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/RSS FeedIt’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.
[0:08] Hi, I’m Julia, and at my work at mySociety, over the last six months I have personally looked through every single MP’s Register of Members Financial Interests.
[0:18] That means I’ve looked at every donation, second job, shareholding, trip abroad. Everything that has been declared to the Register by every MP, my eyes have seen it. And we’ve learnt a lot in this process. And I’ve been supported by 50 amazing volunteers and the rest of the mySociety team.
[0:33] 50 volunteers helped us go through all of this information about second jobs, gifts and donations for all 650 MPs.
[0:40] We’re making that available on TheyWorkForYou on Tuesday the fourth of March. There’s new summaries and extra information about whether your MP received money from oil and gas companies, gambling companies, or if they took visits to countries which are scored ‘not free’ by Freedom House.
[0:56] In the process of doing all of this work and adding all this information to the Register, we’ve got some opinions on how it can work better, both in terms of collecting the data so that it’s accurate and so that we know who is donating, but also changing some of the wider rules to make sure that there is less of an influence of private money in politics.
[1:13] The first recommendation that’s coming out of the WhoFundsThem project is about the data itself. And that might sound boring, but it’s really fundamental to us being able to have trust in the system.
[1:23] At the moment, the forms that are being used by MPs to declare their donations and their second jobs just aren’t capturing the right information. There’s all sorts of things going on here.
[1:32] Sometimes the questions that are being asked aren’t very good. Sometimes the questions are right, but they’re not required, so MPs can skip them. Or sometimes the right questions aren’t even being asked.
[1:43] All of the rules seem to be interpreted in slightly different ways by new MPs or by older MPs, and fundamentally, it just made the project really hard, because the same questions were being answered in such different ways that when we’re trying to compare all MPs, it felt like comparing apples and oranges.
[1:58] We’ve got more recommendations later on in the report, which have bigger implications on how we fund politics. But we have to start from the beginning. We have to ask the right questions to get the right data, to even understand what’s going on.
[2:10] The second recommendation from our report is about scrutiny, which is a boring word for an important thing, which is, how do we check that the information that we’re being given is accurate and it’s correct?
[2:19] Our first recommendation was about changing the forms and doing better data collection to begin with. But that’s not enough. We also need to have mechanisms in place to check that the data is accurate, and fundamentally, we think that that has to be Parliament’s job.
[2:32] This is tricky, because the capacity in Parliament is stretched, and we totally appreciate that, but there’s some key things that can be done.
[2:38] We’re recommending a quarterly audit of just a handful of MPs to check the donations are being reported. At the moment, we’re surprised that there are some quite high profile MPs who haven’t declared a single donation over the last year.
[2:49] This may be the case, but I think an audit process would improve compliance and improve trust as a whole.
[2:54] There’s also a problem that we’re not sure that the data is up to date. And so, for example, there are a lot of new MPs that declared that they were councillors who aren’t councillors any more now, we found that out in our research, but they hadn’t updated the register to say that.
[3:06] At the moment, it seems that MPs can just choose whether or not to update the Register, whereas we’d like that to be changed so that every quarter at least, an MP has to do a declaration to the Register, even if it’s just to say that there’s been no changes.
[3:20] One more little thing in this category is that when MPs ask a question in Parliament, especially if it’s a written question, on the form where they submit the question, they have to say whether they have a relevant interest.
[3:30] And just for some strange reason, at the moment, Parliament will tell you whether or not they ticked yes, they have an interest or not, but they don’t tell you what that interest is. And we’d like that to change.
[3:39] If an MP has declared to Parliament that they have an interest that relates to the topic they’re asking a question about, that interest should be made public.
[3:47] So there’s a few of our ideas in this kind of second category of recommendations, which is all about improving the checks on the donations and the other information that gets declared to the Register.
[3:57] The third set of recommendations, as part of our Who Funds Them project are all about the rules themselves. So our first set of recommendations were about stronger data collection to get better data in the first place. Then the second set of recommendations were about checks for that data: are we sure it’s accurate? Are we sure that everything is being declared?
[4:15] And this third set is actually about the rules themselves, what qualifies as meeting the threshold to be declared. And in lots of the cases, we think that the thresholds need to be lowered so that more information gets declared.
