Episode 1: August 2024

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Episode 1: August 2024
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It’s our first ever podcast at mySociety! Heeey how about that?

Myf, our Communications Manager, runs you through all the stuff we’ve been doing at mySociety over the last month. It’s amazing what we manage to fit into just 30 days: you’ll hear about a meeting of Freedom of Information practitioners from around Europe; our new (and evolving) policy on the use of AI; a chat with someone who used the Climate Scorecards tool to springboard into further climate action… oh, and there’s just the small matter of the General Election here in the UK, which involved some crafty tweaking behind the scenes of our sites TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

Links

Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.

Transcript

0:00

Well, hello and welcome to mySociety’s monthly round-up.

My name is Myf Nixon, Communications Manager at mySociety.

0:11

This is part of an experiment that we’re currently running where we’re trying to talk about our work in new formats, to see if that makes it easier for you to keep up with our news.

0:21

So please do tell us what you think and bear in mind that we’re still getting to grips with these new means of communicating.

So we might be a bit rough and ready at first.

0:30

We haven’t invested in any fancy podcasting equipment or microphones yet, you know.

What do you want from us?

We’re a charity.

0:37

This is me talking into my phone at home.

So apologies if the sound quality isn’t quite as it should be.

You know, if these take off, then we’ll be able to make the case for getting that fancy mic and giving you a better audio experience.

0:53

Also, this episode is going to be mostly me talking, but in future months, I really want to bring you lots more voices from mySociety.

So with all of that said, we’ve got six pieces of news this month.

1:06

So first of all, I’m gonna talk about our international conference, TICTeC.

Then we’ll go into all the democracy work that we did around the election.

1:16

We’ve got some new features on our Freedom of Information platform Alaveteli, and news from the organisations running Freedom of Information sites in countries right across Europe.

1:27

We’ve got a story from a volunteer – a lovely story, somebody who volunteered on the Climate Scorecards project; and then, lastly, the thinking that we’ve been doing at mySociety around AI.

1:41

And if you want to read about any of these in more detail, you can visit the mySociety blog at mySociety.org/blog.

1:55

So first up is the Impacts of Civic Technology conference TICTeC and this is mySociety’s convening of the global civic tech community – and civic tech?

That’s what we do, the kind of technology that we do that helps people gain access to democracy,

2:12

talk to authorities, have a little bit of power in their hands.

and TICTeC is really somewhere for organisations like us from around the world — because there are organisations like us all over the place — to come together to learn and share their research.

2:29

All kinds of people come: researchers, practitioners, policymakers, funders, some of the tech giants as well, and it’s a place where we can openly and honestly examine and share and improve the impact of the work that we all do in civic technology.

2:46

Now the most recent TICTeC  was held last month in London, but it’s been running since 2015 in cities all around Europe.

2:55

So there’s been one in Florence, one in Barcelona, Paris, Lisbon, really nice experience running conferences in all of these cities, and we were about to hold one in Reykjavik in 2020: the date might give you a clue around what happened to that.

3:12

It got cancelled quick sharp when the pandemic hit, unfortunately. And since then, TICTeC has been really active online in the meantime, And then last month in London was our first return to an in-person event.

3:27

Well, you know, it was hybrid, so you could join online as well, as many people did. And as I had to, so gutted, it was the first one I’ve missed.

But I was really ill, and I wouldn’t have been able to get involved properly as a helper.

3:40

You know, I wouldn’t have been much use in any function there, so I was tuning in from home. Anyway.

Most of the sessions were videoed, so you can watch them all now on our YouTube channel. And I’ll put the link in the show notes.

3:55

And there’s also a really great selection of photos of speakers and delegates so you can really catch the vibe of what it’s like to be at TICTeC, and we’re planning a podcast series around some of the video highlights, so I won’t go into too much detail now.

4:11

But just to say the main themes this year were around democracy and climate and the intersection of the two, and we had speakers from all around the world, including the Ministry of Digital Affairs from Taiwan,

4:25

Code for Pakistan, Fiquem Sabendo from Brazil, Mevan Babakar, the News and Information Credibility Lead at Google, and we had our wonderful keynotes, Nick Maybey and María Baron.

