1. This is not just any Impact Report…

    …this is mySociety’s 20th anniversary Impact Report!

    Cover of mySociety's 20th anniversary impact reportThis has been a very special year – mySociety’s 20th anniversary.

    So we haven’t just put together our usual review of the past twelve months: this Impact Report is a special edition, covering our entire history since 2003.

    We look back at our beginnings as a small group of determined coders, and trace our history through the changes our services have made, here in the UK and across the world.

    Discover daring acts of (data) piracy, and learn which vandalised phone box sparked the idea for FixMyStreet. Find out how our “cheap and cheerful open web technology” has been instrumental in helping citizens tackle vital issues, from the climate emergency to human trafficking.

    It’s quite the read. Sit back, grab a mince pie if you have one to hand…and enjoy! Access the Anniversary Impact report here (web), or enjoy the print-faithful PDF version, or plain text and epub formats.

    And if you’re interested in our activity on the SocietyWorks side, don’t miss their own, just as engrossing, annual report: you can read that here.

  2. How we improved CAPE this year

    CAPE is our data-packed website that makes it easier for everyone to track and improve local action on climate change, built in collaboration with Climate Emergency UK.

    When CAPE launched, it was basically a list of councils’ climate action plans — but we’ve continued to make regular improvements and additions, and it’s better, and more useful, than ever.

    If you’re a council officer with climate duties; a researcher looking for climate data; an activist needing facts to back up your climate campaign; or simply an interested citizen, you’ll find some truly invaluable facts and figures on CAPE.

    And if you haven’t visited for a while, you’re in for a surprise. Here’s what we’ve added this year:

    Improved search

    Search results for 'flooding' - these include terms such as 'drainage' and 'river'

    Now you don’t need to think of all the different ways that councils might have described the concept you’re looking for. We’ve integrated machine learning into the search function, to help surface your search term even in documents that use different words for the same concept. Interested to know more? We wrote it up in detail here

    Updated for new councils

    In April, a set of UK local authorities was abolished and merged into new unitary authorities.  When this happens, we do work to update the data that CAPE depends on. You can make use of it too!

    We’ve updated:

    And this has all fed back into CAPE to make changes of local government structure transparent in the site. 

    Local polling

    We wanted to make it easier to see where there is support for climate action, so we took a few sets of MRP polling on people’s attitudes to net zero and energy sources and converted it from per-constituency to per-local council.

    For each local authority (except in Northern Ireland) – see Croydon, for example – you can now see estimates for support for net zero (even when it is described as expensive), and for different kinds of renewable energy project.

    Support for net zero in Croydon

    Not sure what MRP polling is? We wrote something up about that

    Climate Assemblies

    Local climate assemblies at CAPEIn 2019, we were part of the UK-wide Climate Assembly, and we’ve kept an interest in citizens assemblies about climate change. There’s been one held for the whole of Scotland, and more widely we’ve found 17 (so far) held by local authorities across the UK.

    We’ve uploaded the final reports of those assemblies into CAPE. It is now easy to see which authorities have held climate assemblies, and to search the results of those assemblies. Find all this at cape.mysociety.org/assemblies.

    Hundreds of new documents have a fresh coat of paint

    Thanks to people telling us about new plans, and us conducting an extensive search for new documents across council domains, we’ve updated and added hundreds of new documents to councils’ pages. 

    With all that content, we’ve gone back and tidied up the design of our council page layout, giving us more space to add explainers and summaries to each section. Why not take a look for your area?

    Council Climate Action Scorecards

    Let’s not forget that while all this activity has taken place on CAPE, we were also helping Climate Emergency UK with the Council Climate Action Scorecards. At the time of their launch in October, we wrote about the part we played in building the site, wrangling the data, advising on the methodology and building a scoring interface.

    The result of all this is, of course, that whatever your climate interests – be you council staff, researcher, journalist, campaigner or interested member of the public – you can dive in to any council’s page to see how they’re doing against several markers of climate action.