[4:27] At the moment, MPs have to declare donations over £1,500 . Overall, we think that this threshold should be lowered to £1,000, and that will just capture more – and you know, £1,000 is a lot of money.
[4:40] We think the rules on gifts need to be stricter: both that more gifts need to be declared. At the moment, the threshold is £300, whereas in the civil service, it’s often £20. And so we think that needs to be lowered dramatically.
[4:51] And we also think there needs to be more rules on what should be accepted.
[4:54] Our fourth set of recommendations we’re calling Systematic Reform, and that’s about trying to decrease the influence of private money in politics.
[5:02] The biggest part of this fourth set of recommendations is this idea that we think there should be a citizens assembly on money in politics.
[5:10] A citizens assembly is when a group of people get brought together that are broadly representative of the public as a whole. They get given a really complicated or controversial policy question, and then over a few sessions, they get invited to hear from experts and witnesses, and they debate and discuss and come to conclusions about what should happen going forward.
[5:30] These have been used on issues that are really controversial, such as climate change, abortion and assisted dying.
[5:36] And we get that our recommendations as part of this report, where we’re saying that private money should play a lesser role, and therefore public money needs to play more of a role, like taxpayers’ money will be going more to political parties, is controversial.
[5:50] On the whole, people don’t generally support more money going into politics from taxpayers’ money, but we think it’s necessary, or at least we think that there are some trade offs to be had here. There’s a conversation that needs to happen.
[6:01] Are we happy that there is the amount of private money going into politics that there currently is? A citizens assembly seems to us a good way to draw out some of those debates.
[6:10] I have all of this information in my head now, and a lot of it has gone into the report, but the report is really long, and so if you have any questions on how money and politics works in the country, any questions about your individual MPs or what we’re going to do with the data, then let me know. But don’t forget that you can read the report in full on our website.
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Maai Makwa is an open source, open data and public domain project from The Demography Project, Kenya, and it’s the outcome of our fifth TICTeC subgrant.
Our fifth Civic Tech Surgery discussed the question of how the civic tech community can learn from, and contribute to, climate action, to drive impactful societal change. The subsequent working group commissioned The Democracy Project to establish Maai Makwa (indigenous Kikuyu language for My Water): a water quality and quantity monitoring project integrated with practical civic education to empower individuals, households and communities in Kenya to participate in freshwater conservation and sustainable water resource exploitation.
Kenya is classified as a chronically water-stressed country by the United Nations. Population growth, growing agricultural water use, frequent droughts and mains supply disruptions all increase the difficulties of accessing and preserving water.
Through this project, the Demography Project have developed:- An interactive Water Cost Calculator to enable Kenyans to understand the full cost of water services from all 81 water companies in the country
- A compilation of national and local water laws and regulations
- In-person forums in vulnerable communities to help them understand water rights and contribute to water conservation
- A real-time Water Distribution calendar
- Collaborations with higher education institutions, recruiting eight student climate champions who conducted field research on water supplies in their regions and authored stories on their findings
- The deployment of low-cost, compact, modern meteorological kits and water monitoring devices to communities
The project was showcased at World Wetlands Day celebrations, and collaborations with local youth groups recognised by a visit from the President of Kenya, Dr William Ruto.
As a result of this work the Demography Project have entered into fourteen partnership/ membership agreements with local and global organisations working in freshwater conservation and youth networking. They continue to develop the project, with plans in progress to translate the content and tools into local languages.
We’re impressed by this extensive set of outcomes and we hope that it will help bring about solutions for the water issues of the region.
To find out more about Maai Mawka:
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As a joint project between mySociety and the Centre for Public Data, we have written a set of simple principles for how to get the most impact out of publishing public data. You can read the report online, or download it as a PDF.
Fragmented public data is a problem that happens when many organisations are required to publish the same data, but not to a common standard or in a common location. Data is published, but without work to join up the results, it rarely has the intended impacts.
The results of this are frustrating for everyone. Data users cannot easily use the data, policy makers do not see the impact they want, and publishers in public authorities are required to produce data without seeing clear results from their work.
