TICTeC will be returning in 2025:  10 & 11 June in Mechelen (Belgium), and online. 

Registration is open now. 

This year we are framing our call for session proposals around ‘pro-democracy technology’. This blog post contains information about the audiences, themes, and formats for the conference – and information on how to submit proposals. Read on to discover what we’re looking for in submissions, and guides to the different formats of sessions. 

What is TICTeC?

TICTeC, short for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, first launched in 2015 as an annual gathering. Since then, it has evolved into a programme of year-round activities through our current TICTeC Communities and previous TICTeC Labs projects. 

A key tenet of the civic tech movement is the idea that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible. This is what TICTeC is all about. We’re bringing together practical people and practical thinkers to talk about the impact of our work, and learn lessons in how we can go further.

TICTeC is all about sharing research, knowledge and experiences on how digital technologies are being used to defend and advance civic and democratic values across the world.  We want a future where technology strengthens democracy rather than undermines it, in order to build societies and technologies that serve the many, not just the few. 

TICTeC is a place where you can learn about everything from combating corruption and misinformation to empowering communities and enhancing civic participation, and is a unique platform where attendees connect and collaborate.

Attendees are a distinctive mix of small and big tech practitioners, civil society leaders, funders, users, civil servants, government representatives and academic researchers. Together we want to showcase cutting-edge pro-democracy innovations with a relentless focus on their real-world impact and effectiveness.

At previous TICTeC conferences, between 150-250 people have gathered in person and online, from more than 40 countries.

Conference themes

This year we’re shaping TICTeC around three thematic areas. 

• Access to information and open data
• Democracy, people and politics
• Climate change

In these areas, we’re structuring panels around ideas of defensive and constructive democratic tech. Read our blog post on pro-democracy technology to understand more what we mean by defensive and constructive technologies (there are also examples below). Proposals may in practice cover multiple areas. If your proposal does not fit either category, you can select both or neither. 

Beyond these topics, we will also have time for sessions that are interested in meta questions around ideas of civic tech and pro-democracy technology.

The examples below are not meant to be comprehensive, but give a sense of what we mean by each category. 

Access to information and open data

This thematic area applies to people working with access to information/Freedom of Information laws, or open data. The tech side may be innovations in running ATI platforms, improved government efficiencies, or projects that produce subsequent analysis or tools as a result of the data. 

Defensive tech

This category is looking at the use of access to information laws/platforms or open data as part of anti-corruption projects or platforms. This might include how data from ATI requests have been used as part of wider initiatives, or meta-investigation about how technology can make anti-corruption use of ATI more effective. 

Constructive tech

This category is looking at how open data or access to information laws can be used to build new data and tools, and the wider social (or commercial) impact of making it easier to access information. 

Democracy, people, and politics

This section covers projects concerned with mainstream democratic structures, or technical approaches to democratic processes involving people directly. 

This might include democratic transparency projects, e.g. those that create/rework public information about democratic institutions/politicians to improve transparency, accountability, standards, or efficiency. This includes Parliamentary Monitoring Organisations, but also extends to projects looking at elected politicians in other contexts that are Parliaments (such as city governments), or other democratic processes such as deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies. 

But it might also look like technology that directly involves people in democratic processes, such as toolkits of deliberative processes, consultation approaches, conditional commitment etc. 

Defensive tech

This covers a range of uses of technology to safeguard and investigate democratic processes. For instance: electoral violence monitoring, political donation tracking and broader anti-corruption work. 

Constructive tech

Here we are looking for empowering technologies that build democratic fibre and capacity. These approaches are less of a zero-sum game, but are looking at the potential for technology that enriches democratic life. 

This covers technology that may be trying to improve processes and understanding of electoral democratic institutions. It might include new forms or innovations in PMOs applying machine learning to existing problems. It also includes innovations in new forms of technology, and the uses of technology in deliberative processes.

Climate change

The climate crisis is a massive practical issue that requires urgent action — and like all practical issues it’s a democratic question. We’re interested both in where action on this issue is being actively disrupted by anti-democrats, and where we need to build democratic capacity to solve these problems. 

At TICTeC we want to explore practical approaches to facilitating and delivering democratic action on climate change. 

We need to develop defensive approaches — but we also need to bring the full cognitive and relational capacity of democracy to bear on the problem, – pushing decisions away from a few big levers in the middle, to understand how to reshape our environments and communities to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. 

Submissions in this category may also fit into one or both of the other two. 

Defensive tech

In this area, defensive tech may take the form of anti-corruption approaches focused on the influence of fossil fuel companies and petrostates. This might include monitoring of fossil-fuel sponsored narratives repeated by politicians, or fact checking for climate conspiracy theories.  

