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2025 definitely felt like it’s had quite the entrance and things have been full and exciting here at mySociety’s transparency team! So let’s take a look at how 2025 started for the ATI Network
mySociety: have been working hard putting together a schedule for TICTeC, there’s going to be an ATI day on June 12th which we hope you’ll all attend, and there’s set to be an amazing group of ATI focused sessions which we’re excited about! We’re also kicking off our FOI support process for organisations working with marginalised communities and hope to share more about that soon.
Access Info Europe: sent the Moldovan recommendations to the Council of Europe Access to Information Group, a monitoring body established by the Tromsø Convention (see here). They’ve also been pushing forward working with MaDada in France and SPOON in Netherlands getting their legal reform work rolling.
SPOON: Started 2025 with our focus for the new year: hitting the streets. One of the ways we will do this, is by launching a Woo-forum and proactively answer all questions we receive via that forum. This also means changing our workflow(s) from a ‘we know what you need’ to a ‘tell us what you need’ approach. And teaming up with other organisations and professionals on facilitating the needs that come forward from these questions, kicking off with mySociety participating in their Impact Measurement Mentorship program!
Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska: In December and January, we focused on several key initiatives, including expanding free legal support for SLAPP cases and seeking funding for this program. We worked to promote transparency in salaries, improve the process for selecting the new Head of the National Electoral Office, and streamline the management of asset declarations. Efforts were also made to enhance anti-SLAPP regulations and advocate for Poland’s membership in the Open Government Partnership. Additionally, we hosted a webinar on transparency with experts, published a new edition of the Transparency Report and other summaries, and released a podcast on Public Information Bulletins.
Ma Dada: Ma Dada has been working together with Access Info on legal reform proposals for France, the result of which was just published. We have also been busy looking for funding, and training some more journalists to use the platform. Also, we officially left X/twitter because it is so far from our values that it didn’t make sense to stay there and try to fight an algorithm that is programmed to destroy everything we work for. You can do it too, and https://helloquittex.com will help you bring your community over to bluesky/mastodon in a few clicks.
Transparencia: are exhausted by a SLAPP procedure ((Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) A Maire from Brussels spent 48 000 € of public money in lawyers fees to defeat us in a second trial and ask for a non-disclosure clause of this huge public amount. This expensive lawyer has been contracted without public procurement. The blackmail (in case of disclosure of this amount) is to send bailiffs to our house.
Vouliwatch/Arthro5A: Had a meeting with the General Secretary of the Ministry of Interior and presented/discussed in detail our policy recommendations for the improvement of the access to information legal framework.
VreauInfo: and Access Info Europe have been working hard on recommendations for the FOI law in Moldova. Lawyers for Human Rights widely distributed the recommendations to the public and public bodies in Moldova and they were picked up by an Anti Corruption journalist who wrote a piece on their work.
Abrimos Info: After the constitutional reform in México, the National Transparency Platform is transitioning from the autonomous body to the executive branch. Together with 200 orgs we published a text demanding data integrity during the transition. In x and linkedin. There is an official release by the executive branch mentioning cryptography for data integrity, likely because of our push.
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Photo: Vika Strawberrika -
As this will be the last monthnotes of 2024 (because on New Years Eve we’ll be looking back at the past year and toasting to the wonderful strides we’ve all made in our work in 2024) we here at mySociety’s transparency team wanted to wish you all a happy holidays and a fantastic new year celebration. Let’s take a look at what November brought us!
FragDenStaat: won the right for digital media to be considered media in the courts! This is a huge step forward for a slightly archaic system that previously had only considered printed media to be “the press”
mySociety: are pushing forward with our support to marginalized communities and are starting some cohorts of groups using our projects service in early January. We’re also excited to be mentoring SPOON on their impact measurement work !
Access Info: are working in depth with MaDada and SPOON on their legal reform Projects, and helping NI work on their OGP action plan. We also just delivered a Legal Framework Reform Masterclass for the ATI network and are looking forward to sharing more about our work in this area in 2025.
SPOON: are preparing for next year! We defined our focus for 2025: leaving the building. Going out into the woods getting to know our users, what they need and how we can help. One of the ways we will do this, is by launching a Woo-forum in January and proactively answer all questions we receive via that forum. This also means changing our workflow(s) from a ‘we know what you need’ to a ‘tell us what you need, we don’t know’ approach. Introducing ‘intakes’ and looking for other organisations and professionals to work together on facilitating the needs that come forwards from thos intakes.