    Since launch there has also been the significant addition of Question Pages, allowing a never before seen view of how each council scores on every individual action point. Julia wrote about that in detail, in this post.


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  3. New feature! Scorecards Question Pages unlock hundreds of brand new datasets

    This year’s Council Climate Action Scorecards involved thousands of hours of volunteer time, hundreds of FOI requests and a lot of scrolling through local authority websites. Now we’re excited to launch a brand new filtering tool that lets you unlock the value of all of this amazing new data: question pages

    These individual pages allow anyone — from campaigners to council officers — to unlock the most interesting data from the Scorecards. You can now view a dedicated page for each question, which is itself a brand new and comprehensive dataset of local authority action. This will filter by type, rank all the councils from highest to lowest scoring, show the evidence for why councils scored point(s), and will tell you how many councils achieved each of the possible available marks.

    Find these pages by clicking through from the question you’re interested in from any council’s page.

    screenshot of a question page on Scorecards - Does the council use peat free compost or soil in all landscaping and horticulture?

    This allows anyone to:

    • Get a sense of where best practice is happening in the country, by policy area
    • Share examples of best practice, so that more councils can more easily access the policy solutions they need
    • Evaluate trends in where local authority action is succeeding or stalling across the country.
    List of councils with their scores for the question 'Does the council use peat free compost or soil in all landscaping and horticulture?'

    Not sure where to start? Below, we’ve pulled out three really interesting brand new datasets. And, because these illustrate some of the gaps that we identified in our Fragmented Data report, we hope they’ll show just how useful this kind of nationwide picture would be if they were being published as standard.

    3.1 Is the council’s area wide net zero target a strategic objective of the Local Plan?

    socrecards question page: Is the council's area wide net zero target a strategic objective of the Local Plan?Local Plans are the key piece of local authority policy that guide how a council will run its operations. We want to see climate action and net zero move beyond siloed ‘Climate plans’ and into day-to-day local planning. On Scorecards, councils scored the one available point for this question if the Local Plan included reaching net zero as a strategic objective, and if the council’s net zero target date is a) area wide and b) also found within the Plan. See this question page here.

    Through volunteer research, we now know:

    • 44 out of 186 single tier councils got full marks for this question.
    • 31 out of 181 district councils got full marks for this question.
    • 0 out of 24 county councils got full marks for this question.
    • 0 out of 11 Northern Ireland councils got full marks for this question.

    This is a great example of something you can ask your local council to do that doesn’t cost them any money, but will make a huge difference to day-to-day climate policy in your local area. Using the questions page, we can highlight councils of the same type that score well, in order to surface the evidence, allowing them to share it as best practice.  

    In this case, you may wish to share Wakefield’s recent local plan with your council

    4.3a Is the council reporting on its own greenhouse gas emissions?

    Scorecards question page: Is the council reporting on its own greenhouse gas emissions?Our Fragmented Data report details why we think it would be useful for central government to support local government in compulsory and collaborative reporting standards for local councils, especially on climate action. We can’t know the progress made and the progress yet to happen without better data – and the Scorecards project would certainly be a lot easier if we had more data published in more useful formats! See this question page here.

    A council got a point on this question if it is reporting its own emissions and fulfils all of the following:

    • the council states whether they are using the Environmental Reporting Guidelines from Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), the GCoM Common Reporting Framework (CRF), the Greenhouse Gas Accounting Tool (from the LGA), the Greenhouse Gas Protocol for Cities (Community Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventories) or for Corporate Standards to develop their inventory.
    • the inventory covers a continuous period of 12 months, either a calendar year or a financial year
    • there is data from 2019 and 2021 (or the financial year 2021/22)
    • the council is measuring their own scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions

    Thanks to hundreds of hours of volunteer time, we now know:

    • 69 out of 186 single tier councils got full marks for this question.
    • 48 out of 181 district councils got full marks for this question.
    • 11 out of 24 county councils got full marks for this question.
    • 1/11 Northern Ireland councils got full marks for this question.