Better and more consistent publication of data by local authorities helps enable understanding and action at scale across a range of areas. At the same time, we recognise that the technical advice given has assumed higher levels of technical capacity that in practice is possible for many data publishing tasks. Our goal has been to make sure our advice makes data more accessible, while having a realistic idea of technical capacities and support needed for data publishing.
This report recommends three minimum features for a data publishing requirement to be successful:
- A collaborative (but compulsory) data standard to agree the data and format that is expected.
- A central repository of the location of the published data, which is kept up to date with new releases of data.
- Support from the data convener to make publication simple and effective – e.g. through validation and publication tools, coordinating returns, and technical support.
We recommend that:
- Whenever government imposes duties on multiple public authorities to publish datasets in future, it should also provide the staff and budget to enable these features.
- The Central Data and Digital Office should publish official guidance covering the above.
You can read the report online, or download it as a PDF.
Better data publishing helps climate action
This project is informed by recurring frustrations we have run into in our work. Projects such as KeepItIntheCommunity, which mapped registered Assets of Community Value, were much more complicated than they needed to be because while transparency was required of authorities, coordination was not – meaning the task of keeping the site comprehensive and updated was enormously difficult. In principle, we could build a tool that empowered communities in line with the intentions of the original policy makers. In practice, a lack of support for basic data publishing made the project much harder than it needed to be.
This problem also affects our work around local government and reducing emissions. Local government has influence over one third of emissions, but much of that is indirect rather than from the corporate emissions of the authority directly. As such, many activities (and datasets) of local government have climate implications, even if the work or data is not understood as climate data. For instance, the difficulty in accessing the asset data of local authorities makes it harder for civil society to cross-reference this information with the energy rating of properties, and produce tools to help councils understand the wider picture.
In future we will be publishing in more detail the kind of data we think is needed to support local authorities in emission reduction – but emissions reduction cannot be isolated from the general work of local authorities. Improving the consistency of the data that is published helps everyone better understand the work that is happening, and makes local government more efficient.
Sign up to hear more about our climate work, or to the monthly mySociety newsletter.
Photo credit: Photo by Olav Ahrens Røtne on Unsplash
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Last month the project we’ve been supporting Climate Emergency UK on, their Council Climate Plan Scorecards, made a big splash with local and national news outlets.
But that’s not all mySociety’s climate team has been working on – we’ve also been putting effort into making CAPE, our Climate Action Plan Explorer, more useful to council officers and campaigners, through improved emissions data, and ‘features’ – a whole new way of discovering councils with exemplary plans.
Sectoral emissions breakdown
Until recently, CAPE displayed a small amount of emissions data on each council’s page – coming from BEIS’s annual estimates of CO2 emissions within the scope of influence of local authorities:
A key improvement we wanted to make was to better highlight the sources of emissions in a council’s area. The balance of emissions from different sectors (domestic, industrial, commercial, transport, etc) will be different for each council, and will influence their approach to emissions reduction.
Thanks to BEIS funding, we’ve been able to expand our emissions data to cover combined authorities and new 2021 authorities, and we’ve used this to display a new emissions graph on council pages that separates out the emissions of different sectors over time:
Find your council on CAPE today, to see how emissions stack up in your area.
We hope this improved breakdown will help visitors understand the actions their councils are taking, and the scope there is for improvement in the different areas. The graphs can be downloaded and re-used, with the data source and attribution already embedded. Hooray for transparency!
Browse by feature
And there’s more. If you’re interested in seeing, say, all the councils who are doing a good job engaging residents and other stakeholders on their climate plans, or maybe all the councils with a clear plan for upskilling the workforce in the face of climate change, then we’ve got a new feature for you.
Thanks to data from the Council Climate Plan Scorecards, you can now use CAPE to browse councils by ‘features’ we’ve identified, through our research, as being particularly interesting to council officers and campaigners – such as the best approaches to adaptation and mitigation, the best communicated plans, and the fairest plans for communities most directly harmed by climate change.
You can start by visiting the ‘Browse by feature’ page:
Or you can follow the links on any council’s page, to see other councils who also share the same features:
We’re looking to expand our selection of features over time, but we need to make sure these are based on an external dataset that we can import into CAPE. If you have an idea of something new we should include, let us know!
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Open Data: an essential, not just ‘nice to have’
Would societies around the world be better able to respond to the pandemic, if more or better open data were freely available?