Also we are happy to announce to be one of the few lucky ones to team up with mySociety on their Impact Measurement Mentorship starting in 2025!
Sieć Obywatelska Watchdog Polska: sent approximately 2,500 public information requests to schools, courts, and county offices. We organized local meetings about transparency. Together with other organizations, we advocated for anti-SLAPP legal reforms in Poland and took a stance on amendments to the law on assemblies.
Ma Dada: have been working on a call for individual donations from our community, and a grant proposal for tech work together with mySociety (around GDPR/search). Work is ongoing on our FOI observatory. We also had a brief internal conversation around a law proposal to bring back a 50€ stamp fee on court appeals (which would include FOI court appeals).
ImamoPravoZnati: Gong has been educating journalism students about FOI and demonstrating the uses of the IPZ platform.
KiMitTud: started a campaign with hashtag #kozadatbesztof (articles and social media postst) covering the most interesting freedom of information request of each month in 2024. We published two short animations: what does public data means and how to make a FOI-request (full article covering the topic in Hungarian here).
Some legal challenges for FOI in Hungary: the government has stuffed new legislation into a bill that removes the Ministry of Agriculture’s obligation to publish contracts with the National Land Center.
One of our latest successful complaint to the Hungarian National Authority for Data Protection and Freedom of Information: a state-owned company has finally sent the impact study for the port of Trieste – the only problem: most of the document’s contect is covered with black marks.Vouliwatch/Arthro5A: sadly didn’t win their funding pitch to google to look at the use of AI in parliaments, but they’ll still be exploring this topic in the future.
AccessInfo Hong Kong: will be relaunching our website with a new portal and name in Jan 2025! We also have published a manual on how to use the Code on Access to Information in Hong Kong in English and Chinese. https://civicsight.org/access/accessinfo/
Abrimos Info: are continuing the fight for the access to information right on multiple fronts. The reforms are on the verge of being approved without significant modifications or meaningful debate. We have signed this joint statement with more than 200 CSOs. https://articulo19.org/mexico-dejara-de-ser-un-referente-en-el-mundo-en-materia-transparencia-para-convertirse-en-uno-de-opacidad/
OpenUp ZA: are working with KiMitTud on the impact measuring mentorship
Other news:
In the Civic Tech Field Guide, we’ve aggregated network-wide Access to Info impact measurement metrics Thanks to everyone who shared their stats.
Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash
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All of us working on Access to Information here at mySociety were extremely saddened to hear of the death of Helen Darbishire on October 18th. Helen was one of the key leaders of the Access to Information space, and her tireless enthusiasm and drive to improve transparency around the world – along with her warm and welcoming personality – will be sorely missed by us all. Please join us in sending best wishes to the Access Info Europe team during this difficult time and supporting Rachel and Carlos in their mission to build on the work Helen started.
FragDenStaat: have been uncovering hidden tax havens in secret forest locations in the middle of Germany – held by the descendents of the founders of the ottoman empire; the kinds of stories that feel like they’re fiction but are actually fact!
mySociety: are working hard on our new round of AI experiments to detect misuse of WDTK, finishing up and submitting our year 2 report for the ATI network project and planning out the next couple of meetup events. We’ve also been getting campaign groups on board for a FOI support pipeline we’ll be running from January to July 2025 to go through the process of forming a request to analysing data.
Access Info: have been liaising with MaDada and SPOON to finalise the legal framework projects they’ll be working on over the next 6 – 12 months.
SPOON: experimented for the first time sending in a legal opinion in a court case of a citizen who had started a legal procedure after his FOI-request for disclosure of a memo was dismissed. He had won in the first instance, but the municipality hired the most prominent government law firm to appeal the decision. The point of contention was the interpretation of an important provision in our FOI-act that had not previously come before our highest court. The court allowed us to join in the hearing and answer questions. This way we could make for a level playing field and make sure the court heard all arguments on the side of the citizen. Compared to starting your own case from the beginning, it is more time effective and a real case from a citizen is more sympathetic. And you achieve the status of ‘expert’, which is good for your reputation. Judgement is expected late November.
Regarding our Alavetelli platform, we are in the process of coming to an agreement with the Ministry of Interior Affairs on our handling of the privacy of government officials.
Ma Dada: got a new grant to pimp up the website and reach out to civil society organisations and non-profits in France. We got started with work on this. We are also discussing how to approach GDPR in relation to public bodies.
