1. Climate Action Scorecards are having real-life effects

    mySociety podcast
    mySociety
    Climate Action Scorecards are having real-life effects
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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:

    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.

    0:13 And every day, when I’m writing up the stories about what people are doing with our data, I learn and understand more about the power of what it can do.

    0:23 So this week, it’s been my job to write up the stories about how three different types of people are using the Council Climate Action Scorecards. And these are a joint project between mySociety and Climate Emergency UK, and they mark local councils all over the UK on their climate action.

    0:43 Now looked at one way, those scores are just loads and loads of numbers, but they are helping people do really useful things around climate action. So the scorecards mark local councils across all kinds of different areas of climate action, and that’s really useful for the councils themselves to see. But it’s not just the councils who can see this. It’s also local residents. In fact, it’s anyone who wants to.

    1:09 We told the story of one local resident in Cirencester who used that data to inform a question that they asked at their local council meeting. And this is a right that everybody has, and that one question resulted in a resident and council group being set up where residents can work together with councils, and they’re working on things like retrofit and sustainable transport together.

    1:38 They’re looking for more members as well, people right across the Cotswolds. So if you’re interested in being a part of that, then check out our blog post.

    1:46 The Scorecards give councils marks on different areas of their climate action and one thing that South Cambridgeshire noticed was they’d scored poorly around staff awareness training, and since then, they’ve put training in place right across the council, and that includes councilors. So you can read more about that in our blog post.

    2:04 And then finally, this week, I wrote about the small Borough Council of Gedling, who also told us about how they had used the Council Climate Action Scorecards. And at Gedling, they basically said that because the Scorecards are an independent source, it gave them what they described as the gravitas to approach all the different departments in the council internally and engage in a conversation about what can be done in those departments around the relevant bits of climate action.

    2:36 And if you would like to read more about that, again, it’s all written up in the mySociety blog, and I’ll put the link to all of those blog posts in the show notes. Thanks very much for listening.

    2:48 If you appreciate what mySociety does, whether that’s with climate or data, transparency, democracy, then please consider giving us a donation. You can do this at www.mysociety.org/donate, and we promise that we’ll put every penny to really good use.

     

  2. FOI for investigating: Joe Banks and Mary Le Port

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    mySociety
    FOI for investigating: Joe Banks and Mary Le Port
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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.

    0:18 In this second interview, I spoke to Joe Banks, a journalist who’s been following really carefully the development of an old part of the city in Bristol, Mary Le Port. It’s said that it’s almost as old as Bristol itself, and in 2018

    0:35 the Council announced some plans for redevelopment. Now what Joe found through FOI was fascinating,

    0:40 actually. What really intrigued him was a complete 360 degree turnaround in the council’s attitude towards this development plan. So their initial stance was that it was way too big, and then all of a sudden they gave it a green flag to push it through. All of this is what Joe discovered with Freedom of Information using mySociety’s website WhatDoTheyKnow.com.

    1:03 But we started off by discussing Joe’s discovery of a Facebook group that wasn’t all that it seemed.

    1:10 Joe: I’m Joe Banks, freelance journalist: I’ve written for people like Vice and I’ve written locally, written for the Bristol Cable.

    1:16 I became interested in a development in the in the Old City, in the historic centre of Bristol, which was for three large office blocks, which was very controversial. It was very large, way out of scale with what remains of the Old City.

    1:33 Most, a lot of the old city in Bristol was destroyed in the in the bombing of the Second World War. Half of it is now a park because that whole area of the Old City was just obliterated.

    1:44 It was in one of these committees, and it’s in the minutes that they have a discussion, and they say it will be good for members and officers to set up a “Friends Of” group, right?

    1:56 That was the phrasing, you know. So this is a top down thing they’re talking about. And then the Facebook group appeared a week later, after that. An astroturfing community group.

    2:07 There’d been a history in this location of local opposition to previous schemes trying to take a chunk of the park. And yes, it turned out that the developer had put the community group right at the centre of their community engagement, which all developers have to go through as part of the planning process.

    2:24 And you’d had this guy giving a statement to the actual planning meeting, where the planning application was determined by the council, and telling them that the members of this community group were were in favour of the proposal, at ten to one. But it turned out he got that figure from counting emojis on the Facebook page. So not the most scientific of bases.

    2:47 And I wasn’t actually very switched on in terms of local governance issues in Bristol and planning and development, but it sparked my interest.