That was the question put to our expert panel on Tuesday, in the first in our series of online TICTeC Seminars.
Karabo Rajuili of Open Ownership, Olivier Thereaux from Open Data Institute and Fabrizio Scrollini of the Open Data Latin American Initiative (ILDA) were led in a discussion by our own Head of Research Dr Rebecca Rumbul.
We heard of the need for — and simultaneously the impossibility of — a rapidly-constructed open data standard; the benefits and dangers of releasing data about COVID to a potentially uninformed public; and the need for good ownership data to be freely available in a fast-moving procurement environment in which there may not be the tools to investigate where money is being spent.
After the speakers had laid out their positions, the floor was opened for questions, each of which ignited still more informed debate. Finally, attendees were invited to a quick (and optional!) networking session in which they could speak to other attendees more directly.
If that all sounds interesting, you can catch up on the main session for yourself by watching the video or reading the collaborative notes that were taken by attendees.
There are still two more TICTeC Seminars in this series to go, so do join us to take part in the conversation.
On 20 October, panelists will discuss why it’s taken a pandemic for more parliaments to digitise; while in November (date TBC) the topic will be the climate crisis. Find full details for both sessions here, and don’t forget you can sign up for TICTeC updates.
Also: if you work on, use, fund or research civic technology, we would be really grateful if you could spare some time to help us shape the future of TICTeC by filling in this survey.
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We’re starting the new year in the best way possible — with a new project that we’re really excited to get our teeth into.
Just before we all went off for the Christmas holidays, we learned that mySociety had won the contract to work on the Discovery and Alpha phases of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG)’s Central Register of Planning Permissions. To put it simply, this is the first couple of steps towards an eventual plan to aggregate and share, as Open Data, information on residential planning applications from councils across England.
Those who have followed mySociety for some time may remember that we have some experience in this area: we’ve previously worked around planning permissions with authorities in Barnet and Hampshire. More widely, many of our projects involve taking data from a range of different sources, tidying it up and putting it out into the world as consistent, structured Open Data that anyone can use. The most ambitious of these is EveryPolitician; the most recent is Keep It In The Community, and in both cases we suspect the issues — data in a variety of different formats and of widely differing qualities, being stored in many different places — will be broadly the same when it comes to planning permissions.
But we don’t know exactly that for sure, and neither does MHCLG, which is why they’re very sensibly getting us to kick off with this period of research, testing and trying out proofs of concept. With work that will involve our developers, design team, consultation with experts in the field and collaboration with MHCLG, we’re right in our happy place.
Best of all, the project ticks a lot of mySociety boxes. The eventual Open Data set that should come out of all this will:
- Help central government utilise digital to best effect: once this dataset exists, they’ll be able to develop tools that support the planning system and housing markets
- Aid local authorities in keeping consistent and useful data on their own planning applications, allowing them to analyse trends and plan wisely for the future
- Benefit the building industry as well as local residents as they have access to information on which applications have previously succeeded or failed in their own areas
- Be open to developers, who — as history tends to show — may use it create useful third party tools beyond the imagination of government itself.
This project is one of a number of pieces of work we’ll be doing with central and local government this year. With all of these, we’re committing to working in the open, so expect plenty of updates along the way.
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Image: Rawpixel
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Forgive me if the title of this post makes us sound like a price comparison site — it’s just that if you are, mySociety is interested to hear from you.
We’re hoping to hear from people who spend a lot of energy collating data on UK politicians — where you have to go through a process of collecting basic info like politicians’ names, parties, and the areas they represent, before you can even get to the real work of your project. Specifically, we are interested in learning more about the impact this additional effort has on your work; the staff time it is costing your organisation, or the issues it creates in connecting citizens to their representatives.
Recently, mySociety met with Democracy Club and Open Data Manchester to discuss the lack of open data on UK councillors, what could or should be done about it, and by whom. Sym from Democracy Club has brilliantly covered the who, what and how background to our meeting in a series of posts and I really recommend reading these.
But first things first. We all recognised that before we travel too far down the road of planning something, we need to understand why.
Why should there be open access to basic data on all of our elected representatives?