    We have lots more on why climate data is so essential, and the sorts of climate data we need, in this blog post

    If you’d like to share best practice with your council, take a look at Westminster City Council. You may also want to encourage your council to participate in the CDP reporting programme, a brilliantly in-depth reporting framework that is used across the globe, and published in the open.

    6.3 Has the council lobbied the government for climate action?

    scorecards question page - has the ouncil lobbied the government for climate action?This is such an interesting question — the results of which have been uncovered through FOI  — because it gets at the often-obscured links between local and national climate action. Local authorities are undoubtedly limited in their ability to act by budgets and resources handed down by national government, but they too have a voice in asking national government to prioritise climate spending. See this question page here.

    Councils got a point in this question if they:

    •  sent a letter or had a meeting with national or devolved governments calling for the government to take further action, 
    • or asked for councils to receive more funding, powers and climate resources to take climate action.

    Through FOI requests sent via WhatDoTheyKnow, we know:

    • 86 out of 186 single tier councils got full marks for this question.
    • 59 out of 181 district councils got full marks for this question.
    • 11 out of 24 county councils got full marks for this question.
    • 5 out of 11 Northern Ireland councils got full marks for this question.

    Across the board in this question, about half of councils have lobbied national government for climate action, with district councils lagging slightly behind. 

    Once again, this is an example of an council action which requires no additional cost and very little resources. If you’d like to email your council to ask them to start lobbying national government, or to do more, you could point to the great example from Chorley Council.


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    Image: RMHare (CC by-sa/4.0)

  4. Freedom of Information to support social change

    Rethinking our approach to marginalised communities

    Read our new report
    ‘Using Access to Information to support social change’

    Freedom of information is for everyone: that’s something we believe, and something we’re taking concrete steps to ensure.

    As we celebrate the millionth public FOI request on WhatDoTheyKnow, it’s important to consider how we can ensure the next million can benefit a broader range of people to do more towards social justice.

    Historically our userbase has skewed towards those who already hold privilege, with white, well-educated, affluent males most represented across all our UK services. This demographic has fluctuated a little over time, but not as considerably as we would like.

    Cover of mySociety's report Using Access to Information to support social change by Jen BramleyThanks to a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, we are taking proactive steps to address this imbalance, with the primary aim of supporting marginalised groups in using FOI as one of their tools for social change. 

    Jen Bramley, our Partnerships Manager, is leading on a programme to firstly research into such groups’ needs and their perception of FOI; and then identify and deliver the training that will be most effective in giving them the hands-on skills required to include FOI into their campaigning toolkits.

    The first part of that activity is completed. The research confirmed some perhaps predictable points around making the very concept of FOI clearer to these communities who may not have come across the term before; and ensuring that the language and interfaces on WhatDoTheyKnow are made more accessible.

    But there were other learnings that we would have come to without speaking directly to our subjects. For example, we heard that some communities’ longstanding mistrust of authority extends to the idea of having any interaction with them, even within the rights conferred by the FOI Act; and that people in more deprived demographics are more likely to access the internet via mobile phone, making it much harder to access and understand dense documents that might have been released — and all the more so when they are in bulk.

    Finally, there is a desire to see more positive accounts of people using FOI without the subject having to jump over several barriers to get the information they required. While we may see such stories as an inspiring narrative encouraging us not to give up, it’s also understandable that to people approaching FOI for the first time, such stories could seem offputting and unattainable.

    We’ll be using everything we learned to inform future development on WhatDoTheyKnow. These improvements will be possible thanks to the time and experience generously given by our interviewees.

    You can read the full report here.