4:40

And lots, lots, lots more. There were speakers from Morocco, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Lithuania, Belarus and Nigeria. And that is just to name a few.

4:48

There really were people from all over the world, all working on civic tech. And honestly, our community is so fascinating when you get them together and you learn what they’ve been working on.

4:59

Everything from whether routing algorithms in journey planners allow for elderly women who are walking up hills with heavy shopping bags — that was one; then the role of AI in lobbying —

5:11

that was another, and then there was quite a lot of talk about running civic projects in hostile environments of various sorts.

5:18

So you know, there are people running projects in everything from poor internet infrastructure, hostile dictatorships.

5:26

You know, it really puts into perspective the much more minor problems that we have when we’re running mySociety’s projects, like WhatDotheyKnow and FixMyStreet. Anyway,

5:36

It is all fascinating stuff, and you can watch those 38 videos at your leisure. Next, the UK general election. And lots of people know mySociety best for our democracy tools

TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.

5:54

TheyWorkForYou publishes all the activity in Parliament; WriteToThem helps you email your representatives at every level: MPs, councillors, Assembly Members, what have you, and you don’t need to know who they are in order to use WriteToThem to contact them.

6:10

You just put in your postcode and it shows you a list of everybody who represents you and what those different representatives are responsible for, so quite useful just on that front to begin with, then it lets you send an email as well.

6:25

Now, for lots of our friends around the civic tech world, a general election means activity beforehand. So they’ll be encouraging voter registration or gathering data on who candidates are or explaining how to vote.

6:38

And historically TheyWorkForYou hasn’t really been very active in the run up to an election, you know, from the moment an election’s called officially, there are no MPs. And so you go on to TheyWorkForYou, put in your postcode to find out who your MP is, and you haven’t got one.

6:57

and of course, there’s no debates or anything for us to publish, so it all gets a bit tumbleweed around those few weeks. But this time around, we used the API from Democracy Club

7:08

so that we could show the candidates for each constituency, or again sort of linked up to your postcode. So you put in your postcode, see who was standing in your area.

7:20

And then there was a link to Democracy Club’s own websites WhoCanIVoteFor and WhereDoIVote? So a lot more useful for our users to signpost them to really sort of the information they needed before the election. And we also displayed constituency boundary changes.

7:39

But for us, really, the work is in updating our sites as soon as possible after the election, so that we have all the new MPs in place and the sites are up and running, ready to go. And again, thanks to Democracy Club’s data, we managed to import the new MP s into TheyWorkForYou

7:57

so it was ready the day after the election.Now there were a couple of stragglers because a couple of constituencies were recounting late into the next day, but there it all was and ready for people to sign up on TheyWorkForYou.com to follow their new MP and get email alerts every time that that MP speaks or votes, which is one of our core offerings on, TheyWorkForYou.

8:20

And if you haven’t done that yet, I will put a link in the show notes where you can sign up to receive those emails.

8:28

And then Matthew, who’s one of our developers — he’s been around pretty much since the beginning of mySociety, so he knows his stuff  — he wrote a blog post about some of the tech challenges with a general election.

8:40

So this election was the first UK parliament election with boundary changes since 2010, and in Matthew’s post he explains how TheyWorkForYou, having been around for so long and having legacy code,

8:53

it brought up some difficulties with historic data encoding, even like the circumflexes on a couple of the names of Welsh constituencies caused some little issues that we overcame thankfully, and thanks to people like Matthew who have got all that techie knowledge, and if you want to know more about the sort of stuff that most people don’t realise we do behind the scenes to run sites like TheyWorkForYou, then Matthew’s blog post is the place to go.

9:23

And Matthew also talked about how he was actually able to go to sleep on election night, thanks to a script that automatically imported all the election results. And he was running a little bot that piped in all the names of all the new MP s and constituencies into our Slack, which is the instant messaging service that mySociety staff used to chat to each other day to day, so we could see that that was all working smoothly.

9:49

And then in another post, Alex, who’s our Democracy Lead and Senior Researcher, he has linked to all the various tools and services and information that we have at mySociety to help you understand what’s happening in Parliament and in your own constituency.

10:07

So as well as TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem, we run Local Intelligence Hub, which has a wealth of really, really interesting data about your own constituency and the UK as a whole.