Collectively, we agreed that the basic data on our elected representatives should be available as structured, consistent and reusable public information; who represents you at each level of government should be a public good and we believe that there is an obligation on authorities to ensure this information is made freely available in a structured way. The arts and sciences already recognise this concept of ‘commoning’; the same beliefs underpin mySociety advocating for a Democratic Commons. Plus, like Sym, we agree that “access to good information is vital to a well-functioning democracy”.
However, tangible examples are better than abstract beliefs, which is why we are interested in finding cases that demonstrate the potential social impact from opening up this data.
We already know that:
- Open Data Manchester spent a lot of time collating data on English Councillors so that they could match who local representatives with the most localised level of deprivation profile, a Lower Super Output area. ODM hope that “the dataset will add to the understanding of the local political landscape in England” and will allow for further enquiry where patterns of representation exist.
Oh, here is Open Data Manchester’s beautiful visualisation of “The deprivation profile of each local authority (most deprived from the top left, down) and the party with the most power”
- We are aware of a number of charities that are independently gathering and maintaining basic data on politicians, a duplication of efforts and resource that could be better spent in other ways. And, that the cost of accessing Councillor Data is preventing some small charities running e-campaigns.
- Organisations like Global Witness are using EveryPolitician data to spot potential corruption — but this data currently exists only at the national level, both for the UK and internationally.
- And, we recognise that there are many commercial players in this space who provide complete and up to date data on politicians, which often includes more detailed biographical or political background. That’s not what we’re trying to replicate; instead, we all feel that there should be basic fundamental and up to date data on who our politicians are, freely available for anyone to use for any purpose.
We would love to have more examples to add to this! If you — or someone you know — has an idea for a piece of research or service that you could run if only this data existed, or spends time moaning about finding it, please get in touch with me, georgie@mysociety.org.
P.S if you would like a copy of ODM data visualisation, it is available to buy/ download in A2
Photo by David Kennedy on Unsplash
- Open Data Manchester spent a lot of time collating data on English Councillors so that they could match who local representatives with the most localised level of deprivation profile, a Lower Super Output area. ODM hope that “the dataset will add to the understanding of the local political landscape in England” and will allow for further enquiry where patterns of representation exist.
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Since 2015, mySociety have collected and shared open data on the world’s politicians via the EveryPolitician project.
And while we receive emails from across the world pretty much on a weekly basis, asking us to update a dataset, we still can’t say exactly who uses the EveryPolitician data, and for what purpose.
This is largely because we want to place as few barriers as possible to using the data. Asking folk to fill in a form or register with us before they access data which we believe ought to be free and accessible? Well, that would be counter to the whole concept of Open Data.
But that said, it’s really useful for us to hear how the data is being put to use, so we were very pleased when Global Witness sent us their report, The Companies we Keep.
This fascinating read shares the results of their analysis of the UK’s Persons of Significant Control Register (PSC) in which Global Witness used EveryPolitician data to see if there are politicians who are also beneficial owners of a company registered to the UK.
In order to interpret and compare datasets (which also included sources such as the Tax Justice Network Financial Secrecy Index), Global Witness and Datakind UK built two tools:
- An automated system for red-flagging companies
- A visual tool for exploring the PSC register and other associated public interest datasets
The red flagging tool can be used to uncover higher risk entries, which do not indicate any wrongdoing but could be in need of further investigation… such as the 390 companies that have company officers or beneficial owners who are politicians elected to national legislatures, either in the UK or in another country.
The report also highlights some of the challenges faced by Companies House that prevent the register from fulfilling its full potential to help in fighting crime and corruption. We recommend a full read: you’ll find it here.
It is very helpful for us to demonstrate the uses of EveryPolitician data, both for our own research purposes and to enable us to secure the funding that allows us to go on providing this sort of service.
If you have or know of more examples of the data being used, please get in touch with me, Georgie. And if you value open, structured data on currently elected politicians, you should get involved with the Democratic Commons; this is a developing a community of individuals and organisations working to make information on every politician in the world freely available to all, through the collaborative database Wikidata.
Photo by G. Crescoli on Unsplash -
You may remember that thanks to a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, mySociety has been working to support increasingly authoritative data on the world’s politicians, to exist on Wikidata as a key part of developing the concept of the Democratic Commons.