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  5. Climate monthnotes: November 2023

    Following their launch in October, we have continued to improve the Council Climate Action Scorecards site — for example, the scores for all councils on any one question can now be seen on one page (like this). Find these pages from any individual council’s page, or via the section pages

    Meanwhile, CE UK have continued to network, influence and promote the site and their work around the Action Scorecards. They have created significant media interest, especially at the local level (just where it’s needed!) and also attracted coverage from ITV, the Independent, and specialist press such as LGPlus. They’ve been invited to speak to a variety of audiences from an LGA event to Mobility Ways. Having already trained up 110 local residents/campaigners since the launch, the last of CE UK’s How to use the Council Climate Action Scorecards’ training sessions will run today (7th Dec) at 5.30pm, and bring people together to learn about how to use the Scorecards in their campaigning, and network with others doing the same.

    A key learning point from CAPE and our Scorecards work has been to see just how fragmented the data around local authorities’ climate planning and action is, and how much of a barrier this is to data transparency and therefore to improvement: it can be highly ineffective, and a waste of (paid) people’s time, to compare metaphorical apples and pears.

    As such, this month we were proud to run an event focused on Fragmented Data, with support from our partners in the Blueprint Coalition. Julia Cushion, our Policy & Advocacy Manager, chaired the webinar which saw Anna Powell-Smith introduce key findings of our report Unlocking the value of fragmented public data, while a variety of speakers provided perspectives around the potential and practical application of de-fragmenting data and answer questions from a 80+ strong virtual audience.

    It was encouraging to see influential people grasping the significance of what might be seen as a bit of a dry, obscure issue to the untrained eye. This, we hope, is just the beginning of this story and I suspect we’ll see it move into the mainstream over the next few months / years, with more ‘next steps’ from Julia and our Senior Researcher, Alex, sooner. The recording is available here (with subtitles) on our YouTube channel.

    We are a month closer to launching the Local Intelligence Hub (LIH) to the public (in early 2024) with our partners the Climate Coalition. November saw more groundwork going into this, with new datasets uploaded, the ‘new constituencies’ work continuing, and functionalities enabled. Our developer Struan moved across from handling the Scorecards’ site development to double our developer capacity on LIH for the next while, and give our other developer, Alexander, someone to work alongside. Planning has also ramped up beyond the site itself, including around communications, and how it fits into the Climate Coalition’s broader plans for 2024.

    Partnership has been a solid theme for mySociety’s Climate team from the word go, but it has been particularly noticeable this month with a number of the team scoping out, listening and learning from each other and potential partners to help bring our Neighbourhood Warmth plans together. 

    As we prepare for a retrospective on our latest year in partnership with CE UK, I find myself reflecting on how vital trust, mutual respect, care and good will are for enabling people to achieve, as is learning to recognise and rise above one’s ego. Achieving with others can also be, in my experience, deeply rewarding, as we join with the best of others to achieve more than we could alone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work in a team, and with partners, who work hard to put the needs of the planet, society and the sector before themselves.

     

    Image: Hannah Domsic

  6. What’s on WhatDoTheyKnow?

    In celebration of our millionth public FOI request on WhatDoTheyKnow, we’ve been examining many aspects of the service — and now we come to that huge archive of released information, built up by members of the public asking for what they wanted, and receiving data in response.

    So, what’s in there?

    The thing is, we don’t know. 

    Well, that’s not to say we have no idea: of course we do occasionally look at what’s being requested and released via WhatDoTheyKnow. When we find something interesting, we often tweet about it. But with requests being submitted at an ever-increasing rate, there’s no way that we can inspect every single one.

    We do, however, have some thoughts about what you can find in the massive public archive that is WhatDoTheyKnow, and it’s not just ‘information that people have asked for’. The meta-benefit of having a big corpus like this free and online is that it provides a lens for examining our own society.

    So for example, some of the information just waiting to be analysed by curious researchers, linguists or historians include:

    What sort of things people want to know Machine learning technology can now allow a researcher to take a huge dataset like WhatDoTheyKnow’s million public requests, and analyse it. What topics do the most people ask about, which authorities do they make what type of requests to, which type of wording is most likely to gain a response, and all sorts of other questions are just waiting to be answered — should a curious enough researcher want to get their teeth into it.