ForSet: ForSet has been focused on upcoming parliamentary elections. Following ideation sessions and working groups from Civic Tech Summit hold in Tbilisi in August, we co-launched two civic tech platforms (https://daitove.learnworlds.com/ for educating and certifying volunteer election observers and https://damkvirvebeli.ge/ for coordinating work of 3000+ observers). Media news aggregation tool https://skhivi.com/ has been launched as well for assisting journalists in covering elections. We have continued Data Communication Fellowship programs, where 5 Georgian journalists produced in-depth data stories regarding the changes in elections system, predictions, and transparency. Although we don’t have an active grant for AskGov.ge, we have seen the increase of FOI requests (42) at the platform, concerning the transparency and open data for election related processes.
ImamoPravoZnati: Gong has published a set of evidence-based recommendations for improved access to information in Croatia. The publication is available in English.
KiMitTud: have been investigating Hungarian think tank’s investments in the US political system
Vouliwatch/Arthro5A: Vouliwatch published a set of recommendations for the improvement of the access to information legal framework in Greece (in Greek, soon in English). These recommendations have been sent to the Prime Minister, the competent Minister as well as to members of Parliament. The recommendations were accompanied by an open letter signed by 15 CSOs and investigative journalism orgs. We have so far held two meetings with MPs on this issue and hopefully by the end of the month/beginning of next we will be meeting with the Minister. In addition, October marked the beginning of our awareness raising campaign aimed at introducing the wider public, CSOs and journalists to the right to information. For the purpose of this campaign we created social media posters (1+ 2+3) and videos (1+2).
Abrimos Info: We have published a joint positioning with other organisations regarding the reform of the transparency institute (in Spanish)
The proposed constitutional reform seeks to abolish several autonomous and decentralised bodies, including the National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information and Personal Data Protection (INAI). This reform is set for debate by the LXVI Legislature.
The dissolution of INAI poses significant concerns regarding transparency and public access to information. The elimination of INAI could severely restrict citizens’ ability to monitor government activities, impacting civil society and journalists the most. Without INAI, the transparency necessary for democratic oversight and accountability in government operations could be significantly undermined.
OpenUp ZA: are getting ready to deliver us a workshop next week on Impact measurement and working on a mentorship programme with European organisations working in the Anti-Corruption space.
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash -
Ok, doing these regularly fell apart at *about* when the election happened – but let’s get back on track!
WhoFundsThem
On the WhoFundsThem work, last week we inducted the 50 volunteers who are going to answer 32 questions for 650 MPs. We’re using the crowdsourcing software we developed for the Council Climate Scorecards with CE UK (and taking big inspiration from their general approach). We’ve also released the underlying research we’ve based the questions on.
It’s been really exciting to meet the volunteers, and getting to grips with the fine detail of what’s in the registers. This is the reason we wanted this to be a volunteer project, because while you can get good aggregate stories through data analysis, to get good analysis on an individual level, you really have to go through it by hand.
Over the next six weeks we’ll be going through that process, then reviewing the results and making a right of reply available to MPs, before a launch in the new year.
On our “ask the APPGs for the information they have to give out on request” project. We’ve made our first information request to the APPGs, getting some resistance here (eg APPGs who say all the information is on the website when it’s not) but waiting to see what we get back by the deadline later in the week. Depending on the level of disclosure, we might stagger the questions we ask to balance “the rules say you should know this and make it public” with “in practice, awareness is low and these are run by small organisations”. But we’ll see what happens.
One of the things we’ve started to pay more attention to is written questions, given reasonable suspicion that there has been some cash for questions happening. There’s something odd in that Parliament seems to ask what the conflict of interest might be, but doesn’t publish it (just says it exists). We’ve got an FOI request in to see if there’s some more information we can get Parliament to publish (or flush out what’s happening in the processes there).
Julia’s been down the rabbit hole of trying to understand the different donation disclosure systems (visiting her local council to see what the disclosures look like there). We think there’s some under-disclosure nationally, so we’re checking in on ways we can validate that.
Across these areas, there’s basically a set of things where there are “rules” that exist, but in practice no one is actually monitoring them to enforce — and we might get some improvement just by paying attention and trying to kick other processes into motion. Along these lines we’ve got an experimental machine learning approach going, to feed possible “conflict of interest” disclosures in debates to our volunteers, but we’re also thinking about doing a weekly blog post about the number and quality of disclosures that week (there’s in general something interesting about how MPs rhetorically use ‘I declare an interest’ to speak to personal experience).