Constructive tech

Constructive tech in this area is trying to bring the cognitive and relational capacity of democracy to bear on the problem, – pushing decisions away from a few big levers in the middle, to understand how to reshape our environments and communities to respond to the effects of climate change. 

This might be participatory approaches to shaping policy, directing local changes, or collaborative approaches to mixed public/private decisions home upgrades and retrofit. 

Session types

This year we’re looking for three session types.

• 20 minute presentations
• 35 minute short workshops
• 75 minute long workshops/panels

For workshops, we really want to see a strong interactive element that involves the audience in working through a practical activity, sharing information and experiences. 

Short workshops may (but don’t have to) take the form of a short presentation, with structured audience participation. 

Long workshops may take the form of a panel (where multiple speakers are involved), but there should still be a strong interactive component. For these, we would want to see panellists from a range of expertise and backgrounds. 

Structured participation doesn’t have to be complicated. When we run sessions, we tend to use the 1-2-4-all method to structure conversation around questions. Sessions in the past have used slido or similar. What we’re looking for in evaluating workshops is:

• A clear sense of the kind of discussion and questions you want to have.
• A sense that participants will have something to say, and get something out of these discussions (so being clear which subset of the TICTeC audience and themes you are talking to). 

When submitting workshop proposals, the key thing to bear in mind is that we have fewer time slots and can accept fewer of these proposals.

You are allowed to submit multiple proposals if you would like to pitch a presentation and a workshop (but both are unlikely to be accepted). 

We have a limited number of travel grants available to support speakers to attend, you can apply for this via the submissions form.

While we will favour speakers to be in-person, there are a limited number of slots for people who cannot travel to present remotely. Please indicate if you may need to present remotely when filling out the submission form.

Submission details

Submit your proposals via this application form by 15 Jan 2025 at the latest. 

Those selected for inclusion in the conference programme will be notified by 31 Jan 2025. 

Presenters will be required to register for the conference by 14 February in order to confirm their slot (the registration fee will be waived for individuals presenting; people who have already booked will be refunded). 

What is a good TICTeC presentation?

TICTeC is a practical and reflective conference. We encourage presentation submissions to focus on specific impacts or usage, rather than showcase new tools that are as yet untested.  We’re less interested in speculative uses of technology, but more in people’s practical experiences of working with tools and technical approaches. Technology does not have to be new, and we welcome retrospectives on long running projects.

A tool doesn’t have to have mass usage to be worth talking about – we’re equally interested in qualitative stories on the impacts of technology; their impacts on official processes; and how users have used platforms to campaign for change. We’re also interested in stories about obstacles and barriers to having impact. The main work of your organisation does not have to be technology centred: we are interested in experiences and impacts of adopting new approaches in less technical organisations. 

TICTeC attendees are a mixture of practitioners and researchers. Presentations should expect audiences to include different levels of technical knowledge. 

We score proposals according to their alignment to the conference themes, as discussed above. 

Use of AI in writing proposals

You may use ChatGPT or similar to sharpen ideas for proposals, better highlight alignment with our themes, or improve written language. However, proposals and sessions that are entirely AI-conceived will not score well. 

Last year we saw a number of proposals we suspected were AI-written because while they were at first appearance well crafted, they ultimately only spoke in vague and general terms about the themes we asked for. Because we prioritise experience and impact, such submissions will score poorly. If using these tools, ensure the result is an accurate and truthful account of your own experiences, research, or impact. 

More information

The TICTeC 2025 Eventbrite page contains further information about the conference, including FAQs. If you still have any questions after reading that, please email tictec@mysociety.org.

Speaking opportunities through sponsorship

TICTeC 2025 sponsors receive a guaranteed speaking slot, with no need to participate in the open call. Find out more about sponsoring TICTeC 2025.

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You can follow updates as they are announced over on the TICTeC website. If you’d like to be the first to receive TICTeC 2025 updates, please sign up for our emails.

And in the meantime, if you’d like to see what TICTeC is all about, you can browse all the resources from previous events over on the TICTeC Knowledge Hub.

We look forward to welcoming you to TICTeC 2025!

 

The TICTeC conference will be returning next year: on 10 & 11 June 2025 in Mechelen (Belgium), and online. 

In light of the exceptional political times we’re living through, and that 2025 marks 10 years since TICTeC began, TICTeC 2025 will have a renewed focus on what we’re calling “Pro-Democracy Technology”.

TICTeC 2025 will bring together people working on defensive technology against threats to democracy, and those who are using technologies constructively to enrich and strengthen the heartbeat of civic and democratic life. Read more on our thoughts on reframing civic tech for the current moment.

If you’re working in this area and have things to share, or want to understand how technology can be applied to the democratic needs of our age – sign up now, we’d love for you to join us. 

What is TICTeC?