    And incidentally – if an authority analyses the requests made to it over the years, it would also find useful intel on what data it could be publishing proactively, so people don’t even have to submit an FOI request, and they don’t have to expend effort responding to them.

    Lessons about how language changes When you have a million questions, and a vast number of responses from authorities, you can start to understand shifts in our language. For example: when did information officers start including pronouns in their signatures? That may not be relevant to the information being released, but it still marks a significant change in social history. And when did society settle on ‘covid’ rather than ‘coronavirus’, ‘Brexit’ rather than ‘leaving the EU’? We reckon there’s a huge value to any linguist or historian who takes a look.

    Widely useful information There’s at least one type of information that we know is useful to hundreds of people every year: the acceptance rates at various universities. 

    Every year, prospective students start to worry about their chance of getting into their preferred institution; and every year (usually on Reddit) they are pointed towards previous releases showing the data; or, where it doesn’t exist, advised to put in their own request for it.

    That’s just one example of how information, once published, has a spread far beyond the single person who requested it. There are many more, not least in Wikipedia citations.

    When contracts are due for renewal Another common use of the FOI Act is by companies or startups looking for commercial information — such as when a contract is up for renewal so they can submit a tender; or whether certain authorities have a need for the product they’re developing.

    A request sent across a number of authorities in the area, or even across the country, can be a very efficient source of intel. 

    Your esoteric pet subject What are you into? Politics?, Public transport? Cookery, bats, or seagulls perhaps? Whatever it is, you can search WhatDoTheyKnow and see if anyone’s uncovered interesting information about it. 

    If not, maybe you’ll think of something you’d like to know — and don’t forget you can set up an alert, so you’ll receive an email whenever someone mentions your chosen keyword in a future request or response.

    What authorities don’t actually have a record of. We blogged a while back about what it means when your request comes back as ‘information not held’. Sometimes this can be as revealing as the information itself.

    Datasets behind news stories. When journalists or researchers use WhatDoTheyKnow or WhatDoTheyKnow Pro to gather data that helps them break a story or write a paper, we always encourage them to link their article or report back to the responses on the site. Because, yes, they’ve found one story, but there may be more to discover in there, and there are always people motivated enough to look. Equally, we’ll link back from the site to their story – look out for the ‘in the news’ section in the right hand column of every request page.

    These are just a few examples of the riches to be found in plain view on WhatDoTheyKnow. If it wasn’t for the UK’s Freedom of Information Act, and for WhatDoTheyKnow’s ability to make information truly free, none of this would be available. But it is, and that’s great, so why not dive into the search bar and see what you can find?

    Tomorrow, in the final post of this series, we’ll be looking at what we’re doing to bring WhatDoTheyKnow’s benefits to the communities that need them most.

     

    Image: Fabio

  7. You can use WhatDoTheyKnow for the good of the climate

    As we look back on a million public requests, we’re also looking to the future and how WhatDoTheyKnow might be leveraged for the most important issue of our generation — the climate.

    The climate emergency is a “wicked problem,” that is to say that it is a challenge with incomplete, contradictory, and often changing requirements. When you add misinformation into the mix, with politically-driven narratives that seek to derail progress (indeed, question the need for progress), it is easy to see why the release of factual information might be a vital tool in our journey to decarbonisation.

    There is, as it happens, a legal mechanism that was designed specially for requesting information about the environment. The Environmental Information Regulations (EIRs) are similar to FOI in that they allow you to request information from authorities, and they can be used when requesting anything — broadly — to do with the environment. 

    Happily, they cover more authorities and have a higher bar for refusal than FOI. Equally happily, you can submit an EIR request on WhatDoTheyKnow, just as you can with FOI requests. Find out more about EIRs on WhatDoTheyKnow.

    With that in mind, no matter who you are — a company, a campaign or just a concerned citizen — there are ways in which you can put the EIR to the service of the climate. Here are just a few of them.

