In the second seminar of our Using Freedom of Information for Campaigning and Advocacy series, we learned how to use information from FOI requests to create stories and further your cause. 

First, we heard the experience of two different campaign groups — Privacy International and Climate Emergency UK — in getting their stories into the public eye; this was followed by tips from freelance journalist Rosie Taylor about pitching to newspapers.

You can watch the whole video over on YouTube, or read the summary below.

Privacy International

Ilia Siatitsa

Privacy international is a UK-based organisation, working with partners around the world to research and advocate against governmental and corporate abuses of data and technology. 

They’ve used FOI requests as a source of information that feeds into campaigns and advocacy for many years. Sometimes they use a preliminary round of FOI requests to help inform a subsequent, more focused one.

Their Neighbourhood Watched campaign, which investigated the use of new surveillance technologies by the UK police, is a good example (we’ve written about it before here). Privacy International submitted fact-finding FOI requests to many police forces across the UK, asking which technologies were being used at a local level for law enforcement.

The responses enabled them to identify several different types of tech, and that there was a massive regulatory gap around this area of law enforcement, with new, invasive technologies having been introduced before any guidance was put in place.

The information they obtained via FOI has inspired a number of different actions within a wider, multi-year campaign. Privacy International first rallied their supporters to write to their local Police and Crime Commissioner to ask for more information and better regulation. 

They later launched a similar campaign around police technologies being used at protests, producing a guide to inform people attending marches, so they knew what tech was being deployed by police, and how to mitigate some of the exposure.

They also made follow-up FOI requests around the specific technologies that their first round had identified. In this second round of FOI requests, Privacy International found that the responses were all coming back as refusals, using very similar or identical language and stating that the authorities could not confirm or deny that the information was held. 

Privacy International attempted to challenge these refusals via the ICO, but they were upheld; a subsequent appeal at the Information Rights Tribunal also upheld the decision and denied a request to appeal. Undaunted by this setback, Privacy International have moved back to advocacy, sending letters to police oversight bodies to point out that every other country that has introduced these technologies to their police forces has been more transparent about them. In 2020 they published a report criticising the way the police were using mobile phone extraction (where the contents of your phone are copied, no password required), calling for reform and safeguards.

So, while Privacy International haven’t yet won the battle, they continue to fight — and this is a good example of how FOI can form the basis of a multi-year campaign with many outputs, audiences and facets.

Here are Ilia’s top tips for submitting requests — also make sure you see our previous seminar, Getting the most from FOI, for lots more advice.

Questions from the audience:

Q: Can you make a rejection into the story?
A: You can, but it depends how you want to play it: you might decide that you don’t want the refusal decision to be out in public, setting a precedent for how authorities reply to responses. Privacy International are also trying a new approach, sending a different set of questions to see if that gets them better results. 

Q: One of your tips is “format matters”: any further advice here?
A: Authorities might try to give the least information possible, using the way you’ve formatted your question to minimise what they share, so look carefully at how you’ve worded your request before sending it, and consider how it might be responded to with this mindset. 

It can be very useful to use a yes/no question: this only takes the authority moments to answer. 

Or, rather than asking for stats, try asking for the documents that those stats can be found within. Responding to this type of request takes less time for the authority, but their response will contain more information. 

Authorities often come back and say that your request needs to be narrowed down, so that can be a strategy too: start with a broad request which you’ll be happy to whittle down, knowing that you actually want the narrower information.

Climate Emergency UK

Isaac Beevor 

Climate Emergency UK (CE UK) was founded around five years ago, with the aim of collating data and information on UK councils’ climate emergency declarations. Since then they’ve worked with mySociety to create CAPE, which collates all UK councils’ Climate Action Plans, and the Council Climate Action Scorecards, which first assessed all the plans, and subsequently councils’ actual climate action.

Isaac explained that in order to gather data for the latest iteration of the Scorecards, they’d sent around 4,000 FOI requests to UK local authorities: these were all asking for data which couldn’t be obtained by other means.

These requests, which were worded very specifically, allowed CE UK to compile data on: 

• Councils’ staffing levels for climate and implementing Biodiversity Net Gain (BNG);
• The average energy efficiency (EPC) ratings of council homes and the enforcement of the Minimum Energy Efficiency Standard (MEES);
• Whether councillors and management were receiving carbon literacy training;
• Whether the councils were lobbying their devolved national government, or the UK government, for further powers or funding.