    2:57 And then I was looking into this, into this Facebook group and so forth, but by the time that I was interested in it and started looking at it, the planning application had, actually, it had been given permission.

    3:10 Then I got into into the Freedom of Information requests and looking at trying to work out how the whole process had unfolded.

    3:18 And so actually my first experience of putting in Freedom of Information requests, was what correspondence had occurred between the council and this sort of pseudo community group.

    3;29 But then, yes, I saw all these other requests related to this. Specifically to this development. I didn’t know who they were by, but they had a lot of interesting material in them.

    3:40 The next stage was trying to see what had been going on. Between the planning department and the developers, there’s a pre application process: before a planning application goes before council, particularly for big developments like this and very sensitive locations, there’s a back and forth with the Planning Officers looking at the designs and saying where they think it’s good and where it doesn’t meet the demands of the local plan, which is what planning applications are assessed against.

    4:14 That was my Freedom of Information request, right? Trying to get further insight into it. I mean, that’s a formal process. It’s letters that are sent: pre-app one, pre-app two, yeah. So I was able to get hold of those.

    4:28 I knew from emails that were in these other Freedom of Information requests from other people that there had been basically four pre-app stages.

    4:35 But what came back from my request only went to the third, so I then had to go back, you know? And say, “I know you’ve got a  fourth. Can I have that please?”

    4:44 Yeah, if I hadn’t had the other information from the other requests, I wouldn’t have known that existed. And that fourth one was the letter from the the Head of Development Management. Basically what he was saying in that reiterated what the officers had been saying

    5:00 all along: this development is not acceptable. It’s too big. It’s too bulky. This was the same planning man, you know, Head of Development Management, who had sat in the planning meeting encouraging the councillors to vote for an unchanged proposal.

    5:15 Stage four was his letter, and the final letter from the planning department to the developer before they were going to put in their application.

    5:25 He’s reaffirming, you know, what the council have been saying all the way through this process: this design is not acceptable.

    5:31 You then fast forward, I think, a month on from that, they put the planning application in, which is unchanged, the committee meeting comes around. It was about six months later, and he’s in that meeting, yeah, recommending approval for this design he previously said was unacceptable and that, and again, this was through the other Freedom of Information requests that other people have put in.

    5:51 You could see the email correspondence between the cabinet member for city planning, one of the main contacts for the developers in the council, and she was agreeing to have meetings with the Commercial Director of the developer. There were also meetings with the Executive Director for growth and regeneration. So that’s one of the three most senior officers in the council

    6:13 and the head of the Mayor’s office. People have been putting these Freedom of Information requests in talking about ‘interference’.

    6:19 What they were talking about predominantly was interference from the Mayor’s office who was supposed to be completely detached, you know, legally supposed to be completely detached from the planning function of the council.

    6:31 So you could see these meetings happening, and they were happening just after Historic England had put in their official opposition to the development.

    6:40 I also verified through Freedom of Information request that there’s no record of any of these meetings.

    6:46 [Myf:] And I think this must be your wording, because it doesn’t sound like mine in my notes, but “The development industry has penetrated local government with a disdain for democratic process and accountability.”

    6:58 [Joe:] I imagine that they were not not wanting to put those on record, you know, the shadow system in planning, you know, which is going on

    7:10 outside the public facing process.

    7:14 And, yeah, I think people should be held accountable for that, because we it’s so important that we, that the public can see how this is happening.

    About WhatDoTheyKnow

    7:24 What a great idea that this is publicly available to everyone to access and see the request, see the response. I’m using it quite often. Now, you know, it’s just very well put together.

    7:37 I think it works really, really brilliantly. Yeah, the way you can see all those Freedom of Information requests for a particular institution is great. Yeah, I think it’s a fantastic resource.

    7:46 Yeah, I couldn’t have actually drawn a picture of that whole process without having access, as well as getting that fourth pre-application document.

    7:57 I had to know that it existed, otherwise I never could have made them give it to me.

    On dealing with challenges in the FOI process

    8:02 I think there’s a big question around how Freedom of Information operates and and you’ll get false, often false exemptions that they’re putting up that you then have to get to an internal review, point out, you know, go through the ICO, the legislation, and show them that you can see, you know, that they’re not following the rules.

    8:21 [Myf:] Thanks very much to Joe for sharing his really interesting story with us.