    • If you’re a startup in the climate sector, you might ask authorities about contract renewals, research whether any competitors exist, or request data that will inform your product development. There are many more such uses, but hopefully that’s enough to get you started!
    • If you are running a climate-related campaign, you may also find EIRs helpful. You can get the facts and figures that underline your arguments; find out richer data about your issue; or even get minutes from meetings where decisions have been made about your cause.
    • If you’re an individual who would love to do something for the climate, but don’t know where to start, how about holding authorities to account, for example over divestment from fossil fuels in their pensions? Ask a question, get the facts  — and then maybe write to your councillors, or even ask a question at a council meeting to get the point home.
    • If you’re a journalist, you can use WhatDoTheyKnow (or WhatDoTheyKnow Pro if you want to keep your findings private until your story goes out) to uncover the truth  — or even corruption — around climate issues. For inspiration, take a look at what journalist Lucas Amin found out with a series of dogged requests.
    • If you’re a researcher, or just someone who loves stats, remember that you can fill in any gaps in your information with WhatDoTheyKnow. Just see what Climate Emergency UK did when they needed information from every council in the country, to inform their Scorecards project. That was a massive endeavour, but the principle can be applied to any quest for information.

    Yesterday we considered what the world would look like if WhatDoTheyKnow had never been launched. Come back tomorrow for thoughts about what’s in that massive archive of requests and responses, and how society as a whole can benefit from it — beyond the obvious utility of simply accessing useful information.

    Image: Matjaz Krivic / Climate Visuals Countdown (CC by-nc-nd 4.0).
    Startup Climeworks uses Co2 from an incineration plant in their greenhouses.

  8. What would the world look like without WhatDoTheyKnow?

    Yesterday we shared the news that WhatDoTheyKnow has processed its millionth public request. 

    The site’s been around since 2008, nearly as long as the UK’s right to information, and we think it’s fair to say that we’ve had some impact on the world during that time.

    Let’s go back, just for a moment, to 2006 when mySociety ran its open call for suggestions of new websites we could build. Imagine we’d bypassed the ‘Freedom of Information Filer and Archive’ suggested by both Francis Irving and Phil Rodgers, and instead had plumped for one of the easier ideas. And in this scenario, let’s imagine that no-one else went ahead and made an FOI site either.

    So, in a world without WhatDoTheyKnow:

    Information would be released to the requester only. Here’s the most obvious difference: instead of being automatically published on WhatDoTheyKnow, any information received would come directly to the person who requested it. 

    If someone else wanted the same information, they’d have to ask for it again. And every time it was requested, authorities would have to send it out all over again.

    This one simple thing that WhatDoTheyKnow does – publishing responses – both puts information into the public domain, and saves authorities from the bother of duplicating their efforts.

    Information might not be released by email. Of course, when you make a request on WhatDoTheyKnow, it goes to the authority by email, and, almost always, the response is sent by the same means. But in our alternate universe without WhatDoTheyKnow, information might come much more regularly through the request-maker’s own letterbox.

    In WhatDoTheyKnow’s early days, one of the big battles we had to fight was for email to be accepted as a valid FOI request — not to mention email that came from a WhatDoTheyKnow-generated email address. Guidance from both the Ministry of Justice and the Information Commissioner now confirms that such requests are not only valid — and in 2016 an independent commission concluded that publishing responses to FOI requests “should be the norm”.

    Many fewer people would have heard of FOI, and FOI would be the preserve mainly of journalists and researchers. Let’s face it, FOI still isn’t as well-understood as we might like it to be — even though our research found that one in ten adults in the UK has put in a request at some time.  

    But without WhatDoTheyKnow, we believe the concept of FOI would be even less recognised. Fewer people would have stumbled across it when looking for answers; even those who had heard of the Act might find it difficult to figure out how to access it. It’s probable that only trained professionals such as journalists and researchers would be using FOI on a regular basis. 

    We wouldn’t be there to help people with FOI issues. WhatDoTheyKnow’s amazing team of volunteers answers a massive number of queries every day — questions from users of the site who are puzzled about how to make a request, what to do when they receive a refusal, or what an exemption means. 