Previously:
New register of interests spreadsheet – with much richer data / mySociety
Monitoring and voting updates
The stars (and funding) have aligned to get Struan to spend a month on a range of TheyWorkForYou updates we’ve had planned. The key work here is to improve TheyWorkForYou as a political monitoring platform.
One of TheyWorkForYou’s most impactful features is the email alerts – we’re going to make it much easier to manage ‘keyword’ alerts (for people interested in topics rather than people).
Alongside just making it easier to manage, we’re planning to use the same approach we used in CAPE, to help people search for the right things by offering related search terms (based on a vector analysis of the TheyWorkForYou corpus).
Something that came out of our previous research was how helpful it was that TheyWorkForYou converts written answers into email alerts. We want to do the same for devolved Parliaments by adding three new scrapers for written questions, so that all answers published are searchable and alertable through the same platform, giving a common toolkit to organisations working across the UK.
A new coat of paint
Lucas has refreshed the TheyWorkForYou homepages and made a suite of colour changes for better accessibility throughout the site.
In general, on TheyWorkForYou we’re trying to pick off design improvements as we go through related projects. On the MP profile pages we’re gradually moving elements out of one long page and into their own pages with supporting content. This also, in the long run, will help a bit with the display of people who are in multiple parliaments at the same time (or who move between them).
Machine learning
We’ve been doing a big set of experiments exploring how vector searches (which use some of the more basic bits of large language models) might fit into our future plans.
In general, I’m much more comfortable with uses of machine learning that are enabling better search or discovery rather than summarisation at this point. Obviously there’s some good proof of concepts already out there in terms of summarising debates — we just feel there’s a big space to use these new tools to speed up old approaches (improved linking to glossaries rather than creating glossaries, for example) without getting too into generated content.
TICTeC
As part of our community of practice around Parliamentary Monitoring Sites we had a good session on subnational PMOs with some organisations focused on municipalities. I’ve got a longer write-up coming from this because I think it’s a related but different problem to parliamentary monitoring where we need a slightly different toolkit.
What else are we doing
The answer to this question is usually “applying for grants”. We’ve put together a good set of ideas over the summer – and if we get them or not I’ll do some more public write-ups of what we think the direction of travel is.
But for a quick taste, we’ve got pitches around:
- A big revisit of WriteToThem – and how we pivot that into solving some of the big democratic problems of the current moment (getting the right message to the right place in a layered democracy).
- Getting good at public education through TheyWorkForYou — we have the potential to add a lot of value beyond just republishing debate transcripts, but need to redevelop the annotation and glossary tools from earlier in the site’s history for the modern era.
- Making Parliament work better — there remains very basic “this data is in a PDF and doesn’t have to be” work to be done, that can improve not just outside understanding of the process, but provide more tools to people working inside Parliament.
- Better digital tools and transparency for citizens’ assemblies — how do we take the same “improve transparency/improve efficiency” philosophy and apply it to deliberative approaches?
Less developed, but in the works:
- House of Lords: not going anywhere anytime soon — but is also unpopular. We want to get better at presenting how it works and applying pressure to perform well, while contributing to the picture of evidence for reform. Some tools we have for the Commons can move across well to the Lords (eg registers of interest), but what special approaches do we need for this large appointed house?
- Mayoral scrutiny: there’s wide acknowledgement of a big scrutiny gap here. We have some ideas on how best to support this – but also an awareness that the tools of TheyWorkForYou aren’t quite right to deal with what is less “one institution”, but one among many in area governance.
I am once again…
As ever, if you’ve read this far, and you’re not a monthly donor to mySociety, would you consider becoming one? There is even an anonymous form on that page to tell us why you don’t want to, which is always helpful for us to understand more about.
Related, but if you are someone (or know someone) with lots of money — we have really clear plans of how we’d make use of it in a wide range of areas!
One of the reasons we do this work is because we don’t think there’s a more efficient way of improving UK politics/democracy than making TheyWorkForYou (and friends) better. Obviously it’s our job to make that case well, and I’m always happy to hear from people.
Image: Marko Blažević
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Summer is finally upon us, and though things are slowing slightly in the heat there’s been lots of amazing work happening on Access to Information across Europe this month!
NB: Our TICTeC community of practice is Global and we’d love to hear updates from our global members too in the future!