TICTeC, short for The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, first launched in 2015 as an annual gathering. Since then, it has evolved into programmes of year-round activities through our current TICTeC Communities and previous TICTeC Labs projects. 

A key tenet of the civic tech movement is the idea that the best advocacy is the demonstration of what’s possible. This is what TICTeC is all about, we’re bringing together practical people and practical thinkers to talk about the impact of our work, and learn lessons in how we can go further.

TICTeC is all about sharing research, knowledge and experiences on how digital technologies are being used to defend and advance civic and democratic values across the world.  We want a future where technology strengthens democracy rather than undermines it, in order to build societies that serve the many, not just the few. 

From combating corruption and misinformation to empowering communities and enhancing civic participation, TICTeC is a unique platform where attendees connect and collaborate.

With a distinctive mix of small and big tech practitioners, civil society leaders, funders, users, and academic researchers, we want to showcase cutting-edge pro-democracy innovations with a relentless focus on their real-world impact and effectiveness.

At previous TICTeC conferences, between 150-250 people have gathered in-person and online from more than 40 countries.

Why do we host TICTeC?

We run TICTeC because we think there is important work being done, and that we are stronger and smarter together.

Threats to democracy and civic power are rising across the world. Anti-democratic actors aren’t standing still – and are constantly learning how to use technology to extend their power and control over people. 

Democracy’s reaction to this needs to be not to reject technology but to use it to evolve and compete, particularly in addressing society-changing issues like climate change. 

Democracy needs to be fast, effective and popular, and digital technology can and is helping to achieve this. 

That’s why TICTeC exists – to highlight and examine these pro-democracy technologies, in a collaborative and safe space. This not only strengthens our work at mySociety but also contributes to a global movement harnessing technology to protect and advance democratic values around the world. 

TICTeC 2025 themes

The 2025 TICTeC conference will focus on exploring the impact of pro-democracy tech innovations across several critical themes: Access to information (ATI), Democratic Transparency, and Climate.

In each of these areas, we want to explore what we’re calling ‘defensive’ and ‘constructive’ approaches. Defensive approaches safeguard the openness democracy needs to operate – while constructive approaches build the capacity of the engine of democratic progress.

Call for Proposals

We’ll soon be launching our Call for Proposals, giving more information and the opportunity to pitch your session ideas on the above themes. Be sure to sign up for email updates to be the first to know when submissions open.

Register now- Early Bird tickets available

It is essential to register on Eventbrite in order to attend TICTeC 2025, whether that’s in person or online. Early Bird tickets are available until 3rd March 2025, saving £100. More practical information and FAQs can be found on the TICTeC 2025 webpage.

If you have general ideas or questions about TICTeC 2025, or are interested in sponsoring the conference, please get in touch. 

We can’t wait to see you at TICTeC 2025—either in person in Mechelen or online. Let’s come together again to explore how technology can be leveraged for a resilient and proactive global democratic future.

Image: CC Visit Mechelen. 

Whether or not you were lucky enough to attend TICTeC in person earlier this month, you can now experience it all over again.

Where there are videos and slides for a session, you can access them via the Schedule page. Just click on ‘see session detail’ to see which resources there are. Or discover all the videos via the TICTeC 24 YouTube playlist.

Note: Videos and slides are only available for sessions that were recorded, and where presenters gave consent to share.

Plus: browse through photos from the two days of TICTeC 24 on our Flickr page, here. All photos are available under a non-commercial Creative Commons licence, so please do share them where you like.

Don’t miss TICTeC 2025!

Work with us at TICTeC 2025: we’re open to suggestions from organisations who might like to partner with us to host TICTeC in your region; and we’re also always happy to talk to potential sponsors. Drop us a line if you’d like to discuss more.

Subscribe to updates: Be the first to know when we put out the call for papers, open bookings and announce the location for next year’s TICTeC — sign up here.

Thanks for your feedback

We love hearing what other people got out of TICTeC! Special thanks to those who have taken time to feed back on what those two days meant to them.

Here are just a couple of the comments we’ve received: follow us on Instagram to see more over the next few weeks.

 

Yes, it’s that marvellous time for the Civic Tech community: the full TICTeC schedule is now online and you can browse it to your heart’s content, picking which sessions you’ll attend — not always an easy decision when there’s so much to choose from!

As usual, TICTeC promises access to civic tech around the world with insights you won’t get elsewhere, presented by a truly amazing roster of international speakers. This year we have a focus on threats to democracy and climate, and the tools that are working to counter them.

You’ll find grassroots NGOs, making a difference through their on-the-ground technology; representatives of governments; tech giants; and of course the academic researchers that make sense of everything we do in the civic tech world.