    8:25 And if you’re interested to read more of that sort of thing, you can buy the book Our City, edited by Suzanne Audrey. And if you’re intrigued by what Freedom of Information can do, why not check out my Society’s website. WhatDoTheyKnow.com. It takes you through the whole process and makes it really easy to ask for information from public authorities.

     

  3. FOI for campaigning: We Love Stoke Lodge

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    mySociety
    FOI for campaigning: We Love Stoke Lodge
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    We Love Stoke Lodge is a campaign group in Bristol, and the subject of one of the chapters of the book Our City, edited by Suzanne Audrey. Many of the campaigns featured in the book used WhatDoTheyKnow and FOI to uncover vital information to support their campaigns. Hear Helen Powell describe the group’s experiences of campaigning to save a beloved piece of land for public use, and what they discovered thanks to FOI.

    If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.


  4. Discovering TICTeC 2: Pryou Chung on fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action

    mySociety podcast
    mySociety
    Discovering TICTeC 2: Pryou Chung on fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action
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    mySociety staffers Zarino, Gemma and Myf discuss the TICTeC Session “Fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action”, in which Pryou Chung of East West Management Institute gave real life examples of how seemingly positive climate initiatives can go badly wrong when financial structures and baked in biases provide an incentive to overlook indigenous people.

    Watch Pryou’s presentation for yourself here.

    If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.


     

    Transcript

    0:05 Myf: I’m Myf, I’m Communications Manager at mySociety.
    Zarino: I’m Zarino, I’m the Climate Programme Lead at mySociety.
    Gemma: I’m Gemma, I’m mySociety’s Events and Engagement Manager.
    0:16 Myf: We’re going to talk now about Pryou Chung from the East West Management Institute, and the name of the video is “Fostering inclusive approaches to technological innovations for climate action”, and that was a remote session at TICTeC 2024.
    0:31 Gemma: Having a session that highlights the human rights risks involved with digital innovation in the climate space, and ways to navigate that, seemed especially important to include – and actually I don’t really remember us
    0:45 having highlighted technology’s impact and effect on indigenous peoples at previous TICTeCs.
    Zarino: Yeah, so she was talking about two examples – one in Cambodia and one in Thailand – of places where local indigenous communities had
    1:01 basically been excluded often intentionally from really fundamental decisions about how the climate crisis is being addressed in their area in ways that really would affect them: big infrastructure projects and
    1:14 implementation of things like biodiversity credits, and she described them as like technocratic approaches to the climate crisis.
    Myf: You could feel warm and fuzzy and like everybody’s doing the right thing because they’re using these wonderful phrases: “carbon financing” and “biodiversity credits” and
    1:32 all of these things, but there’s a bit of greenwashing going on there.
    Zarino: At one point she said, “Data’s not neutral”, which I really like, and she sort of explained how data and technology has been implemented to perpetuate the existing kind of imbalance of power.
    Myf: She was saying these inequalities are almost baked in, whether by design or just
    1:51 because technology is coming from a world that just completely ignores indigenous populations.
    Zarino: There was one kind of thread through it which is something we’ve been thinking about at mySociety, around ownership of
    2:05 data, or physical infrastructure – ownership of things like heat pumps. Ground source heat networks, for anyone who doesn’t know, are one of the more efficient alternatives to individual gas boilers in everyone’s homes, but they throw up really interesting questions about who
    2:22 literally owns that physical infrastructure and so we were coming at it as mySociety from like, how can we bring communities together to take on shared ownership of an asset like a heat network that is literally, like, embedded in the streets around your estate or whatever? I think
    2:38 it also applies to like the physical kind of infrastructure, like Pryou was talking about, she gave an example of a mangrove protection scheme and how communities were meant to look after these mangroves but they only got like 20% share of profits of what comes out of the mangroves, whereas somebody else – I
    2:55 assume the organisations that set this up, or who invested in the first place -get 80%. Nice for them. I think one of the things we’ve been wondering is like, is there a fairer way to try and do that, through things like community share offers, or like local nonprofits and co-ops? Like are there ways we can use
    3:11 Civic Tech to try and give those organisations an unfair advantage in a way?
    Gemma: Pryou’s presentation really made me reflect on some of our previous
    discussions that we’ve had internally about reducing our carbon emissions and carbon offsetting. At the moment,
    3:28 mySociety does carbon offset – not to projects that are protecting rainforests,
    like REDD projects like Pryou mentioned – but it raises the difficulties that there are in those sort of projects and for us it seemed like doing that was better than doing nothing. These sort of presentations really bring to the forefront those sort of discussions and
    3:48 make us realise that we should be constantly reviewing our decisions about carbon offsetting.
    Myf: I noticed that at the end she said that she was still an optimist herself. She said that a lot of the problems that she was facing now were the same problems that she had right at the beginning of her career, so good on her for being such an optimist – but she says, “I still believe that AI and
    4:07 data-driven technology could be a solution. We’re still battling the same systemic injustices and imbalances as when I started my career.”
    Gemma: I would have loved her to go into why she believes AI and other data-driven technologies can be the solution, but I think yeah her focus was on talking about those
    power imbalances that still do exist.
    4:26 Zarino: These feel like really deep structural problems, and being based in the UK I think we’re probably missing some of the historical and cultural social aspects of that, but when I apply
    4:42 it to what we’ve been thinking about here in the UK, I think it does give me
    some hope – things like CAPE, our Climate Action Plan Explorer; the Scorecards even; the Local Intelligence Hub – they’re all about scrutiny and transparency of local government decisions. Admittedly we’re
    4:56 not talking about indigenous populations here, but there are communities in the UK who are really on the breadline, who are often completely excluded from decisions either because they don’t feel they have a voice, they can’t participate in
    5:09 decision-making or policy making or they’re just busy single moms who don’t have time to turn up to a consultation exercise. And so some of the stuff we’ve been doing here in the UK, and I think some of the other the other topics throughout the whole of this year’s TICTeC have sort of proven that there are
    5:25 ways that technology and more transparent data can help. Pryou was being really brutally honest about how difficult that is. But yeah, taking it as part of a wider picture, I think we have seen some examples of how technology can be used for good as well as ill.
    5:40 Myf: I’ll put the link to this video in the show notes, and it’s just one of many videos that were taken at TICTeC 2024, so whatever you’re interested in, there’s sure to be a session that is of interest.