Without further ado:
FragDenStaat: are working on a long running investigation into a funding scandal at the Ministry of Education looking at the withdrawal of funds from critical scientists. More on that here
mySociety: are working on a new release of Alaveteli to bring some of our new features into your platforms. We’re also getting WDTK Projects as a self serve option into the Alaveteli Codebase, investigating AI for assessing batches and talking about our marginalised communities work at the Women’s Aid 50th Anniversary Conference. We’ve also finally released our Resource Hub, can you spot the pre-September event doc? Hint hint
Access Info: are working on legal reform projects with Moldova and Greece, as well as supporting Serbia with some legal challenges and convening a group of CSOs and activists around the 1049 Article.
SPOON: just got a win from the court in Amsterdam (more here) on rejections based on draft documents! There’s been some support from a minister who suggests the house waits to see what happens with FOI before talking about Abuse of the law and dealing with the complexities of things passing through the house when trying to ask for information about bill proceedings.
Transparency International Slovenia: have been Releasing their global integrity report with Ernst Young and going into conversation with Ernst and Young about what this means for Slovenian businesses.
Transparencia: is using FOI campaign to change 7 Belgian FOI regulations. Our actual campaign is on the federal Belgian law. We have collaborated with mainstream media to support that goal Transparence : ces documents que l’on ne veut pas (facilement) rendre publics – Le Soir and we presented to the press an FOI-investigation on fraud in covid-government contracts Des espions dans le Covid #1 : Vaccins périmés, manipulations et vidéos, le scandale belge qui éclabousse la France et l’Europe (blast-info.fr)ImamoPravoZnati: are sailing along smoothly this month; Users are sending their questions, receiving answers and they calculated they receive around 6% of all the FOIs sent in the Republic of Croatia to public authorities!
KiMitTud: Atlatzso (KMT’s parent company) have been using FOI to investigate fraudulent calls for vote recounts and uncovered that almost half the calls (114) for a recount in one constituency were made by the candidate themselves, not the vote counters.
Arthro5A: Vouliwatch (Arthro5a’s parent organisation) ran their first workshop around Access to Information to encourage journalists and CSOs to make requests and use their right to information. It was well attended and 18 CSOs signed up to the campaign afterwards. The event was supported by Access Info and Open Knowledge Germany.If you’re in our Network and Community of Practice and have something to share for August monthnotes – drop Jen a line!
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Previously: January!
Gaza ceasefire blog post
I wrote a blog post about the Gaza Ceasefire opposition day votes – especially focusing on how there ended up being no recorded votes.
This is the kind of responsive work we’d like to do more of. We don’t need to duplicating every explainer out there, but we want to be able to better articulate “this is how Parliament works, but there’s something wrong with that” when there’s currently something confusing/going wrong in the news.
Asking for money to do good things
Alice, Julia and I have been putting together a more structured version of the idea I talk about at the bottom of this blog post about our new spreadsheet of the register of interests — using crowdsourcing to create good, understandable summaries of MPs interests. Will let you know how that goes.
Something we’d like to get better at is being more public when these applications for funding do not work out (spoiler: this happens a lot!). There’s a lot of work and creativity that goes into our ambitions for TheyWorkForYou, and ideally these wouldn’t just be locked away in various virtual desk drawers.
Oflog consultation
Julia worked with our friends at the Centre for Public Data on a joint response to an Office for Local Government (OFLOG) consultation – read more about that.
This is a continuation of our work around public data fragmentation.
Small API updates
Matthew has added Parliament’s unique identifier to the response to the ‘getMPInfo’ API call, making it easier to jump from our data to query the Parliament API.
Server upgrades
Sam and Matthew have been upgrading the servers that run TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem.
We need to do this periodically for security reasons: the organisations that distribute the server software (and other packages we depend on, like those that distribute the programming languages) only provide security and bug fixes for a certain period, after which they only provide it for newer versions.
Running software on the web — where there are *constantly* bad people testing for weaknesses — means taking this seriously. But upgrading the lower levels of the “stack” often means small changes further up where features we use have been deprecated and replaced with other approaches. Some of this work is running just to stay in the same place, but it does also enable us to adopt new approaches in how we code and the packages we use.
This is one of the massive benefits of the same organisation running TheyWorkForYou AND WhatDoTheyKnow AND FixMyStreet AND (many more) – we have excellent people thinking hard about our technical infrastructure across all our work.
Voting summary update
We’ve done some of the trickiest technical work required to enable the voting summary update we’re planning.