As well as giving vital information that fed into the Scorecards project, the request about EPC ratings resulted in an exclusive [paywalled] on page two of the Financial Times.

Isaac shared how CE UK went about achieving this coverage, noting that any organisation could do the same: they are a small and relatively new charity, but followed some logical steps to pitch their story, and it paid off. 

First of all, they identified three potential stories, analysing the data they’d received and looked for trends within it to see what stood out the most. They wrote the headline for each, to make it easy for a journalist to imagine the piece and the way the data could be framed. 

CE UK also considered the stories’ relevance to what was in the news at the time. The cost of living crisis was very much in the zeitgeist, and that tied in well with their data around low energy efficiency standards in council housing.

They identified which newspaper they wanted to target, and found a suitable journalist to approach, and then simply emailed them with both the headlines and the detail to back them up. Isaac advises that it is reasonable to pitch a few potential stories at one time, especially if you have such rich data that you can pull several angles out of it. 

Finally, Isaac advises that having given your framing to the journalist, you must allow them the freedom to emphasise whichever parts of the story they want to, based on your clear explanation of the data and what it is saying.

Questions from the audience:

Q: Did CE UK use EIR (Environmental Information Regulations) requests? 

A: The requests were sent with a note that the authorities should feel free to treat them as either EIR or FOI requests. In these cases, the responses would be much the same so the distinction wasn’t a great concern for CE UK.

Q: How can one identify the right journalist to approach? 

A: CE UK were guided by where they wanted the story to go, based on the reputation of the paper. Ideally you can then identify a journalist who has an interest in your subject matter. Clearly they won’t know your data as well as you do, so make sure they understand the context — be really clear in explaining what your data is about. And it’s fine to pitch to more than one journalist: give them a deadline to respond by and if they don’t, move on to another.

Q: If the paper has a paywall how do you ensure as many people as possible see the story? 

A: As well as the FT exclusive, which gave that paper the ability to print first, CE UK later sent a press release round to more general and sector press. This was also picked up by many.

Rosie Taylor, freelance journalist

Rosie specialises in health and consumer affairs, writing news and features across all national press, and she often uses FOI in work. She also works with organisations to improve their media coverage. 

Rosie began by listing five key things to consider when pitching a story to the newspapers:

1. Relevance Your story needs to be relevant to that publication’s readers. All publications have slightly different audiences with unique interests and concerns.
2. Timeliness Can you hook into topics that are being talked a lot at the moment in the news? Make sure the journalist knows ‘why now?’.
3. Ease How easy are you making it for the editor to say yes? Overworked journalists don’t have time to build up a story, so ideally you should provide a complete package. If you’re giving them data, it’s all the better if you can give them the top line but also attach the datasets. Line up experts, provide case studies and pictures — it all really helps. Look at what a finished article looks like on the page: that is everything you’re going to need.
4. Targeting Make sure you’re sending your pitch to the right journalist in the right section of the right publication. Read the publication yourself and look at the stories; become familiar with which journalists are covering certain topics.
5. Timing Pitch plenty of time ahead of when you want the story to be published, to allow time for the journalist to write it.

When considering which news outlet you are targeting, you need to look at your ultimate aim: for example, the Financial Times is read by changemakers, so it fits the needs of many campaign or advocacy groups well. Perhaps you just want more people to know about your organisation, in which case a mass readership publication would suit you better.

We tend to think of each newspaper as a single entity but in fact they can contain different sections, each with their own editor and journalists, and slightly different  interests, audiences and timescales.

It pays to know which section you are targeting, and what you want it to look like on the page. Will the story be a few paragraphs or are you hoping for a double page spread?

You might pitch your story to local papers rather than a national. In fact, many of these are syndicated across the whole country, so you can still effectively attain national coverage that way.

If you are pitching to a daily newspaper with a Sunday edition: is it a seven-day operation, or are they two separate papers? For example, you shouldn’t pitch the Times and the Sunday Times simultaneously, as they run autonomously, while the Telegraph just runs seven days a week.

Similarly, some papers have a different team producing online content, like the Daily Mail newspaper and Mail Online.

Don’t feel that you have to write off a whole publication just because you’ve had a ‘no’ from one section – if the Sunday paper says no, you can still pitch the dailies; if the Health section says ‘no’, you can try another section.

