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/RSS FeedImagine a world where every citizen automatically receives the government grants they’re entitled to, stays informed about public consultations, and can easily contribute feedback—feedback that they trust will genuinely shape policy decisions. Services like these could strengthen and transform democracies worldwide.
But, should this be the reality we ought to seek? What are the opportunities and challenges? And how close are we to achieving this?
At this TICTeC gathering, we heard from two insightful speakers:
- Richard Gevers, Head of Service Design and Delivery at the Digital Services Unit of The Presidency South Africa.
- Sanna-Kaisa Saloranta, Specialist in the Democratic Innovations programme at Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund.
Sign up for our newsletter to be informed about future events, and find out more about TICTeC at tictec.mysociety.org. Appreciate mySociety’s work? Please do donate!
Transcript:
[00:04] Louise Crow: Welcome everyone. I’m Louise Crow. I’m Chief Executive of mySociety. Thank you so much for joining us today for this TICTeC community gathering: ‘From digital public infrastructure to democratic public infrastructure’.
[00:20] Just as a brief reminder, TICTeC stands for The Impacts of Civic Technology. TICTeC started life as a conference, but since 2020 we’ve been running year round activities to try and connect people building using and researching technology to strengthen democracy and civic power, with the aim of helping us learn from each other and boost our collective impact.
[00:44] So ahead of the global DPI summit next week, we thought this was a good time to talk about civic tech’s relationship to digital public infrastructure. What are we talking about when we say digital public infrastructure? (more…)
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TheyWorkForYou aims to improve the quality of UK democracy by making more and better information available to everyone. In previous updates, we’ve expanded coverage to all the UK’s parliaments and brought all the registers of interests together.
Now we’re pulling in data from beyond Parliament to provide richer insights into your representatives. Alex and Julia share our new features:
- Committees and APPG memberships
- Signatures (Early Day Motions and open letters)
- Vote annotations
- Adding context to parliamentary debates
- Improved email alerts for political monitoring
No intro this time: we’re plunging you straight into the audio from the event!
Useful links:
- If you’d prefer to watch the video of this session, it’s on our YouTube channel.
- TheyWorkForYou is here, and TheyWorkForYou Votes is here.
- Donate! It helps us do more of this sort of work! Thank you!
- Subscribe to our updates here (make sure ‘Democracy & Parliaments’ is ticked if that’s what you’re interested in).
- Julia mentions Local Intelligence Hub, which you can play with here.
- Alex mentions a video about how other parliamentary websites get audiences in an age when search engines have become less useful: it’s this one – also available as a podcast here.
Transcript
00:00 Julia Cushion Thanks so much for coming along to this little update. We try and do these every so often.
00:03 You might have come to our one a few months ago, we were talking about TheyWorkForYou Votes, whereas today, we’re telling you about some of the broader stuff we’ve been up to on TheyWorkForYou. We’re calling it “A richer view of Parliament.” (more…)
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In our latest online webinar, we convened three experts to speak around the topic of how Freedom of Information works in practice – in other words, how does the law work when it comes into contact with the real world?
Speakers were:
- Toby Mendel, Centre for Law and Democracy
- Giovanni Esposito, Université Libre de Bruxelles
- Mária Žuffová, European University Institute
Sign up for updates and we’ll let you know when the next events come up. Don’t forget to check the box ‘Conferences and events’ if you want to know about every event we put on, and/or any of the other topics you have an interest in.
Music: Grand_Project from Pixabay
Image: Nick Fewings
Transcript
Myf Nixon 0:00
Hello again. Today we’re sharing our latest online webinar, which was called “Putting transparency to the test: evaluating FOI in practice”.Myf Nixon 0:10
So the idea here was to look at how Freedom of Information is supposed to work on paper, and how it actually works when it comes into contact with the real world. (more…) -
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Note:
This is the audio version of an online event, in which a couple of the speakers refer to visual elements. If you’d like to see the websites, etc, that they mention, please see the video of the event at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvJVCgBprwY.