We’ve moved TheyWorkForYou from pointing at the Public Whip website, where it used to get voting summary calculations, to an instance of a new,experimental “twfy-votes” platform. This is doing the work Public Whip was originally doing, but also taking over the party comparison calculations that were being done in TheyWorkForYou itself previously.
TheyWorkForYou has become simpler, and more of the relevant code is now in the same place. We’re not yet completely independent of the Public Whip because twfy-votes currently uses the database dump to populate itself — but soon we’ll be able to move that to an export from TheyWorkForYou’s own database.
The goal in this set of changes is to move from this:
To this:
Which is… still a lot of boxes and arrows, but is better than it was. This could in principle then be simplified even further, but this brings the whole process under our control and simplifies some of the back and forth steps.
Currently, all this work should have resulted in almost no visible changes to the site. But we now can flip a switch and it will switch the underlying algorithm used from the one in the Public Whip to the new (simplified) approach. One of the motivations behind this shift is to be fully in control of that algorithm (which is effectively a number-based editorial policy).
One of the things I’ve been doing this month is running the analysis to clearly map what exactly the public effect of this will be. Broadly, most things stay the same, which is good because we don’t want the headline messages to be hugely affected by different methodologies behind the scenes – At the same time we’ll end up with something that is easier to explain.
The final stage before full release is a set of less technical changes, consolidating the voting summary information on one page, and adding a rewritten page describing both how Parliamentary voting works in different places across the UK, and what our approach is in the data we publish. Making good progress on these, and hope to have this project completed soon.
That’s all for now
As ever, if you’re the kind of person who reads to the end of these (I’m going to assume a generally nice person who is also a fan our our work) – donations are welcome. But also get in touch if you’ve got something to chat with us about!
Header image: Photo by yasin hemmati on Unsplash
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It’s so tempting to start each of these with a clichéd “where did the time go?” or “how is it X month already?”, but in this case, it really does feel like 2024 is running away from us!
January kicked off with Louise, Alex and I heading to the Democracy Network conference, where the theme of climate ran throughout lots of the discussions. If you are also interested in the intersections between climate, democracy and civic tech, you’ll be delighted to know that the call for proposals TICTeC 2024 is out now!
At the start of February, Annie from Climate Emergency UK and I worked on a piece that was published in the LGC, responding to an article from Richard Clewer asking for more emissions data in the Council Climate Action Scorecards. We agreed with Richard that more scoped emissions data would strengthen the scorecards. But, without a statutory reporting framework, that data simply doesn’t exist. We pointed to our fragmented data asks, that I’ve written about in these parts before. Also on our fragmented data work, our joint response with the Centre for Public Data to the Housing & Levelling Up inquiry has been published on the committee’s website. Two great examples of collaborative working to kick off the year!
The big ticket item for the last few months has of course been the Local Intelligence Hub, our joint project with the Climate Coalition, which launched to the public on 15th February! We’ve had such brilliant feedback from the launch, including great coverage in national and local media outlets. Zarino and I have been demonstrating the Hub to anyone who’ll have us (get in touch if you’d like your own demo!) — or watch Zarino’s brilliant short videos on YouTube. Struan and Alexander have been working through the datasets at phenomenal speed, and Myf has been doing wonderful messaging on Twitter and over on LinkedIn.
There are plans afoot to add even more data, so if you’re sitting on datasets that you think would be useful to yourself and others as part of the Hub, let us know! We’re especially interested in data organised by the new constituency boundaries, which I explain in more detail in a blog post about the recent byelections. Zarino made the most of the extra leap year day with several of our friends from the sector, at an event about data and the new constituencies.
Alongside all of the excitement about Local Intelligence Hub, the wheels are starting to turn for the next round of the Climate Action Scorecards. Siôn, Zarino and I have all attended different section-specific roundtables, which have involved brilliant discussions with council officers and industry experts. I’ll be joining the CE UK team at the Scorecards Report Launch & Conference on the 21st: hope to see some of you there!
Photo by Chandan Chaurasia on Unsplash
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January 2024
It’s full steam ahead in the mySociety Climate team for January 2024, with two chunky pieces of work occupying much of the team’s attention:
First, our preparations for a public launch of the Local Intelligence Hub we’ve been building with The Climate Coalition. The Hub brings together data from public sources like government, Parliament, and the ONS, as well as—most excitingly—datasets on climate movement presence and activity from members of The Climate Coalition, to help Coalition members (and soon, members of the public) plan and coordinate action at a parliamentary constituency level. Having soft launched to Climate Coalition members in April last year, we’ll soon be opening up most of the data on the Hub to public access, and we’re looking forward to sharing some examples of how organisations are using it in due course.
