clearer throughline to the summaries, supported by updated explanations of parliamentary voting.

We have just made the first update to our voting summaries of the new Parliament, with the information now covering votes up to the end of 2024.

Our goal is for these updates to be at least quarterly: this update has been delayed in part because we have been doing work on the underlying infrastructure.

In April we will launch a new votes explorer website, which is our replacement for the Public Whip website. This includes a new range of tools and analysis we’ve been using to understand votes, and is part of our general goal of creating better public information and understanding about parliamentary processes.

For more on what we’re doing over the next few months, see our list of upcoming new features — or subscribe to our mailing list to hear about updates.

You can view summaries for your MP on TheyWorkForYou.com – where you can also view registers of interest, and sign up for email alerts when your MP speaks.

What we’ve changed

We’ve added new policy lines for:

• Increasing windfall tax on oil and gas
• Increasing stamp duty
• Reducing minimum detention requirement before release from custody.
• Means-testing/removing universality on winter fuel payments for pensioners
• Creating a publicly owned energy investment company (Great British Energy)
• Employment rights
• Raising Capital Gains tax

And added votes to these existing policy lines:

• Assisted Dying
• Environmental Water Quality
• Publicly Owned Railways
• Tougher On Illegal Immigration
• An Elected House Of Lords
• Removing Hereditary Peers From The House Of Lords
• Proportional Representation When Electing MPs
• Taxes On Alcoholic Drinks

We have retired:

• Lowering Capital Gains Tax (this has been replaced by a raising Capital Gains tax, which is more consistent with our other policies around taxes).

Additional notes

Greater range of new policies

Previously we’ve had a conservative approach to adding new policies, as in doing so created a mix of old and recent votes for long-standing MPs, making their positions in the present moment harder to understand.

Our new technical approach calculates voting summaries for the current Parliament as well as an ‘all time’ calculation. Although this is not yet visible in TheyWorkForYou, we are in general adding a higher number of new policy lines in anticipation of being able to show both (we want to reflect ‘here are live issues’ but also just because a vote was a long time ago doesn’t mean it’s not still important).

Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill

There is an existing policy line that we have added the second reading vote to.

Because what is being voted on can be become clearer after revisions between the second reading vote and third reading vote, we prefer to include third reading votes if voting patterns are significantly different. We might sometimes include both when there’s not much difference (so we cover MPs who might be absent from either).

As a high profile vote it felt like it would be a notable absence not to include the vote as of this stage. Our expectation is that when the third reading vote happens, we may retrospectively downgrade the second reading and lead with the final vote being a clearer indication of where MPs stand at this stage.

Generally, the vote broke down mostly along party lines, but with a significant minority of Labour MPs voting against the second reading. As we class a significant difference from the party as anything more extreme than a 60/40 split (which this just was for Labour MPs), a number of MPs now have this highlighted on their voting record page as a new significant policy.

We also note that a lot of MPs made public comments about the reasons for their vote (part of a wider trend of greater visibility of votes leading to more public justification).As part of our new votes site we want to make it easier to collect and share comments that MPs make publicly about their voting.

Renters’ rights

The Renters’ Rights Act is not included in this round, as the third reading was in January 2025. The second reading passed by consent, but with a reasoned amendment beforehand. As such:

• It is inaccurate to say consent reflected cross party agreement: an attempt to stop the bill immediately preceded it.
• It would be confusing to present the only vote as the reasoned amendment.
• We are waiting for the Third Reading before including that and the reasoned amendment as scoring votes.

This will be part of the next release.

Ten minute rule bills

By focusing on votes affecting parliamentary powers, we exclude a range of votes that could never be impactful, but ten minute rule bills are in an ambiguous position.

In principle, as seen with the vote on proportional representation (which won, but possibly as an oversight), they are a vote to start the process of legislation. However, even when this vote is won, since parliamentary time is not allocated, it does not go anywhere.

Our policy for the moment is to continue to include ten minute rule bills where we have existing policy lines.

Anything we’ve missed

We have a reporting form to highlight votes that should be added/are incorrectly in a policy, or a substantial policy line we are missing. We will review responses for urgent problems, and otherwise feed into the periodic updates.

What else we’ve been working on

Last week we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

Over the next few months we’ll be making more improvements to our registers of interest, voting records, and political monitoring.

If you would like to support our work – please consider donating.