Details:
Across the world, there are many websites and apps that help citizens to better understand how their democracies work, and what their elected representatives are doing on their behalf.
Historically, one of the main ways these tools could measure their impact was by tracking their visitor numbers and page views via website analytics tools.
However, across the world, civic and pro-democracy tech projects are finding that citizens can’t, or no longer, directly visit their websites and apps. They’re either restricted by data packages that only allow them to use social media sites, or are finding out information via AI chatbots or social media, rather than directly visiting sites and apps.
This shift can make it harder than ever to measure the reach and impact of pro-democracy projects and tools. Traditional website analytics no longer tell the full story, leaving some projects struggling to demonstrate their effectiveness—and, as a result, to secure the funding needed to sustain vital democratic services.
At this TICTeC gathering, we hear directly from practitioners running civic and pro-democracy tech initiatives from across the world. They share the strategies they’re using to reach people where they are, ensure their services remain accessible and relevant, and find new ways to track impact in this changing digital landscape.
Ana Arevadze from ForSet in Georgia talks about their work with social media influencers to inform and educate Georgian youth on voting and democratic information.
Ufuoma Nnamdi-Udeh from Enough is Enough Nigeria shares how they have leveraged social media, chatbots, and messaging services through their ShineYourEye platform to provide citizens with accurate democratic information and improve access to elected representatives.
Joseph Tahinduka from ParliamentWatch Uganda speaks about working with infomediaries such as local radio and journalists to get parliamentary information to a wider audience, as well as their usage of social media and messaging apps.
More information
This is a TICTEC Communities of Practice session. Find out more about TICTeC at https://tictec.mysociety.org/.
Sign up for TICTeC updates at https://tictec.mysociety.org/events/ or subscribe to updates about all mySoicety activities by telling us what you’re interested in at http://eepurl.com/gOEVFj.
Transcript
Alex Parsons 0:01
Hi everyone. I’m Alex Parsons.Alex Parsons 0:02
I’m the Democracy Lead and senior researcher at mySociety. Thank you for joining us here for this TICTeC community gathering. (more…) -
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AI and automated decision-making technologies are increasingly being used in government, and due to their opaque nature, it’s vital that we bring more transparency to their workings. In this event, three researchers and civil society actors talk about how they have used Freedom of Information to do just that.
You’ll hear from Morgan Currie from the University of Edinburgh; Gabriel Geiger of Lighthouse Reports, and Jake Hurfurt from Big Brother Watch. Learn what concerns them about this new age of automated decision-making; the practical tips and techniques they’ve used to bring hidden algorithms to light; and what needs to change in our laws as a matter of urgency.
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More information
- Blog post, with links to the video and slides
- Morgan Currie’s research (with Alli Spring): Algorithmic Transparency in the UK
- Lighthouse Reports’ Suspicion Machines, as presented by Gabriel Geiger
- Big Brother Watch’s report on the ‘error-riddled AI tool to be used by the Home Office’.
- Find out more about the Access to Information Network
Transcript
Louise Crow 0:03
Hello, everyone, welcome. I’m Louise Crow, Chief Executive mySociety.Louise Crow 0:08
Thank you for joining us for this one hour session on how Access to Information can help us understand AI decision making in government. (more…) -
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New launch, new launch! We could have just talked about our new votes platform, but it was much more interesting to also explore a bit of history, and research into how MPs and the public use TheyWorkForYou. So, together with Dr Ben Worthy, Alex and Julia, that’s what we did.
Further information
- Find the TheyWorkForYou Votes platform here.
- Here’s a blog post about its launch.
- And here’s the same launch event that you hear in this episode of the podcast, only in video form.
- If you’d like to help us do more of this kind of work, please donate to mySociety.
- Sign up for the Repowering Democracy newsletter.
- How to help us gather information on how MPs are voting on the End of Life Bill.
- Ben’s research can be found on his website Who’s Watching Westminster.