Secondly, Siôn, Alice and I have been putting lots of effort into shaping the next few years’ work on community-led home energy actions via our Neighbourhood Warmth platform. We’re really excited about the prospect of testing Neighbourhood Warmth with retrofit organisations and community groups in 2024, to see how a digital service might be able to facilitate and encourage neighbours and communities to explore home energy actions like retrofit and energy flexibility, together. You can read more about our plans in Siôn’s series of monthnotes from 2023.
A look back over 2023
Before I sign off for the month, I wanted to also take a moment to recognise the amazing work my colleagues have done in mySociety’s Climate programme over 2023. Here are a few of the highlights I’m particularly proud of:
In April 2023, we first soft-launched the Local Intelligence Hub to Climate Coalition members. The feedback was massively encouraging, with users from organisations like Green Alliance and The Wildlife Trusts already excited about how the service could help them plan engagement and advocacy activities in 2024 and beyond. As mentioned above, we’ve since spent much of this year adding more datasets, support for the upcoming 2024/2025 constituencies, and free public access, which will be launching in a few weeks.
In July, Alex and Julia published our Unlocking Fragmented Data report, in partnership with the Centre for Public Data. While the report isn’t specific to climate data, we used our experience of trying to collect data on local climate action as a case study into how poor interoperability and poor transparency of public data can turn into a major blocker to public action. A few months later, we were encouraged to see many of our Fragmented Data recommendations adopted into Chris Skidmore’s ‘The Future Is Local’ report.
In September, in part as a recognition of mySociety’s work campaigning for more transparent and democratic climate action, we were accepted into the Blueprint Coalition – an influential group of local government organisations, environmental groups, and research institutions working to join up local climate action in the UK. A few months later, in November, we ran a joint event with Blueprint, exploring how the public sector can make local climate data more useful for everyone.
October saw the launch of the Council Climate Action Scorecards, in partnership with our long-time collaborators, Climate Emergency UK. This year’s Scorecards represented a step change in complexity over the 2021 Plan Scorecards, and saw us develop “GRACE”, an online system for crowdsourcing data on councils’ climate actions, as well as joining CE UK’s advisory board to shape the methodology for the year, and supporting CE UK volunteers in using WhatDoTheyKnow Projects to gather extra data from every local authority via FOI requests. The Action Scorecards were featured in over 150 national and local news stories around the launch, including an exclusive on the EPC ratings of council-owned social housing, in the Financial Times.
In early November, we attended Business Green’s Net Zero Festival. Louise delivered a barnstorming talk about how mySociety’s services (including CAPE, Scorecards, WhatDoTheyKnow, and WriteToThem) support public action on Net Zero, and I attended a number of interesting sessions, which I blogged about here.
A few weeks later, in mid-November, we were back in London for mySociety’s 20th Anniversary awards. Food campaigning group Sustain won our award for best use of mySociety services to accelerate climate action, in recognition of how they’d used CAPE to track local authority action on food emissions. If you couldn’t make it to the anniversary awards, I highly recommend you read Louise’s opening speech about mySociety and the history and future of digital democracy in the UK. I’m not crying, it’s just raining above my desk.
And finally, in December, Alex blogged a round-up of a number of improvements we’d made to CAPE over the year, including a massive upgrade to the discoverability and searchability of plans in the database, using AI / machine learning. The future is here, and turns out it eats climate PDFs for breakfast.
Thanks to everyone who’s followed along with our progress over 2023! If you’d like to be kept informed about all these projects, and more, sign up to our climate updates newsletter.
Image: ANIRUDH
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Following their launch in October, we have continued to improve the Council Climate Action Scorecards site — for example, the scores for all councils on any one question can now be seen on one page (like this). Find these pages from any individual council’s page, or via the section pages.
Meanwhile, CE UK have continued to network, influence and promote the site and their work around the Action Scorecards. They have created significant media interest, especially at the local level (just where it’s needed!) and also attracted coverage from ITV, the Independent, and specialist press such as LGPlus. They’ve been invited to speak to a variety of audiences from an LGA event to Mobility Ways. Having already trained up 110 local residents/campaigners since the launch, the last of CE UK’s How to use the Council Climate Action Scorecards’ training sessions will run today (7th Dec) at 5.30pm, and bring people together to learn about how to use the Scorecards in their campaigning, and network with others doing the same.