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Paul Buffington on Unsplash.

Over the next few months we’re making some major updates to TheyWorkForYou improving our coverage of registers of interests, votes, and the email alerts system.

If you’d like to be updated as things are released, please sign up to our newsletter.

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What do you value about TheyWorkForYou and our democracy work?

We want to understand what you value about our work, to better shape our plans. If you’d like to help us out, please take our supporters survey.

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March

March is Register of Interests month.

At the start of the month we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.

We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.

You can rewatch the launch event here.

Later in the month, we’ll be adding the Registers of Interests for the UK’s other parliaments to TheyWorkForYou and creating spreadsheet downloads.

April

April is Votes month.

We will be launching our new votes site to provide better resources on understanding parliamentary voting.

This new approach builds on the official data to provide:

• Automated party breakdown analysis and party alignment (“rebelliousness”) stats.
• Quick descriptions of parliamentary dynamics (which side proposed, strength of conflict) powered by a clustering approach.
• Links to motions that clarify what is being voted on (and power some additional analysis of motions)
• Detecting ‘agreements/consents’ when decisions are made without a vote.
• Tools to supplement official data with annotations (by division, or by MP’s vote) and recording of whip reports.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.

May

May is Monitoring month.

A major use of TheyWorkForYou is as a political monitoring tool, helping civil society keep up to date with Parliament, and keeping information moving around Parliament and government itself.

We have been working on a set of changes and guidance to make it much easier to use TheyWorkForYou to monitor areas you care about, helping you set up better alerts with a wider range of keywords, and manage a wider range of alerts.

As part of this, we want to improve our coverage of APPGs — building on our earlier lessons about how best to gather information.

Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.

June

June is TICTeC!

Our global pro democracy tech/civic tech conference will be held in Mechelen & online on June 10-11th, and we’re excited to share our work with, and learn from, fellow pro-democracy technologists and thinkers from around the world.

Full schedule to be announced soon, but our keynote speakers are:

• Marietje Schaake – former Member of the European Parliament, Fellow at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center and the Institute for Human-Centered AI, columnist for the Financial Times and author of The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley – read more about what Marietje will bring to TICTeC 2025 here
• Fernanda Campagnucci – Executive Director of InternetLab, global specialist in data governance, digital transformation, and open government. Read more about Fernanda and TICTeC 2025 here.

Learn more about we mean by pro democracy tech, and buy tickets now!

 

Second half of 2025

In the second half of the year, we’ll be overhauling the WriteToThem experience, with improved guidance, and the addition of questions to help us build a better systematic picture of what’s important to people in different areas, and when writing to different kinds of representatives.

We will also be revisiting TheyWorkForYou’s annotations feature, to explore ways we can make important parliamentary debates more understandable through better glossaries, annotations and explanations, either working alone or in partnership with other organisations.

We can make a difference together

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

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

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

If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.

Image: Matt Foxx on Unsplash.

February has been a whirlwind but we’re back deep in TICTeC organisation and looking forward to the sunny summer sun in Belgium in June. Let’s see what the network have been up to this month!

FragDenStaat: are promoting the use of FOI to counter the activities and disinformation spread by the far right movement in Germany

mySociety: have been presenting their work at various UK conferences, working on funding bids, writing documentation to support people who receive exemptions around commercial interest protection and helping organisations working with marginalised groups in the UK. 

Access Info Europe: and MaDada (OKF France) in France created recommendations on how to improve the national access to documents law to align it with international standards (see here). Open Knowledge France sent the recommendations to the French government calling for the signature and ratification of the Tromsø Convention, a step strongly recommended by GRECO in its Fifth Evaluation Report on France (see here);

SPOON: Old EU ruling, new possibilities!

 The highest court on public law in the Netherlands used on an ‘old’ European Court of Justice Fish Legal ruling from 2013 – about an information request from a British NGO to several water companies – to rule that certain kind of environmental information can be requested from (semi) private enterprises on which the state has ‘decisive influence’. This applies to environmental information that is related to ‘public responsibilities or functions concerning the environment’ or ‘public services related to the environment’ where this decisive influence exists in a way that the enterprise cannot carry out its environmental tasks ‘in a genuinely autonomous manner’.