• Hear from Mevan Babakar, News and Information Credibility Lead at Google;
• Learn how tech has shaped citizen-government communication from the Taiwan Ministry of Digital Affairs;
• See what happens when you wake up and realise your civic tech project is now critical national infrastructure, with Alex Blandford of the University of Oxford

These are just a few of the 60+ sessions from an international range of perspectives that you can dip into across TICTeC’s two days. Which will you choose?

Come along in person, or tune in from home

This year, most of TICTeC’s sessions will be livestreamed, so you can tune in no matter where you are (the workshops won’t be broadcast, as they don’t lend themselves to online participation). If you’d like to attend virtually, you can book a ticket via Eventbrite for just £50.

Or, if you’d prefer to join the conference in person, enjoying all that a real-life meet-up entails, with sessions interspersed with networking, nibbles, and socialising, make sure you snap up one of the limited slots. But hurry – TICTeC always sells out, and this year is looking like no exception.

Register for TICTeC now.

Hot on the heels of our last big announcement, we’re very happy to confirm our second keynote for TICTeC, The Impacts of Civic Technology conference 2024: Nick Mabey OBE.

If you’d like to hear from one of the big players, really making a difference to the UK’s climate change response, you’ll want to make sure you’re at TICTeC this year. 

Nick is a founder of E3G (Third Generation Environmentalism), an independent climate change think tank with a goal to translate climate politics, economics and policies into action — and is now its co-CEO.

He has previously worked in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, UK Foreign Office, WWF-UK, London Business School and the UK electricity industry. As an academic he was lead author of Argument in the Greenhouse, examining the economics of climate change. 

He also founded London Climate Action Week, one of the world’s largest climate festivals, which takes place on 22-30 June — so if you’re in London for TICTeC and you have an interest in climate, it might be worth sticking around for that! 

Nick will open the second day of  proceedings at TICTeC, setting the scene for presentations and workshop sessions that strive to examine the central question: What is needed to make civic tech tackling problems around climate change more successful and impactful on a global scale?

Few people are better equipped to bring such a broad spectrum of knowledge and experience to this complex issue. If you’d like to tap into some of that, then make sure to snap up your tickets to TICTeC. 

BOOK YOUR PLACE AT TICTeC NOW

The TICTeC 2024 schedule will be published very soon, so watch this space.

We’re excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our 2024 Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC)!

Join us on 12 and 13 June  — in London or online — and you’ll hear from María Baron, founder and now Global Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo.

This year, one of the major themes at TICTeC will be the role of civic tech in safeguarding and advancing democracy where it is under threat. María and Directorio Legislativo’s work explore both  the problem, and how we can collectively roll up our sleeves and do something about it. 

María has a long career in transparency and democratic institutions, working first across Latin America and then globally with both Directorio Legislativo and the Open Government Partnership. Along the way, María also founded the Latin American Network for Legislative Transparency, convening 24 civil society organisations from 13 countries. 

With her team at Directorio, María developed a methodology for building consensus across polarised stakeholders on tricky issues — and has brought many of those agreements to Congress, where they were signed into law.

The Regulatory Alert Service, also from her Directorio team, enables political analysts to predict changes in regulation across 19 countries. 

Among many other achievements, María has been awarded the NDI Democracy Award for Civic Innovation. In short, we can guarantee you’ll gain a massive dose of inspiration and hope from her session.

And that’s just the first speaker announcement from this year’s TICTeC. Make sure you’re a part of the “best concentration of practitioners, academics, and thinkers in this field” (Fran Perrin, Indigo Trust) and book your place now.

It’s been a while since we convened the wonderful, industrious, inspiring global civic tech community in one place, face to face — we’re ready to reignite those amazing conversations, connections and deep dives into democracy at the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, this June. 

BOOK YOUR PLACE AT TICTeC NOW

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.

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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.

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Photos: Sally Bracegirdle and Lizetta Lyster

 

Read more about our 20th anniversary event

Thank you for joining us to celebrate mySociety’s 20th anniversary. It’s brilliant to be able to toast 20 years of using data and digital tools to empower people.  

One of my favourite descriptions of our work was written a few years ago by the journalist Zoe Williams. She said “Any meaningful access to democracy requires that the citizen can navigate the terrain. These mini institutions – whether Democracy Club or mySociety – collate, editorialise, create digital order for the public good. The more transparent and accessible democracy is, the more obvious it is which bits could be better. It’s like sitting in on the meeting where they invented dentistry, or clean water: kind of obvious, kind of earth-shattering, kind of tedious, kind of magical.”

I think magic is a really appropriate metaphor here, maybe stage magic, where something seemingly impossible happens. Sometimes, as in mySociety,  there are clever technical tricks, but mostly, what makes it seem magical is that no-one can imagine that someone would spend so many hours practising to make the trick work.