10:18

It’s fun to play with. You can use sliders. You can bring in datasets, get rid of other datasets and really learn a lot about your own local area and how that relates to everywhere else in the country.

10:31

Alex also mentioned our plans around WhoFundsThem, our newest project, in which we’ll be working with a group of volunteers and we’ll be producing summaries of MPs’ financial interests.

10:43

We’ll be talking a lot more about that, I’m sure, in a future edition. Next up: as you might know, mySociety does a lot of work around Freedom of Information, Access to Information.

10:59

And most recently, we’ve been working with FOI projects around Europe in our community of interest, sharing knowledge and mutual support.

11:08

With TICTeC being in London, lots of people from European Access to Information projects were in town at the same time, so it was a brilliant opportunity for all of them to meet up in person.

11:19

And Matt Stempeck from the Civic Tech Field Guide wrote the meeting up in a lot more detail. On our own blog, we provided a kind of summary of his summary.

11:29

The group had a lot to talk about. As you can imagine, it is always such a joy when people with a very niche expertise come together and can finally dig in really deep to that subject.

11:41

Maybe they don’t have people at home that they can talk to about all the details of Freedom of Information without their eyes glazing over a little bit. But here, at last was a chance to really dig in.

11:52

So some of the things they talked about: for example, what kind of metrics do you need to collect, to actually show that your project is having impact? How do projects tackle the various issues with their governments?

12:05

You know, this might run from governments who just don’t respond at all to Freedom of Information requests, and it goes as far as outright hostility to the whole concept of Access to Information.

12:17

Then, how do we get people to understand that they have rights to information? How do we engage with potential audiences? And what part can journalists play in that?

12:28

And, of course, then there’s the perennial issue of how do you fund these projects and just keep them going, on a very practical basis? And if you’d like to delve into any of that in more detail, I will put the link in the show notes to both our own blog post and Matt’s much more detailed report.

12:45

And Matt also explained the difference between Access to Information and Freedom of Information, which, to be honest, I had never fully appreciated before.

12:56

Then Jen, who’s our Projects and Partnerships Manager, she also wrote up what many of the European ATI groups have been up to. And here’s the audio version of the little video summary that she made.

[Jen:] Summer’s finally here in Northern Europe.

13:10

And as people wind down for a break, mySociety’s bringing exciting news from our Access to Information Network. 

13:18

AccessInfo Europe, Vouliwatch in Greece and VreauInfo in Moldova been collaborating on legal reform campaigns. Frag Den Staat in Germany have been diving deep into education funding scandals.

13:29

Spoon in the Netherlands had a win in the Amsterdam courts. Transparencia in Belgium are campaigning to change seven FOI regulations.

13:38

Imamo pravo znati in Croatia calculated that 6% of all Croatian requests go through their site and Ki Mit Tud in Hungary uncovered fraudulent calls for vote recounts.

13:50

That’s a lot, but there could be more if you’re part of our network or even part of our global community of practice, and you want to be showcased in our videos, please get in touch with me and I can put you in the August month notes.

14:02

If you want to read more about any of these stories, go to our blog on mySociety.org.

14:12

[Myf:] And then finally, on Freedom of Information.

14:14

We’ve made some updates to Alaveteli, which is our platform that helps you run a Freedom of Information site anywhere in the world. Our own Freedom of Information site

WhatDoTheyKnow runs on Alaveteli as well.

14:27

So the changes that I’m about to talk about also affect WhatDoTheyKnow. Two of the posts that we put up are of more interest to people behind the scenes people running these sites: they’re about how to do things like display blog posts more prominently on the website front page and how to bunch requests together into curated categories.

14:47

So that’s something that you might see coming on to WhatDoTheyKnow, but the last of these blog posts is for data-minded people, and it explains how to explore CSV – comma separated value – files that have been released as part of a Freedom of Information response,

15:05

using a Datasette instance. Now, slightly stumbling over my words there. If you know what that means, go wild. mySociety took me on because of my facility with words and communications, not data and techie stuff.

15:19

So I will just say, if you know more than me about that sort of thing, you can check it all out in the blog post.