Transcript
Speaker 1 0:00
Hello again. I’m Myf, Communications Manager at mySociety. We recently launched a new vote information platform, votes.theyworkforyou.com, and this is the first step towards making it much easier to understand the context around how your own MP voted – and also, if you’re a specialist, you’ll find lots of new tools and data that you can use.Myf Nixon 0:23
We had an online launch event for this, and you can listen to that right now. As well as Alex getting into the more technical details, we’ll first of all hear Julia talking about some of the milestones in TheyWorkForYou’s history, and Dr Ben Worthy sharing some of his fascinating research on how MPs and the general public have, through history, used voting records.Myf Nixon 0:47
I’ll put the links in our show notes to everything that gets mentioned in the recording. And also, if you’d rather watch this than listen to it, you can do just that on the mySociety site. So again, I’ll make sure that that link is in the show notes. -
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On March 4, we launched new data on TheyWorkForYou, making MPs’ financial interests easier for everyone to access and understand.
This wasn’t an easy undertaking! To explain the difficulties we encountered, and the recommendations we have for the way MPs declare their interests, we also put out a report.
At our launch event, we chatted through the challenges and our recommendations, together with Rose Whiffen of Transparency International, and Chris Cook from the Financial Times.
Links
- 📄Our report, Beyond Transparency.
- 🙏Donate to mySociety, so we can do more of this kind of work.
- 📺Rather watch this as a video instead of a podcast?
Transcript
Myf Nixon 0:01
Hi, Myf here, Communications Manager from mySociety. At the beginning of March, we launched the findings from our WhoFundsThem project. And you know what? This was a major undertaking for mySociety. (more…) -
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It’s March 4 2025, and we’re releasing a bunch of new data on TheyWorkForYou, around each MPs’ financial interests: that’s whether they have second jobs, what donations helped them campaign ahead of the general election, and whether they’ve received gifts such as Taylor Swift tickets.
In the course of assembling this data — with the help of our brilliant team of volunteers — we’ve come to understand exactly what the problems with the current system of reporting are.
If you’re seeing this on the morning of release, we’ll also be launching a report at 1pm today, and you’re welcome to join us. (Don’t worry if you’re too late; we’ll be sharing the video afterwards. Just make sure you’re signed up for our newsletter to be alerted when it’s available).
Don’t forget to check out your own MP, to see who funds them, on TheyWorkForYou.com. And if you have any questions about this project, the data, or MPs’ financial interests in general, send them to us at whofundsthem@mysociety.org.
If you appreciate this type of work, please help us do more of it by making a one-off (or even better, a regular) donation. Thank you!
Transcript
[0:00] Julia: If you’ve ever wondered if your MP has a second job, what donations they received, or if they were one of the ones that got a free Taylor Swift ticket, we’ve got the answers for you. (more…)
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In this super-short episode, we look at three recent examples of how the Council Climate Action Scorecards are bringing measurable change. The Scorecards are a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK, and you can visit them at councilclimatescorecards.uk.
Here are the three blog posts where you can find more details about all of these examples:
- Cotswold District Council working together with residents (and if you’re local, find details of how to get involved too)
- Scorecards spark carbon literacy training at South Cambs council
- Gedling Borough Council appreciate the gravitas the Scorecards bring
If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.
Transcript
0:00 [Myf:] I’m not really a data person. I’m a Communications Manager, right? So my currency is words and pictures, but my colleagues at mySociety are real data people. (more…)
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In our second video interviewing subjects of the book Our City: Community Activism in Bristol, we talk to journalist Joe Banks, who was able to find a real anomaly in the council’s approach to developing the oldest part of the city.
He did this both by looking at information other people had requested, and putting in his own Freedom of Information requests, on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow website.
Details of the book can be found on the Tangent Books website.
You can read lots more about Joe’s investigation into St Mary Le Port, and other local topics, on his website.
If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.
Transcript
0:05 Myf: I’m Myfanwy Nixon, communications manager at mySociety. We’ve been talking to some of the people featured in this book: Our City, community activism in Bristol, edited by Suzanne Audrey. (more…)