  5. Discovering TICTeC 1: OpenUp South Africa on measuring impact

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    mySociety
    Discovering TICTeC 1: OpenUp South Africa on measuring impact
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    TICTeC, the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference from mySociety, runs for just two days – but those two days are packed with civic tech practitioners sharing insights and experience from projects along the world.

    We share most of the sessions as videos on our YouTube channel, and to help you decide what to watch first, we’ve asked mySociety staff to pick their favourites and chat about what they found so interesting. In this episode, Alice, Gemma and Myf discuss “Have you empirically improved transparency and accountability?” from Sean Russell of OpenUp South Africa.

    You can watch that session in full for yourself at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsfjF7kV5go.

    If you value the work we do at mySociety, please donate.


     

    Transcript

    0:00 Gemma: Hi, I’m Gemma I’m mySociety’s Events and Engagement Manager and I am the producer of TICTeC.

    Myf: I’m Myf and I am the Communications and Marketing Manager

    00:10 at my Society.

    Alice: Alice I’m the Head of Fundraising at mySociety.

    Myf: Today we’re going to talk about one of the sessions that was at TICTeC 2024 and this was

    0:20 Sean Russell from openup South Africa and the title was “Have you empirically improved transparency and accountability?”. Alice you chose this one to talk about.

    0:30 Alice: Yeah I liked that he was challenging us to think about how do we prove that we are having the impact in the world that we say we want to? It’s obviously very relevant as a fundraiser.

    0:40 I have to demonstrate that we are having an impact. He gave some really good examples of what he called The Good, The Bad and The Misguided.

    Gemma: in terms of impact measurement it was a really

    0:50 nice sort of back to basics presentation of why it’s important to measure impact in the first place and some ways to go about it, but they also talked

    1:00 about some really interesting impacts of their own work which is what TICTeC’s all about. They run a tool, apparently, that is a medicine price registry, so a massive database where you can see

    1:10 prices of all the medicines across South Africa at their lowest price, so you can see if you’re being overcharged and apparently it’s a legacy project doesn’t have any funding

    1:20 and they don’t measure the impacts of it, and then when website went down one day and they had loads of calls and emails saying, “Where’s the website? I use it all the time!”

    1:30 and it it has a massive real world impact that they just weren’t measuring, so I thought about some of mySociety’s tools, you know, our legacy projects that we keep up to date but we don’t

    1:40 have any funding for and just wondered what would happen if we turned off some of our sites and what the impact of that would be.