To build a thing that sustains for 20 years, is hard. I’m going to try to tell a bit of the story of the services and projects, but there’s another story, which is a story of people. People who care and go above and beyond, sometimes above and beyond what is reasonable, to make mySociety what it is. That is what makes the impossible possible. 

With all the people and photos from different times in the life of the organisation, it feels a bit like the mySociety ‘eras’ tour.

So I thought maybe I would sketch out the different eras of the organisation and how they led us to this point.  

Era 1: the early days

mySociety was launched in 2003, 12 years after the launch of the ‘web’ itself. I came across it three years later in January 2006 when I used a site PledgeBank.com to sign an online pledge, a novelty at that point. The pledge was to “pay £10 into a fund that aims to fill a public advertising space with something thought-provoking” if 350 other people would do the same things. According to my emails, in the same minute, I volunteered to write some code to screen scrape official information about the Northern Ireland Assembly, and later that evening joined two of the mailing lists. 

I must have been excited. Lots of people were – mySociety represented a unique opportunity to use technical skills to do something good.  

When I first worked for mySociety later that year, I think I was employee no 5, joining Tom Steinberg and the first three developers – Chris Lightfoot, Matthew Somerville and Francis Irving, and a group of dedicated volunteers. They were in the middle of an exceptionally creative period, having already launched three public facing services – including WriteToThem (which was born as FaxYourRepresentative). They had also taken on TheyWorkForYou,  the parliamentary monitoring site, which had been developed by a group of volunteers. 

That era of creativity continued, with brilliant new services:

In 2007 FixMyStreet was launched, a simple way for people to report local issues.

It was followed in 2008 by WhatDoTheyKnow – a service for making FOI requests, created as a result of multiple suggestions in an open call for proposals. 

Oh, and also the first ever Downing Street e-petitions site. 

So, an era of productivity, but also, like many new organisations, one of huge financial instability. 

At mySociety’s 5th birthday party, Tom said: “We know from the continued influence of newspapers, some born in the 19th century, that political media needs longevity to gain the reach and legitimacy required to transform whole systems and to challenge the expectations of whole populations. mySociety needs to work out how to be here not just in 6 months, but in 20 years.”  

So that first era defined two grand challenges – how can the web be used “to tip the relationship between people and government, in favour of the people”, and how can you embed that mission inside an organisation that can survive long enough to make it stick. 

Era 2: International community and reuse

I think the second era of mySociety is the era of international reuse. Our code had always been open source, and there had been a couple of new sites built with it by this time.  

But now we extracted and built customisable software in collaboration with partners around the world, and fostered an international community to accelerate reuse and impact. Alaveteli was the first product of that era, a framework extracted from WhatDoTheyKnow to power new FOI sites. AlaveteliCon in 2012 was our first significant international event, and was accompanied by an install lab where people could bring laptops and work together to get new FOI sites running. 

This era brought efficiencies of reuse, but in the same way that the most powerful thing about civic tech can be the idea that someone, somewhere has built this tool because they expect you to want to ask a question of those in power, or check what your representative’s been doing, sometimes the most powerful part of international work is not the reuse of the code itself, but the encouragement that comes from a set of friends and colleagues around the world that don’t think that what you’re doing is crazy. 

As the field grew and matured enough to settle on a name – ‘civic tech’ –  mySociety also took a more structured approach to understanding impact. This work stepped up a gear in 2015 with the first TICTeC – the Impacts of Civic Tech conference. TICTeC has run in person or online every year since then, convening thousands of researchers, funders and practitioners to share their knowledge and experience. 

In all there have been 87 projects based on our code, with 48 still running today, including at least a dozen sites like AskTheEU across Europe, InfoProVsechny in Czechia, KiMitTud in Hungary, Mzalendo in Kenya, and QueSabes in Uruguay that have now passed their own 10th anniversaries. We learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t and not every project has lasted. But when reuse works, it’s a huge force multiplier. Alaveteli has been one of the real successes in this respect and it’s been very exciting to see new features, such as the tools we subsequently built for journalists, have immediate impact not just in the UK but across the world.

I’m very happy that we’re continuing to learn and share internationally through TICTeC and our Access to Information network where along with partners we’re sharing approaches around the technology, but also how it works with other modes of action – journalism, campaigning, and strategic litigation and legislative change. 

So the first of many thanks this evening go to Transparency programme lead, Gareth Rees, who has juggled the many, often conflicting demands of running a large UK platform, a successful international open source project, a pan-european learning network and several other projects with fortitude and meticulous planning, ably supported by Graeme Porteous and Jen Bramley. 

They also go to Gemma Moulder, our incredible Events Manager, who  has been the heart of the TICTeC community. And please mark your calendars, now that she’s organised the hell out of this anniversary party, she’s going to be turning her attention to TICTeC 2024 next spring.