There are two ways of pitching: ‘all round’, which goes to several papers at once, or as an exclusive.

All-rounds

If you are sending your story to multiple outlets at the same time, always put an embargo on the press release (a date and time after which it can be published). This ensures that you have control over the moment of release, and journalists welcome it as it gives them the time to write the story up.

Make your embargo clear: you can put it in big red capital letters, add it to the email title, et cetera. The general convention for print is an embargo of 00:01 (one minute past midnight) for the story to appear in the following day’s papers.

Online outlets really like embargos in the middle of the day (but that timing is a nightmare for print, so pick one). For broadcast, you can time the embargo to their news bulletins.

Make sure you’re available in the run-up to the embargo, including having your experts or case studies at hand, in case there are any extra questions. If you have embargoed the story for a Monday release, that means being available on the Sunday.

An all-round is always a gamble, because it can be scuppered by a bigger news story arising; with an exclusive you can discuss timing with your journalist and they might have the flexibility to put it out at a later date if that is still appropriate. 

Exclusives

With an exclusive, you can work with one publication and focus on getting quality coverage. You can still set an embargo if the timing is important to you; you can also do a joint exclusive for print and broadcast, so long as you are transparent with all parties.

As Isaac mentioned, if one paper declines your story, take it to another — you can pretend you’re still offering it to them first!

Be very clear that you’re offering your story as an exclusive. Explain why it is relevant to them, their readers, and is timely. You should do this further ahead of time than with an all-round, especially bearing in mind that you may have to pitch to more than one outlet; also, they might want to examine your data and go into the story more deeply.

As soon as your exclusive story has been published, you can send to all the other press and see if any of them pick it up — so an exclusive doesn’t tie your story to a single paper for good.

Timing

While Rosie says one shouldn’t be too hung up on timing — it is much more important to have a strong story — it does help to know the cycles to which newspapers work. 

Sunday papers have a day off on a Monday; pool ideas on Tuesdays and most of the content has been written by the Thursday. Pitch a few weeks ahead.

Daily papers work to rough weekly cycles. They have more space on Saturdays, when they like lighter stories with good human interest; while the Monday edition is smaller but also the most serious – a good time for dryer, data-driven stories.

On Sundays, daily papers tend to have a skeleton staff, so they might be grateful of a fully-worked story. Pitch on the Wednesday of the previous week, with an embargo for Monday morning, and your story will be worked on by the Sunday staff who will be glad to have something easy to include.

Supplements and weekly sections within daily papers all have their own cycles, so just pitch a couple of weeks ahead of when you need to run.

Questions from the audience

Q: Is it better to pitch to a freelancer like Rosie, or directly to a paper?

A: There are plusses to both, but Rosie says there are several benefits to pitching to a freelancer: they can pitch to multiple publications, know all the editors and know instinctively which would be the best fit. Plus they have an incentive to get your story published, because they are paid on publication.

On the other hand, staff journalists have more weight with the papers, so it’s easier for them to get stories in.

Q: Is it best to phone or email?

A: Don’t ever phone. The journalist will see your email – but they do get a lot, so you need to make sure it is eye-catching. If you are offering an exclusive, make it very clear that this is a personal email intended for its recipient, not a generic one.

Q: What sort of case studies could we be providing?

A: Even if your story is just based on data, there will still be a human impact in the story. For example, looking at the energy standards story, you could find someone who lives in an energy inefficient home or who hasn’t got money for their bills.

Q: How do big investigations get funded? 

A: Most are funded in-house, and developed internally. You might find yourself working with the newspaper’s own team. Complex stories take time, so you need a newspaper on board to pay for your time and any equipment you need. Sometimes, organisations like the Bureau of Investigative Journalism apply for grants to help them with in-depth stories.

Over 115,000 Freedom of Information requests.

Almost 225,000 FixMyStreet reports.

Close to 3,000 public transport problems.

Every word spoken in Parliament since 1935.

So, what would you like to know?

There’s no doubt about it, mySociety sites store a lot of data. And once you have that much data, you can start finding the answers to interesting questions. Questions like:

• Which public bodies receive the most FOI requests?
• Which county gets the most pothole reports?
• Which train routes are people complaining most about?
• Which MP has spoken for the longest cumulative time in the history of Parliament?