 This could mean that, for example, water quality measurements conducted by or on behalf of water companies can be requested. Also companies such as KLM, Schiphol, Gasunie, the Port of Rotterdam, and Urenco where this kind of decisive influence exists. If the Port of Rotterdam or Schiphol checks whether ships or airplanes comply with energy efficiency and emission regulations, are they performing an environmental task? The ruling by the Council of State does not provide clear guidance on this question, but it is certainly worth a try.

Save our right to ask for government information 

On Thursday, February 13, Tim, on behalf of SPOON and investigative journalists, was asked to participate in a roundtable discussion in the House of Representatives to inform Members of Parliament about the practice of the Dutch Open Government Act. Along with other representatives from journalism he advocated for preventing any restriction on our right to ask for government information, which is what government authorities otherwise might propose as a solution to the poor implementation of the law.

Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska: After nearly two years of legal battles (which, in our circumstances, is relatively fast), we have managed to compile information from all Regional Directorates of State Forests regarding their expenditures on promotion and media advertisements in 2022. After four years, two court rulings in our favor, and a change of government along the way, the Ministry of National Defense has finally responded to our request regarding the author of a certain opinion posted by the ministry’s official profile on a popular social media platform—unfortunately, the ministry does not know.

We continue our advocacy efforts to repeal Article 212 of the Penal Code, which, due to the disproportionate severity of its penalties, significantly restricts freedom of speech in Poland.

We have sent information requests to all 135 public universities in Poland regarding the holding of multiple positions by university authorities (potential conflicts of interest), purchases and vehicle usage policies, salaries of university authorities, legal proceedings, and procedures for handling complaints (such as those related to mobbing, discrimination, etc.).

Other requests aim to determine how the Ministry of Justice is implementing the European Commission’s recommendations on combating SLAPPs and what exactly is happening within the Polish Hunting Association following recent revelations of serious irregularities.

Additionally, requests have been submitted for information on recent government meetings with representatives of various international corporations (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, TikTok, Huawei, Uber) and their outcomes (e.g., the content of signed agreements).

InfoProVsechny:

Ma Dada: Our focus has been on looking for funding, as we are reaching the end of our current grant. We are trying to build bridges across borders, mostly in the EU for now, as we think it’s our best chance at doing more than just surviving.

Handlingar: We are looking into using the technical setup from Madada.fr with Ansible technology. We want to gather the Alaveteli network to develop the Alaveteli platform and make it be possible to run without simple flaws or downtime – and without dependence on MySociety or any specific supplier or developer. We believe the time has come for Alaveteli to become a well-organized open source project, including having better documentation, regular release cycles, and a 5 minute process to setup a fully functioning Alaveteli platform in a new country or jurisdiction. All according to best practices within open source software development such as the OpenSource.guide from GitHub. We want to do great work together with MySociety, the Alaveteli network and FOIA community to get funding for development in order to make the Alaveteli software simpler to run, safer to run, easier to maintain and easier to customize. All without issues and dependence on MySociety. We want to reduce the burden on us, our network friends and on MySociety and increase all our chances for collaboration and success with Alaveteli – and of course the Right to Know.

ImamoPravoZnati: Gong is continuing its national “FOI tour”, providing training on strategic usage of FOI for civil society organisations. In February, a workshop was held in Split, with preparations underway for Pula and Karlovac. 

Abrimos Info:  As the INAI is sunsetting we are doing an automated distributed backup of a few of the data files that we can access via a collaborative effort across the Mexican civil society. We are asking for a rapid response fund for this work. The secondary laws creating the new “Transparencia para el Pueblo” institution have been submitted and are on the fast track to be approved. We have promoted a press release demanding changes. A second release today: https://x.com/article19mxca/status/1896363257008652507

We will be presenting on Pidala.info at Open Data Day in Mexico on March 1st.  And of course we will be participating and talking about these efforts at TICTeC 2025. 

OpenUp ZA: OpenUp has been collaborating with the KiMitTud team to co-develop impact measures and reports for the Hungarian FOI platform ahead of the TicTec festival in June!

CITAD: In our efforts to promote protection of digital rights in Nigeria, we are holding a two-day training for judges and lawyers on prosecuting and adjudicating on human rights abuses. The training will be held from 10-11 in Abuja and then 17-18 in Lagos. This would be followed by a series of advocacy meetings with  members of the National Assembly whose objective is to entrenched respect and protection for digital rights in the country. .