Rethinking our approach to marginalised communities

Read our new report
‘Using Access to Information to support social change’

Freedom of information is for everyone: that’s something we believe, and something we’re taking concrete steps to ensure.

As we celebrate the millionth public FOI request on WhatDoTheyKnow, it’s important to consider how we can ensure the next million can benefit a broader range of people to do more towards social justice.

Historically our userbase has skewed towards those who already hold privilege, with white, well-educated, affluent males most represented across all our UK services. This demographic has fluctuated a little over time, but not as considerably as we would like.

Thanks to a grant from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, we are taking proactive steps to address this imbalance, with the primary aim of supporting marginalised groups in using FOI as one of their tools for social change. 

Jen Bramley, our Partnerships Manager, is leading on a programme to firstly research into such groups’ needs and their perception of FOI; and then identify and deliver the training that will be most effective in giving them the hands-on skills required to include FOI into their campaigning toolkits.

The first part of that activity is completed. The research confirmed some perhaps predictable points around making the very concept of FOI clearer to these communities who may not have come across the term before; and ensuring that the language and interfaces on WhatDoTheyKnow are made more accessible.

But there were other learnings that we would have come to without speaking directly to our subjects. For example, we heard that some communities’ longstanding mistrust of authority extends to the idea of having any interaction with them, even within the rights conferred by the FOI Act; and that people in more deprived demographics are more likely to access the internet via mobile phone, making it much harder to access and understand dense documents that might have been released — and all the more so when they are in bulk.

Finally, there is a desire to see more positive accounts of people using FOI without the subject having to jump over several barriers to get the information they required. While we may see such stories as an inspiring narrative encouraging us not to give up, it’s also understandable that to people approaching FOI for the first time, such stories could seem offputting and unattainable.

We’ll be using everything we learned to inform future development on WhatDoTheyKnow. These improvements will be possible thanks to the time and experience generously given by our interviewees.

You can read the full report here.

One of the things we want to do as part of our Climate programme is help build an ecosystem of data around local authorities and climate data. 

We have a goal of reducing the carbon emissions that are within the control of local authorities, and we want to help people build tools and services that further that ambition. 

We want to do more to actively encourage people to use our data, and to understand if there are any data gaps we can help fill to make everyone’s work easier. 

So, have we already built something you think might be useful? We can help you use it. 

Also, if there’s a dataset that would help you, but you don’t have the data skills required to take it further, we might be able to help build it! Does MapIt almost meet your needs but not quite? Let’s talk about it!

You can email us, or we are experimenting with running some drop-in hours where you can talk through a data problem with one of the team. 

You can also sign up to our Climate newsletter to find up more about any future work we do to help grow this ecosystem. 

Making our existing data more accessible

Through our previous expertise in local authority data, and in building the Climate Action Plan Explorer, we have gathered a lot of data that can overcome common challenges in new projects.

These include:

• A swiss-army knife/skeleton key/useful spreadsheet that lists all current local authorities, and helps transform data between different lookups. 
• Mapit An API that can take postcodes and tell you which local authority they’re in (and much more!) Free for low traffic charitable projects.
• Datasets of which authorities have published climate action plans.
• Datasets of which authorities have published net zero dates, and their scopes. 
• A massive 1GB zip of all the climate plans we know about.
• Measure of local deprivation across the whole UK.
• A simplified version of the BEIS local authority emissions data. 
• Measures of similarity between all local authorities (emissions, deprivation, distance, rural/urban and then all of those things together). 

All of this data (plus more) can be found on our data portal. 

We’ve also been working to make our data more accessible and explorable (example):

• Datasets now have good descriptions of what is in each column.
• Datasets can be downloaded as Excel files
• Datasets can be previewed online using Datasette lite.
• Providing basic instructions on how to automatically download updated versions of the data.

If you think you can build something new out of this data, we can help you out! 

Building more data

There’s a lot of datasets we think we can make more of — for example, as part of our prototyping research we did some basic analysis of how we might use Energy Performance Certificate data (for home energy in general, and specific renting analysis). 

But before we just started making data, we want to make sure we’re making data that is useful to people and that can help people tell stories, and build websites and tools. If there’s a dataset you need, where you think the raw elements already exist, get in touch. We might be able to help you out. 

If you are using our data, please tell us you’re using our data

We really believe in the benefit of making our work open so that others can find and build on it. The big drawback is that the easier we make our data to access, the less we know about who is using it.

This is a problem, because ultimately our climate work is funded by organisations who would like to know what is happening because of our work. The more we know about what is useful about the data, and what you’re using it for, the better we can make the case to continue producing it. 

Each download page has a survey that you can fill out to tell us about how you use the data. We’re also always happy to receive emails!

Stay updated about everything

Our work growing the ecosystem also includes events and campaigning activity. If you want to stay up to date with everything we do around climate, you can sign up to our newsletter.

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Image: Emma Gossett

If you’ve used a mySociety website and made a difference, large or small, we’d love to interview you.

A few weeks ago, we heard how Open Data Consultant Gavin Chait used WhatDoTheyKnow to help people setting up businesses .

But you don’t need to be a professional to have achieved something with our sites. We want to know what you’re doing with WhatDoTheyKnow, FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem — or any of our other web tools.

Have you managed to solve a persistent problem in your community by reporting it via FixMyStreet? Used data from TheyWorkForYou to inform a campaign? Or maybe you’ve put WriteToThem on your website and rallied people to contact their MP about something important.

Whatever it is, big or small, we want to hear about it. Please do let us — and the world — know what you’ve achieved with mySociety’s sites.

Ready? Click here to send us a couple of sentences about what you’ve achieved, and if we think we can feature your story, we’ll follow up with an email interview.

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Image: Robert Couse-Baker (CC-by/2.0)

We’ve just put together a brand spanking new page of downloadable FixMyStreet goodies.

Ever tried to explain FixMyStreet to a friend? Well, now you can thrust a flyer into their hand instead – much easier, and you know they won’t forget the web address.

Our goodies page includes all sorts of materials, including:

• posters and flyers to print out at home
• worksheets with ideas for schools or community groups
• print-out doggy poop flags (…yes!)
• artwork and articles that can go in community newsletters

We hope you will enjoy them – and, of course, we really appreciate each and every time someone makes the effort to help us spread the word about FixMyStreet.

As a small charity, we don’t have the kind of marketing budget to allow us to buy billboards or TV advertising, so this kind of help  is incredibly useful to us.

Coming soon

We’re also considering putting together a small online shop selling physical items in the future, too: batches of FixMyStreet postcards, mugs, hats, bags, etc.

Let us know if you’d be interested in things like this  – or any other bright ideas for other FixMyStreet-branded goodies you’d like to see. This is a new area for us, and we’re open to suggestions!