In June this year, a Lords Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement was appointed. Submissions of written evidence were invited, and of course, this being very much our area, we felt the need to contribute.

Our written evidence is a fairly quick read. Nonetheless we hope that it gets the essential points across, drawing on our experience in what works and what doesn’t in technology for civic engagement.

You can view all the submissions the inquiry received on the Parliament website. The committee will report their findings by the end of March next year.

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Image: Daniel Funes Fuentes (Unsplash)

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28 September is International Right To Know Day, and this year it’s a particularly important milestone. 2016 marks the 250th anniversary of Freedom of Information as a concept.

If you’re a teacher of Citizenship or even subjects like Law, History, PSHE or English, you may be interested to know that we have free lesson plans available.

These cover a wide variety of topics, including a half hour lesson on Freedom of Information, aimed at years 10-13 — there are also lessons on concepts such as democracy and having a voice in society. Developed last year in collaboration with the Citizenship Foundation, the lesson plans were created and tested by teachers and have been downloaded by hundreds of schools since their launch.

You might also be interested to see this entertaining article from the US Freedom of Information website Muckrock, aimed directly at high school students. It is, of course, American oriented, but it’s a very good introduction to the opportunities FOI affords younger people.

So, why not mark International Right To Know Day by introducing your students to the concept of FOI, and showing them what they can do with it in the areas they care about?

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Image: Hana Tichá (CC-2.0)

Are you a teacher who might be able to help us with a new project?

mySociety volunteers help us in all kinds of ways, and not just with coding stuff. This time we need skills and experience that only teachers can bring.

Here’s the thing: we’ve often heard from teachers of subjects like Politics, Citizenship and Social Studies that they’d love to integrate TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem – and maybe even FixMyStreet –  into their classroom activities.

We’d love it too. Our remit is to make democratic processes more accessible to all parts of society, and if this means that a whole new generation see contacting your politician as a perfectly normal and easy thing to do, well, that’d be a big win.

We want to provide downloadable lesson plans and resources – but we are not experts and we want to make sure that we get this right. Obviously, materials need to fit in with the present curricula, and be genuinely viable for classroom use.

There’s another possibility here, too – some of our software could be used in the classroom for students interested in coding and creating a new wave of online democracy projects themselves.

So: if you’re a teacher with a particular interest in democracy or digital technology, and you’d be willing to have a quick chat and then prepare some materials that we could provide for schools all across the UK to download, well – we’d love to hear from you. Or if that sounds like too much commitment, but you just have some ideas, let us know. Please mail us on hello@mysociety.org.

Thanks!

Image: Venspired (CC)