A key learning point from CAPE and our Scorecards work has been to see just how fragmented the data around local authorities’ climate planning and action is, and how much of a barrier this is to data transparency and therefore to improvement: it can be highly ineffective, and a waste of (paid) people’s time, to compare metaphorical apples and pears.
As such, this month we were proud to run an event focused on Fragmented Data, with support from our partners in the Blueprint Coalition. Julia Cushion, our Policy & Advocacy Manager, chaired the webinar which saw Anna Powell-Smith introduce key findings of our report Unlocking the value of fragmented public data, while a variety of speakers provided perspectives around the potential and practical application of de-fragmenting data and answer questions from a 80+ strong virtual audience.
It was encouraging to see influential people grasping the significance of what might be seen as a bit of a dry, obscure issue to the untrained eye. This, we hope, is just the beginning of this story and I suspect we’ll see it move into the mainstream over the next few months / years, with more ‘next steps’ from Julia and our Senior Researcher, Alex, sooner. The recording is available here (with subtitles) on our YouTube channel.
We are a month closer to launching the Local Intelligence Hub (LIH) to the public (in early 2024) with our partners the Climate Coalition. November saw more groundwork going into this, with new datasets uploaded, the ‘new constituencies’ work continuing, and functionalities enabled. Our developer Struan moved across from handling the Scorecards’ site development to double our developer capacity on LIH for the next while, and give our other developer, Alexander, someone to work alongside. Planning has also ramped up beyond the site itself, including around communications, and how it fits into the Climate Coalition’s broader plans for 2024.
Partnership has been a solid theme for mySociety’s Climate team from the word go, but it has been particularly noticeable this month with a number of the team scoping out, listening and learning from each other and potential partners to help bring our Neighbourhood Warmth plans together.
As we prepare for a retrospective on our latest year in partnership with CE UK, I find myself reflecting on how vital trust, mutual respect, care and good will are for enabling people to achieve, as is learning to recognise and rise above one’s ego. Achieving with others can also be, in my experience, deeply rewarding, as we join with the best of others to achieve more than we could alone. It is a pleasure and an honour to work in a team, and with partners, who work hard to put the needs of the planet, society and the sector before themselves.
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Image: Hannah Domsic
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As the seasons change and the leaves start to fall, grab your big scarf as we sum up what the climate team have been up to recently.
We’ve been talking about scorecards for much of the year, and this month the work has fallen into place and the Climate Action Scorecards have launched. There was a load of work done, not least by our designer Lucas and the team at CE UK in the lead up to this, to get the site polished and all the data finalised and published.
Since the launch we’ve been making tweaks and sanding off the odd rough edge. While we’ve been doing this, CE UK have been promoting all the hard work they and the volunteers have done with the result that there’s been a lot of press coverage. You may have seen some in your local paper.
If you want to see how your local council did then check out the site. If you’re an organisation or researcher interested in using the data underlying this then it’s available to buy from CE UK in a handy, easy to process format.
We, for Alex values of we, wrote a bit about some of the tech behind the Scorecards crowdsourcing effort.
On the Local Intelligence Hub front we’ve been making progress on supporting multiple versions of constituencies. For those of you who don’t breathlessly follow political boundary news there was a review of the size and shape of Westminster Parliamentary constituencies which has resulted in many of these changing.
The changes will take effect at the next general election, whenever that happens, so we need to support them, while also supporting the existing ones. Alexander has been working away on enabling the Local Intelligence Hub to display data for multiple versions of a constituency. This will also help if we want to add data for other types of area in the future. This is all working towards the new public launch date of January 2024 so you can make using local climate data part of your New Year’s resolutions.
Should you be in a position where you need to care about constituency changes, we have some potentially helpful data and code for making the transition from the old to new boundaries. If you don’t have to care but are interested there’s also some background on the hows and whys of the changes there too.
On the Neighbourhood Warmth front Siôn is continuing to talk to potential partners and funders, while sharpening up our plans for the next stage of development. As always more details on everything Neighbourhood Warmth can be found in its very own monthnotes.
On the policy side Julia has been lining things up for an event about Fragmented Data which is part of our work to explain how better data will help reach climate targets. Look out for more news on that in the coming weeks. Scraping in under the spooky decorations as I write this on All Hallow’s Eve, Zarino is at the Net Zero Festival where our CEO Louise will be, or indeed was, talking about the work we do to help involve people in matters climate related.—
Image: Aaron Burden