Era 3: Real products

So the first era of mySociety defined two problems to make progress against, with perhaps the more challenging one being how to run services for long enough to have impact at scale. In 2015 Mark Cridge joined as Chief Executive faced with two big tasks – to be mySociety’s first non-founder chief executive, a transition point at which many organisations fail, and to develop the commercial side of the organisation into a sustainable business.  

mySociety Ltd had always taken on commercial work, but in 2016 we made a decision to focus on a product in order to scale revenue and generate profit to actually contribute significantly to the parent charity. That product became FixMyStreet Pro, designed to help councils handle fault reporting. And in time mySociety Ltd became SocietyWorks. As of today, SocietyWorks has 28 clients for FixMyStreet Pro, and 6 for our second significant product, WasteWorks. In that time FixMyStreet has gone from 850k problem reports to now 4.4 million. 

This is a huge achievement, and whilst the success of FixMyStreet, like so many things at mySociety,  would never have happened without Matthew, our resident non-evil genius, the transformation into a profitable business has taken a huge team effort – to research, build, price, market, sell, contract, manage and deliver a product that works for citizens and for councils. So, along with Matthew,  I want to say thank you to the whole SocietyWorks team – Dave Arter, Sally Bracegirdle, Chris Mytton, Moray Jones, Lizetta Lyster, Bekki Leaver, Jacqueline Lau, Victoria Mihell-Hale, Amelia Nicholas, Nicolle Whitehead, Nik Gupta, Sally Reader and Chris Edwards. 

And two special thanks – first to Sam Pearson and to Pete Stevens and co at Mythic Beasts for the seamless work behind the scenes to provide stable infrastructure to support both an unusual digital charity and a growing software as a service business. There’s tons more I could say about this but I will limit myself to this – we’ve come a long way since the days of a fax server in a cupboard. 

And second to Angela Dixon – for throwing absolutely everything into SocietyWorks and mySociety and leading the team as Managing Director with the exact combination of thoughtfulness, decisiveness and boundless positive energy that we needed. 

Era 4: Citizen empowerment at scale and with nuance

This brings us more or less to the present era. I quoted Tom earlier, saying that political media needed longevity in order to get reach and legitimacy. We’re starting to see the results of some longevity.  

Some representative polling in 2021 showed that one in three UK adults have heard of TheyWorkForYou, and one in five have used it. In the last 10 years WhatDoTheyKnow has gone from 100k public FOI requests to close to a million, and informed countless news stories and campaigns.  

So how do we use that longevity and reach most effectively? We have some ideas. 

Institutional change

Between them, our services span the practical issues that introduce people to civic life – dog mess, housing issues and bin collection, through the many facets of the tens of thousands of public institutions covered by the FOI act, to the fundamental building blocks of our democracy – voting and representation in the UK’s parliaments. 

People want to participate in civic life but only if they have a reason to believe it makes a difference. One thing that has become clearer over time is that the real core of our mission with respect to government  is not to get it to do better at digital, but to use digital to get it to do better at democracy – to show the kind of transparency, responsiveness and interest in people’s lives that makes participation meaningful. The scale and openness of our platforms gives us a unique perspective on the challenges people hit when they try to engage with democratic institutions. The fact that the platforms sit outside those institutions gives us a point of leverage. 

We’ll be using what we’ve learned from our services, and support from the communities that use them, to bring about changes in policy and practice that are directly targeted at those challenges. That way, we’re not just helping people work around obstacles, but removing those obstacles for good. 

Alex Parsons has given us hugely valuable insights into how our services are being used, and a credible voice on Access to Information, democratic participation and yes, potholes and dog poo too. Thank you Alex, for being an incredible fount of ideas on where we can go from here.   

Reach more and more kinds of people

There are also responsibilities that come with scale, and one is to make sure that our services do more than empower the already empowered. We want to reach more and more kinds of people, with a focus on those who are being democratically underserved, and who are underrepresented amongst our service users. 

We recognise that this is an area where we need to learn from others and we’re taking multiple approaches – conducting outreach and research on how we can better support people from marginalised and under-served communities using our core services, and developing partnership work that gives us opportunities to learn, such as the FixMyBlock project with TowerBlocks UK – helping tower block residents understand and exercise their rights, or the Stop and Search Data dashboard we’ve developed with Black Thrive. 

Respond on climate

We also need to recognise the era we are entering. This is one in which climate change is no longer the story, but the setting in which all stories take place. In the next decades we have to rapidly make changes across our society – in how we travel, what we eat, how we heat our homes. In order to do that fairly, the decisions we are faced with need participation from all kinds of people: to reduce the harms and share the benefits of this enormous transition. It’s a huge democratic challenge. We’re going to need to continue to learn and experiment, not least in getting people in all kinds of roles the information they need to act together. We’ve been working on a suite of services in our Climate programme to help people track, challenge, coordinate and collaborate. I want to share a couple of examples of that work.  