    If it wasn’t for WhatDoTheyKnow, the chances are that the small part of the general population who did figure out how to make a request would give up as soon as they received a refusal or a request for clarification.

    People around the world wouldn’t have access to FOI sites, either. If we hadn’t built WhatDoTheyKnow, we’d never have packaged it up as the open source Alaveteli codebase  — and motivated individuals around the world wouldn’t have had a simple way to set up their own access to information websites. We’re proud to say that Alaveteli sites are running in more than 25 jurisdictions globally, from Argentina and Australia, to Ukraine, Uganda and Uruguay. 

    Our right to information would be weaker. We’ve defended the FOI Act through successive governments, with winds blowing FOI in and out of favour. We’ve given evidence in Parliament, stood up for FOI via inquiries and fought against its erosion with campaigns. 

    We believe in the right to information as a basic tenet of democracy and accountability, and we’re prepared to do whatever it takes to defend it.

    So, with all that in mind, aren’t you glad that WhatDoTheyKnow does exist? 

    Come back tomorrow to find out how WhatDoTheyKnow can be used to tackle the overarching issue of our times: climate.

    Image: Fons Heijnsbroek

  9. A million public requests on WhatDoTheyKnow

    Pop open the bubbly — this is huge! Yes, it’s a big day for us, as the number of Freedom of Information requests on WhatDoTheyKnow ticks over to a mahoosive one million. That milestone was reached at 05:34 this morning, when a request to Kent Police was published.

    WhatDoTheyKnow's homepage, showing the million count

    A million public requests! It’s proof of the value of FOI, and of the need for WhatDoTheyKnow. In essence, this big round number represents the vast archive of publicly-available information, built up by hundreds of thousands of individual users over the site’s 15 year lifetime. They’ve asked — and continue to ask — for information from public authorities, at the current rate of two-and-half thousand requests a week.

    Why? Because, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, they can; and, perhaps more importantly, thanks to WhatDoTheyKnow, it’s easy. Normal. Unintimidating.

    According to our polling, one in ten UK citizens have used FOI. People are doing good things with WhatDoTheyKnow  — we celebrated several of them at our recent awards, and over the years we’ve written about the varied and often surprising ways in which people have used our service to change the world. As a small sample of the many amazing uses we’ve seen, here’s how WhatDoTheyKnow has helped people to:

    But the impact doesn’t stop there. We know from the massive ratio of visitors to requesters that the main use of WhatDoTheyKnow is in viewing information that others have made public. This means that for the same cost to the public purse of processing an FOI request, information has been made much more public and discoverable. 

    Over the past nine  years, 660,000 requests have had 107 million page views (160x). WhatDoTheyKnow is, in systematic terms, a cheap way of getting more benefit from the hundreds of thousands of pieces of public information that have been released through FOI. That benefit will multiply, long into the future, with an archive that will always be available.

    And that’s what we mean when we say that information can be free. Free, as in free to fly; and free as in provided at absolutely no cost to anyone who can make use of it. 

    Thank you to everyone who’s played a part in WhatDoTheyKnow reaching this meaningful milestone: the volunteers who help run the site; the developers who helped to build it and those who continue to refine it; the information officers who gather and respond with information; the funders who understand the worth of our service; and of course all those citizens who, collectively, have asked for information and, together, built up this unparalleled library of knowledge. 

    Here’s to you all, and here’s to the ten millionth request — which given the exponential rate of growth, will not take ten times as long for us to reach.

    If you’d like to assure the future for easy access to information, then please do make a donation. Thank you.

    Next post in this series: what the world would look like if WhatDoTheyKnow had never been launched.

    Image: Ivan Lopatin

  10. 20th anniversary awards and event

    Wednesday night saw a steady stream of people making their way to one corner of a small square in London. mySociety staff, past and present; friends and associates; stellar users of our services; funders, journalists — in short, folk who had played a part in mySociety’s early years or subsequent history — assembled in Conway Hall to celebrate our twentieth year as an organisation.