    Alice: He also talked about how there’s a service

    1:50 that they have for looking at corruption in lottery grants, and he said it essentially only has two users, which if you – and his words were,

    2:00 “If you’re measuring success based on user numbers then this would be the worst website ever!”, but he then went on to talk about the fact that those two users have

    2:10 then gone on to have like significant impact with that and it’s been dramatic the things that have come from it.

    Myf: Those two users are journalists, right?

    2:20 Alice: Journalists and legal experts, so people who can actually make change happen from seeing this data, and that I think is really interesting relating it to mySociety again like Gemma was just talking

    2:30
    about – we’ve got services that are more niche and they they reach like more specific audiences, so user numbers, we’ve got services that reach millions of people, but we’ve got

    2:40 other services that have much smaller numbers, but if those people are then going on to have really significant real world change with the information that we’ve provided or the

    2:50 way that we’ve been able to connect them to important information, then that’s what we want to see. It doesn’t matter how many people are doing it as long as there is change happing as a result and

    3:00
    I think that’s where he was trying to make the distinction between outputs and numbers, and actual outcomes and impact.

    Gemma: I found it really impressive that they actually could count up

    3:10 how much money was actually being recovered from uncovering that corruption so I think he said like 20 million Rands which, I don’t know, is like a million pounds or something that had been recovered from

    3:20 those investigations of that civic tech project that had two users.

    Myf: I remember he sort of opened the whole talk up, didn’t he, by saying somebody came into the office one day and said, “Why should people fund our projects

    3:30 rather than just feeding a hungry child?” The answers that he came up with was that it’s about systemic change so it’s about making the changes that then

    3;40 ensure that there are fewer hungry children in the world rather than just addressing the problem.

    Alice: Which is what I guess people in civic tech are trying to do like and it’s why

    3:50 I think he wanted to do this talk and challenge us in the room to think about how how we’re measuring that systemic impact because it’s harder to prove than, yes, we’ve fed this many children but actually how do you see if you are

    4:00 having systemic impact and as you say the systemic change bit is a really important part the impact of civic tech.

    Gemma: But also he mentioned that if civil

    4:10 society are not doing those projects, then for-profits might take up that space.

    Myf: I thought that was a brilliant point actually.

    Gemma: Yeah. I find it really refreshing that he was saying how hard

    4:20 this stuff is to track you know, because you almost expect everyone else to be finding it a bit easier or like there’s some magic silver bullet that is the way

    4:30 to track impact and measure impact but of course there isn’t. They’ve got some really good ideas, you know they gave their methodologies. I feel like it makes us feel a bit better that like this is a hard thing.

    4:40 This presentation by OpenUp was chosen for TICTeC 2024 because it it really epitomises what TICTeC’s all about. Obviously the Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, we want to talk

    4:50 about how do you measure impact, what impact your civic tech projects are having, and the fact that this encapsulated both impacts of their civic tech tools

    5:00 telling us about those and methodologies for how to actually do the impact measurement was just TICTeC all over. OpenUp, they’re going to be mentoring a couple

    5;10 of the organisations that are part of the Access to Information community to help them measure impact of their civic tech tools and their Access to Information tools, so that’s a a really nice impact of

    5:20 TICTeC, you know you meet amazing people doing really interesting work and then you end up partnering with them to do longer term projects.

     

  6. Episode 2: September 2024

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    mySociety
    Episode 2: September 2024
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    We’ve got updates from Julia on this Parliament’s first Register of Financial interests, showing what second jobs and gifts, etc, MPs have declared; and on the startlingly diminished list of All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs).

    Meanwhile, Gareth tells us how to get a discount on WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, and we hear from AccessInfo about a new award – the winner will be invited to Madrid to present their work.

    Alongside all of that, Myf explains how a WhatDoTheyKnow user harnessed the power of Reddit to verify the responses they were receiving to their FOI requests.

    Enjoy!

    Links

    Music: Chafftop by Blue Dot Sessions.

    Transcript

    [0:04] Myf: Hello. Thank you very much for tuning in. 

    [0:07] This is our second monthly collection of news and updates from mySociety, and my name is Myf Nixon. I’m mySociety’s Communications Manager. 

    [0:15] This month, I’m going to share with you five pieces of news — two from our democracy work, and three from our transparency side. (more…)

  7. Episode 1: August 2024

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    mySociety
    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. (more…)