And, this summer mySociety welcomed two members of staff to support with the community work around both Wikidata and the Democratic Commons. In May, I (Georgie) joined in the role of ‘Democratic Commons Community Liaison’ and in late June I was joined by Kelly, mySociety’s first ever ‘Wikimedia Community Liaison’… and it’s about time you started to hear more from us!
I’ve been climbing the learning curve: exploring the potential moving parts of a global political data infrastructure, finding out how the communities of Wikidata and Wikipedia operate, attempting to take meaningful notes at our daily meetings for the tool the team developed to improve political data on Wikidata and making sense of the complexity in creating interface tools to interpret the political data already in Wikidata. Oh, and supporting a “side-project” with Open Knowledge International to try and find every electoral boundary in the world (can you help?).
And if you are in any of the relevant open Slack channels (what is Slack?), you may have seen my name on the general introduction pages, as I have been shuffling around the online community centres of the world — off Wikidata Talk that is — trying to find the people interested in, or with a need for, consistently and simply formatted data on politicians, but who aren’t already part of the Wikidata community.
That’s because, the issue the Democratic Commons seeks to address is the time-consuming business of finding and maintaining data on politicians, work that we suspect is duplicated by multiple organisations in each country (often all of them having a similar aim), that is slowing down delivering the stuff that matters. This has certainly been mySociety’s experience when sharing our tools internationally.
And the solution we propose — the Democratic Commons — is that if people and communities worked together to find and maintain this data, it would be better for everyone… ah the paradox of simplicity.
Update on efforts to support the Democratic Commons concept
With each interaction and conversation that we’ve had about the Democratic Commons with partners, we’ve continued to learn about the best role for us to play. Here are some initial actions and thoughts that are shaping the work; please feel free to comment, or even better, get involved 🙂
Making sure the concept is a good fit through user research
We have set a goal to carry out user research on the concept of the Democratic Commons. So far, we have lined up calls with campaign staff (who are interested in using and supporting open political data through their UK campaigning work) and journalists in Nigeria (who have expressed a need for the data) and I am lining up more calls — if you have a need for or can contribute political data, let’s talk.Bringing the Open Data/Civic Tech and Wiki communities together?
From my experience to date, the Civic Tech and Wiki communities appear to operate quite separately (I am very open to being proved wrong on this point!).I am just getting started within the Wikidata/ Wikimedia communities (that’s more for Kelly) but on the Open Data/ Civic tech side, there are questions about data vandalism and the potential to trust the data from Wikidata, arguments on the benefit of using Wikidata (especially where you already have a lot of useful data) and on whether there is a need to invest time in learning SPARQL, the query language that allows faster retrieval and manipulation of data from databases.
Misconceptions are not unusual in communities online or offline, but it is a gap that our work focus, communications and tools hope to help close. If you have ideas on blogs, video tutorials or articles to share to read around these concepts, please get in touch.
Working openly in existing global communities (off Wiki)
We are aware that, off-Wiki mySociety is leading the work to develop the Democratic Commons, however, we know that we need to be delivering this work in the open for it to be owned by other people outside of mySociety, and finding the right homes to talk about it (off Wiki) has been important. In order to work openly, we have a shared #DemocraticCommons Slack channel with mySociety and Code for All; see ‘Get involved’ below to find out how to join the conversation.We also plan to document the learning involved in the process through blog posts and documentation, to be uploaded publicly.
And, supporting local communities to develop, where possible
A global network such as Code for All is very useful in supporting a concept like the Democratic Commons, however, the bulk of need for the data will likely be country-specific. Together with our partners and collaborators, we are exploring what is needed and how to support local communities:- Through the remainder of our Wikimedia Foundation Grant, we are supporting community events and editathons: in Lebanon with SMEX, in France with newly formed organisation F0rk, and in Spain with Wikimedia España.
- Some groups we are working with, such as Code for Pakistan, plan to set up a channel on their Slack instance and use their Whatsapp community to discuss the data use and maintenance.
- In my own country, the UK, we are talking to mySociety’s community and collaborators to understand how the Democratic Commons could benefit organisations and work in practice here. If you want to be involved in this work, please contact me.