In the Climate Action Scorecards, a project led by Climate Emergency UK scoring local authority plans and action on climate, we see several interesting elements come together – the use of WhatDoTheyKnow Projects to rapidly create datasets from batches of FOI requests, along with research and policy work, so that we can present simple headlines on local climate action that anyone can understand, and at the same time, make an evidenced case to policymakers for better publication of the underlying data. Come to our webinar together with the Centre for Public Data on fragmented data on the 28th of this month to hear more about that. 

In the Local Intelligence Hub, we’re working with the Climate Coalition, a coalition with more than 100 member organisations, representing 22 million people across the UK, exploring how a digital service can help them share data to work better as a coalition to have effective conversations about climate action with politicians, and to better understand local areas, and their own movement. 

Finally our latest service, Neighbourhood Warmth will bring back a little of the ‘I will if you will’ spirit of Pledgebank to the challenge of home energy across the UK, encouraging neighbours to take action to explore energy efficiency improvements together. 

Zarino Zappia leads the climate team – Struan Donald, Alexander Griffen, Emily Kippax, Siôn Williams and Julia Cushion. Thank you to you all for inventing and realising a new generation of mySociety services. And thanks to Zarino for being a collaborative and multi-talented leader, and for quietly rolling his sleeves up and improving everything he touches, across the organisation. 

Support

I hope I’ve given you a flavour of how we’ve evolved as an organisation, and how I think we can have the greatest impact in our next era. I’m excited, because I think we are starting to see the shape of what mySociety could be for the long term – a stable and effective institution working with citizens, civil society and digital technologies in the service of a democracy capable of meeting the challenges we now face. 

Which makes this a good point to talk about the role of our trustees and directors  – a truly inspirational set of people who give up their time and expertise on a voluntary basis to advise, challenge, and connect us, and to help us be the organisation that we aspire to be. 

A huge thank you to Ade Adewunmi, Cam Ross, Devin O’Shaugnessy, Jen Thornton, Onyeka Onyekwelu, Rachel Rank, Steve Skelton and Tony Burton, and Gen Maitland Hudson as our Chair of Trustees, and Mandy Merron as the Chair of the SocietyWorks board, as well as all their predecessors,  for being sound advisors, and making board meetings something to look forward to.

I also want to take a moment to mark the very sad recent loss of Francis Mainoo, a hugely valued member of both boards, and a kind and generous leader. Like early staff members Chris Lightfoot and Angie Ahl, Francis’ many contributions here and elsewhere will long be remembered. 

mySociety simply would not have got to this milestone without the dedication and selflessness of the many people who have supported the organisation in volunteer roles. 

Along with our trustees, that is particularly true of the people who have volunteered around WhatDoTheyKnow, where scale brings challenges as well as impact. Running a service like WhatDoTheyKnow responsibly takes a significant amount of work – 364 new requests are now made every day through the site and we know that the responsible governance of digital platforms is crucially important to their effect on society. 

Richard Taylor, John Cross, Martyn Dewar, William Fitzpatrick, Matt Knight, Luis Lago, Alison Bellamy, Doug Paulley and more before them have put countless hours in helping and supporting  WhatDoTheyKnow’s users – thank you all. 

And for absolutely invaluable on the spot pro-bono legal advice – when you need it, you really need it – many thanks to Francis Davey, and Matt Lewin. 

And thank you too to Helen Cross who, having been a long time volunteer, has taken on the challenge of managing the service with the help of her robot friends, and now with the help of Georgia Kelsey, who has been gamely spelunking into the support mailbox over the last few months. 

I’ve talked about the significant progress we’ve made in sustaining ourselves as an organisation. That problem is not yet solved – and I know this is a sympathetic audience, as many of you have played a part in getting us to where we are. The funding question keeps me up at night, because I think it is a genuinely hard problem of finding a financial model to deliver services which are a public good.

So two more sets of thank yous here. 

First, to all the funders who have supported our work – with some notables in somewhat chronological order – Tim Jackson for our very first seed funding and Joseph Rowntree for our first philanthropic institutional funding. Long term early support came from OSF, the Omidyar Network and Luminate, Google, and the Indigo Trust. The Quadrature Climate Foundation and the National Lottery are supporting our climate team and the Adessium Foundation, Swedish Postcode Foundation and NED are supporting our international work.  Porticus, and the Patrick McGovern Foundation are supporting work across all our programme areas.  

Second, to those who’ve worried, along with the Chief Execs, about the money in various different ways – alumnis Abi Broom and Paul Lenz (Abi Broom’s graphs of doom!), Angela and her finance team Yolanda Gomes, and Jill Aquarone and on fundraising the eloquent Asha Pond, and now our latest recruit Alice Williams. 