15:30

Meanwhile, in our climate work, we heard from a volunteer who got involved with the Scorecards project, and I actually summarised this in a short video myself. So let’s play that now.

15:41

Yeah, so this is a great one for anyone who’s worried about the climate crisis, but not really fully sure what they can do about it. We heard from a lady called Fiona Dyer, who lives in Durham.

15:54

But you can live anywhere in the UK, and you could do exactly what she did. She told us her story of how she turned from being climate concerned to being climate active. So the first thing that happened was she became a volunteer with Climate Emergency UK, and she was helping to score councils up and down the country on their climate action.

16:20

So the Scorecards project basically looks at every council’s climate action: what are they doing about the climate, and it gives them marks across like loads and loads of different areas.

16:31

And as you can imagine, this is quite an involved project. And so, rather than try and do it all themselves Climate Emergency UK, they train up, volunteers so that they understand exactly how to look at a climate action plan and how to score it in quite a detailed way.

16:50

Now Fiona told us that it didn’t stop there, right? So after she’d been involved in the Scorecards project, she went on to work with her local climate action group in Durham, and they ran a citizens forum on climate action.

17:05

And this brought together citizens or people who live in Durham and the local county council to look at the various areas that had been scored in the Scorecards project and just talk about what they meant locally.

17:19

So for us, we were really happy to cover this because it was just a great story about how the Scorecards went on to have a much bigger impact than just for the project itself. The Scorecards are brilliant to inform councils and inform citizens about all the climate action that’s happening in the area:

17:38

What could be better, which areas they need to work on more. But here was somebody as well who gained skills and knowledge and confidence, and that allowed her to then go on and do something even more impactful locally.

17:52

So if you are interested in doing something similar, maybe volunteering for the next marking of council’s climate action plans with Climate Emergency UK, you can read our full blog post, which has got all the details and a link to how to sign up.

18:12

And then finally we put out a statement on mySociety’s approach to AI. We wanted to have a statement out there as we recognise that like many organisations, we’re increasingly using or considering the use of AI and we’ve been working on a policy to ensure that we’re doing so ethically and sustainably.

18:30

And we also wanted to do that in public, to encourage other organisations in our community to consider the same issues. Clearly, there are some aspects of AI not least its potential carbon footprint and the way that it can be trained on data without permission.

18:45

From the originators of that data and the inbuilt biases in that data, all of these have to be real concerns and, you know, at the same time as Alex notes, AI is changing a lot around the way people work and the civic tech field is obviously is no exception.

19:02

We can see many exciting directions that we might go with it and I’m sure others in our field can as well. But we want to do it ethically, environmentally, practically, and we want to encourage others to do so too. And the other strand

19:17

that Alex noted, was how… well I’ll use his own words here as he says it really well, he says, “mySociety applies relatively mature technology, like sending emails in interesting ways to societal problems”.

19:31

So reporting problems to the right level of government, like we do in WriteToThem; transforming parliamentary publishing like we do with TheyWorkForYou; building a massive archive of Freedom of Information requests, as you can see on WhatDotheyKnow and so on.

19:46

And we’re aware that the AI revolution is very much in its infancy, and we can’t yet have a full picture of how it’s going to interface with mySociety’s own services and mission. We just know it almost certainly will and again from Alex, he says:

20:01

“Our basic answer to when should we use AI is straightforward. We should use AI solutions when they are the best way of solving problems, when they’re compatible with our wider ethical principles and reputation, and can be sustainably integrated into our work.”

20:19

And that’s why we employ Alex for the big thinking. So thanks, Alex for that. You can read more in his main blog post. With all of that said, we know that we’re at the beginning of our thinking here.

20:31

Our policy is very much a work in progress, and we’re inviting feedback. So do go and read more about that via the link in the show notes. OK, so that’s it.

20:42

That was the last month at mySociety. Feels like quite a lot. Well, we’re always so busy, and we’ve always got so much going on, and I hope these monthly updates will continue to be full of interesting little nuggets for you to dig into.

20:57

I hope you did find something of interest in there. And I hope this format is working for you. Drop us a line at hello at mySociety dot org if you’d like to tell us how you found it. Thanks very much.

21:09

Catch you next month. Bye.