- We are listening to understand what support is needed with collaborators in the global South, as we’re well aware that it is a lot to ask people to work on a voluntary basis and that adequate support is needed. I hope we can share the learning and use it to shape any future projects that may emerge.
How to get involved in the Democratic Commons?
- Contribute to the Wikidata community: If you are Wikidata user, or keen to learn, visit the Wikidata project page on political data. If you need guidance on tasks, do feel free to add to the Talk page to ask the community, or get in touch with Kelly, our Wikimedia Community Liaison: kelly@mysociety.org.
- Join the conversation on Code for All Slack: If you would like to join the Slack conversation, join here: https://codeforall.org/ (scroll down and find the ‘Chat with us’ button).
- Look for electoral boundary data: We are working with Open Knowledge to find electoral boundary data for the whole world. See more about that here.
- Keep up to date and subscribe to our Medium blog: Sometimes these Democratic Commons posts are a bit too in-depth for the general mySociety readership, so for those who are really interested, we plan to share all we are learning here.
- Share the concept with contacts: Please share the message on your platforms and encourage potential users to take part in research and get involved. We recognise that our view — and reach — can only be anglo-centric, and we’d so appreciate any translations you might be able to contribute.
- Tell us (and others) how you think you would use the data: This can’t just be about collecting data; it’s about it being used in a way that benefits us all. How would the Democratic Commons help your community? We would love people to share any ideas, data visualisations, or theories, ideally in an open medium such as blog posts. Please connect with Georgie to share.
- Something missing from this list? Tell us! We’re @mySociety on Twitter or you can email georgie@mysociety.org or kelly@mysociety.org .
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Image: Toa Heftiba
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Back in September mySociety’s Chief Executive Mark introduced the idea of the ‘Democratic Commons’: a grand vision where political data is open to all, for the benefit of all. Since then we’ve been quietly working away on making the concept a reality, with some activity more clearly feeding into it, like our current series of events for GLOW, and some requiring a bit of explanation, like our relationship with Facebook — but what we haven’t really done to date is expand on what the Democratic Commons means and why we believe it is so important.
So let’s take a go at a clear definition.
The Open Data Institute have been promoting the idea of data infrastructure for some time now:
A data infrastructure consists of data assets, the organisations that operate and maintain them and guides describing how to use and manage the data.
It underpins transparency, accountability, public services, business innovation and civil society.
Our vision for the Democratic Commons begins with this concept and advocates for a particular strand within it. It promotes the building of an open, sustainable data infrastructure for political data on a global scale. So nothing too grand then!
In essence this is an evolution of our EveryPolitician project — it takes the lessons we learned there and uses them to underpin a new approach. But it is also the culmination of many years of running and developing projects all over the world and facing the same challenges with the data needed to get started time and again: lists of politicians not up to date, or in an unusable format; ‘unique’ IDs being less than unique; administrative boundaries not being available, available under restrictive license or in some entirely unhelpful format.
The effort and cost of just getting this initial data in place — before you can even start the real work of empowering citizens or holding power to account — is often so high that it stymies teams from the off. We want to change this. We want organisations who are interested in running transparency or accountability projects in their countries to be able to find all this infrastructure in place and get to building straight away.
Beyond this core goal we also want to provide richer open data because the better the data the better the questions that can be asked of it and if, as Giuseppe Sollazzo says, data journalism is the future of Open Data, then we need to make sure that we can provide those journalists the answers they need (and maybe help tackle #fakenews a bit in the doing so!).
In no way do we see ourselves as the gatekeepers for this data and instead we are seeking to be true to the concept of ‘commons’ from the start — working with the global communities and platforms that already exist in support of Open Data and content.
We’ve already started to work with the Wikimedia Foundation through our project with Wikidata and see this as a cornerstone of any approach to the Democratic Commons. Of course we also want to speak to members of the OpenStreetMap community about their experiences with administrative boundaries and we’ll be reaching out to them soon.
In the coming weeks we are going to be recruiting for some additional colleagues to help us with all of this so if political and or geographical data is your thing please keep an eye out.
Even with some additions to the team there’s no way we can achieve this alone — we’ve already collaborated with partner organisations like Code4Japan and Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland — and there will be many more partnerships to come. You can expect to read much more about that in future months.
Photo by Matt Seymour on Unsplash