There are many names I haven’t named here – after twenty years, the list becomes too long. But I’m particularly happy to have many people from different points in the life of mySociety, because I think one thing you can see from the vantage point of twenty years is that effort and planning pays off over time in a way that can be hard to see when you’re in the midst of it. If you are at this party, it’s because you are part of the story of mySociety and your help and support has got us to this milestone. And if you don’t think that’s true, perhaps it’s because you’re going to be part of our future in some way.  

So I hope you’ll read through a copy of the impact report and feel proud. Thank you to Myf Nixon and Lucas Cumsille Montesinos for telling our story in such a beautiful way, in the impact report and across our sites. 

And finally thank you to everyone who has used our services to try to make things better for their communities.  Which must be my cue to stop talking and hand over to Myf and Zarino for the second phase of the evening, our anniversary awards, where we recognise some of the incredible stories of change that we’ve been a little part of.

The ways in which people and organisations have used mySociety’s services through the lifetime of the organisation have been impressive, inspiring and sometimes astonishing.

So, to celebrate our 20th anniversary, on 15 November we’ll be presenting awards in five categories, showcasing impactful usage of their services through the years.

• Driving Institutional Change
• Accelerating Climate Action
• Exposing Truth
• Impactful International Reuse
• Campaigning for Justice

The shortlist is as follows:

Driving Institutional Change

• The Give Them Time campaign used WhatDoTheyKnow to get the law changed over funding for nursery care in Scotland.
• John Graham-Cumming In 2009, John used the petitions website that mySociety had built for 10 Downing Street, resulting in Gordon Brown apologising on behalf of the British Government for its treatment of the computer scientist Alan Turing.
• Richard Bennett used WhatDoTheyKnow, coupled with the Equality Act, to make pathways more accessible for wheelchair users, sharing his methods so that others could do the same.
• Privacy International The ‘Neighbourhood Watched’ project used WhatDoTheyKnow to reveal the unchecked use of surveillance technology by police forces across the UK.

Accelerating Climate Action

• Zero Hour Using mySociety’s WriteToThem software, they’ve garnered the backing of over 150 MPs for their draft Climate and Ecology Bill.
• Sustain used data from CAPE, our Climate Action Plans Explorer, to analyse the degree to which local authorities are including food within their strategies to cut emissions. 
• Save the Trees of Armada Way Plymouth’s grassroots campaign fought against the removal of much-loved trees in the city centre, using WriteToThem to send emails to the local councillors — apparently, the most emails they had ever received on a single subject. 

 Exposing Truth

• Jenna Corderoy Jenna is shortlisted for her investigation — using WhatDoTheyKnow — of the Cabinet Office’s controversial Clearing House, a secretive unit that screened  and blocked FOI requests made by journalists and campaigners, often on matters of serious public interest.
• The Bureau of Investigative Journalism Their Sold From Under You project used crowdsourced and FOI data to reveal how much publicly-owned property was sold off by councils across England, in an attempt to fill funding gaps caused by austerity measures. 
• Lost in Europe worked with people running FOI sites on our Alaveteli platform, in 12 different countries, to uncover previously unknown statistics around how many children disappear at borders. 

Impactful International Reuse 

• Dostup do Pravda/Access to Truth The Ukrainian Freedom of Information site continues providing access to information even in the difficult circumstances of war.
• vTaiwan, Public Digital Innovation Space, and the Taiwanese Ministry of Digital Affairs The Taiwanese government uses mySociety’s SayIt software to make deliberations on difficult subjects public and accessible to citizens.
• DATA Uruguay The organisation has built both FixMyStreet and Freedom of Information sites on mySociety’s codebases, changing the way their governments  communicate with citizens at both local and national levels.

Campaigning for Justice 

• Doug Paulley is a lifelong campaigner for rights for disabled people, using FOI to fight against access discrimination, especially around public transport.
• Eleanor Shaikh has dedicated hours and hundreds of FOI requests to finding out the truth behind the Post Office Horizon scandal, with her findings making front page headlines.
• After Exploitation use Freedom of Information to uncover the failings of the government’s measures to protect vulnerable detainees.

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Of course, every single user of our services is a winner in our eyes – but watch this space to find out who takes home the award in each category!

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Image: Rene Böhmer

In case you missed it — or in case you want to watch it all again — here’s the video from our #Democracy2043 event of May 24.

Our insightful panel discuss what kind of democracy they’d like to see in 2043, and, perhaps more importantly, what we need to put in place in order to make it a reality.

Many thanks to our panelists for their brilliant inputs: Emma Geen, Disability Activist; Immy Kaur of CIVIC SQUARE; Joy Green, Systemic Futurist; Dr Kim Foale of Geeks For Social Change and our own Chief Executive Louise Crow.