    It was a wonderful opportunity to look back, sometimes with a slight sense of wonder, but also with some pride. It turns out that when you put together so many people with a bit of mySociety in their history, they have a lot to talk about, even if they come from quite separate bits of our timeline.

    Traditionally, we put out an online impact report at the end of the year, covering the previous twelve months. Well, this year we’ve gone all out and covered our whole history as an organisation. Guests had special early access to this, with a print booklet left on each seat. Don’t worry if you weren’t there: we’ll be putting it out as a digital version closer to our usual December publication date.

    The report doesn’t just present our history though; some sections look toward our future mission and purpose — something that Louise Crow, our Chief Executive, also folded into her speech. Anecdotes, facts, call-outs and thoughtful sidenotes contributed to an engaging and informative spin through the ‘eras’ of mySociety which you can read here.

    Award winners

    And of course, there was the presentation of our awards. A couple of weeks ago, we told you which people and projects had been shortlisted; and now we can reveal the winners.

    Driving Institutional Change award 

    The award was collected on behalf of Richard Bennett, aka the Heavy Metal Handcyclist, by his partner Eryn and sister Perin, and represents his activism and generosity in sharing knowledge with others to make the world more accessible for everyone.

    You can read more about his work in our blog post of 2021.

    Accelerating Climate Action award

    This award was taken by Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, in recognition of the way they’ve turned climate data into tangible climate action, using both our CAPE site and our MapIt API.

    We wrote a bit about that in this post.

     

    Exposing Truth award

    Journalist Jenna Corderoy was recognised in this category, for her bold and sustained work in uncovering the Cabinet Office’s ‘FOI clearing house’ – bringing about change, using FOI, for the benefit of FOI.

    You can read more about the Clearing House here.

     

    Impactful International Use award

    We awarded this one to Ukrainian FOI service Dostup do Pravdy (Access to Truth) – in their absence. The award was collected by our head of Transparency, Gareth Rees, and we’ll make sure it gets to them safely.

    We’ve had a long relationship with Dostup; but our most recent coverage of their work can be seen here.

    Campaigning for Justice award

    The final award was given to Eleanor Shaikh for her tireless research uncovering injustice and official cover-ups around the Post Office Horizon scandal, which we recently wrote about here.

     

     

     

    Of course, we really wish we could have given an award to all of our shortlistees, who are all doing such excellent work in their own areas. It was great to see so many campaigners, researchers, journalists and organisations chatting away and comparing notes over their methods: we hope the evening has resulted in some useful connections.

    We were extremely touched by all the winners’ words when they came up to the podium to accept their awards. They indicated that our services had allowed them to attain breakthroughs that they either wouldn’t have managed without us, or which would have taken a lot more time and effort.

    For us, the evening was a chance to see the living, breathing results of our lines of code and theories of change – ideas that we believe should help people to make a difference, but which are unproven until we hear of such incredible achievements. We are honoured to be a small part of that.

    Might you be a part of our future?

    Be part of our Board! As all of this activity makes clear, mySociety still has an awful lot to do — and a clear direction to take. If that sounds like something you’d like to be part of, you might be interested in our current Trustee and Non-Executive Director vacancies. As a Trustee or NED, you use your expertise and a little of your time to help steer our direction and input on all our activities. Find out more here.

    Help us extend our impact further! Could we work together to achieve more? Part of our mission is to form mutually beneficial partnerships with other organisations, with each side supporting the other. If that sounds like something you’d like to explore further, drop us a line.

    Finally, here are a few photos from the evening – click to see them at a larger size.

    There was also a professional photographer in attendance, so we’ll make sure to come back and share those images once they’ve been processed – especially those of the award winners, which, it turns out, mobile phone snaps didn’t do justice to!

    Thank you so much to everyone who helped make this such a joyous and moving event, from our shortlistees to our guests, and all the staff members who pitched in to make it go smoothly.

    Photos: Sally Bracegirdle and Lizetta Lyster