There are less obvious questions, too – how about:

• Which regions of the country are most likely to include bad language when submitting a form online?
• How many times does the Speaker have to interject, “Order, order!” in an average week?
• Which words are most spoken in Parliament, and which have only become popular in the last five years?
• What topics do people submit the most Freedom of Information requests about?
• Just how often does a UK citizen get so fed up about dog poop that they take action?

We reckon there are almost limitless stories in our data, waiting to be teased out. Some of them will be surprising, fascinating, or just plain funny. Some may even be potential front page news. So, we’ve invited journalists who have a particular interest in data, or indeed in any of the areas we work in, to come and have at it at our first ever mySociety Data Hackday.

Not a journalist?

Journalists aren’t the only ones with bright ideas, so if you’re reading this and there’s a burning question that springs to mind, leave a comment below. Given all these reams of data, what would you be looking for? We’ll add the best ideas to our list, and we’ll be reporting back on everything we find out.

Actually, I am a journalist!

There are still a few places, so if you’d like to attend, please drop us a line. Note: we will expect you to get stuck in! We will run the data, but you may be sifting through the results, looking for significant stories, and sharing your findings. Bring a laptop, and plenty of ideas.

If you can’t attend, but really wish you could, let us know what data you’d like us to run, and we’ll add it to the list.

ETA: Lanyrd page here.

Image credit: Johan Nilsson

FixMyTransport was launched a month ago. It is now well on its way to listing 1,000 individual complaints, suggestions and requests to the public transport operators of Great Britain.

As the sample size grows, we’re able to see just what provokes the country’s mild-mannered passengers into action. There are the diurnal irritations – the leaky station roof, constant announcements, smelly trains; there is the discomfort of overcrowding and overheated buses.

All of which are important, of course. And in this, FixMyTransport is achieving its aim of allowing people to make their reports to the operators, while at the same time creating small bunches of people who read those reports and think, ‘Hey, me too!’.

But FixMyTransport is not just for the little gripes. It’s uncovering some pretty big issues, too. Prime among these is the issue of accessibility: reports have come in of buses driving away rather than let a wheelchair user on; a disabled passenger who has surmised that it’s easier to invite friends to come to him rather than try to navigate London’s public transport system; a station from which those with restricted mobility can only travel in one direction.

What next?

The big question for us is, what happens now? Are these reports making anything better? In some cases, yes.

There is the train that will now stop at intermediate stations, and the pedestrian crossings that are no longer blocked by buses. Little things that’ll make a big difference to the people who reported them. But the pay-off is not always so immediate. Bigger issues are obviously not going to be fixed overnight. And some problems won’t be fixed, for a multitude of reasons – they don’t fit in with the operators’ plans, or they’re not budgeted for, or they just aren’t seen as sufficiently important.

How is FixMyTransport going to crack those? Well, it was set up so that you can show your operator that there is demand, that budgets need to be massaged, or that plans should change. If you’ve used the site, you may well have been on the receiving end of a comment from one of the team, nudging you to spread the word of your campaign, among friends, family, and fellow-passengers.

The fact that people can sign up to your page helps make FixMyTransport different from just contacting the operator directly. We also reckon it’ll make a difference when it comes to getting changes. Consider, for example, the campaign to get increased cycle parking at Cambridge station – with 176 supporters (and still growing every day), our biggest yet. It’s been picked up by local press, talked about on Twitter – and eventually, National Express won’t be able to ignore the public demonstration of a palpable need.

Well, that’s the plan. We know it’s early days, and that FixMyTransport represents a massive sea change for some operators who are not used to interacting openly and online.

If you’ve written an impassioned, well-reasoned request, gathered supporters and spread the word far and wide, and still hit a brick wall, we have other suggestions. FixMyTransport allows us to get you writing to your local councillor, to the local paper, or to relevant groups like Passenger Focus, Transport for All, and the Campaign for Better Transport. These groups have been bashing away at the big problems like accessibility for far longer than we have, and it makes sense to tap into their expertise.

We know that for some issues, it’ll be a long game – just as it’ll be a long game trying to get every operator fully signed-up to the notion of transparent online interaction. But we’ll keep trying, and we hope you will too.

So. Yesterday we officially launched FixMyTransport, a site that has been in ‘quiet beta’ for a few weeks. Not such a big event, you might think – after all, the site has been open for public use; the only difference was that we were announcing it.

I think we’ve all been gratifyingly taken aback by just how much use the site has seen in the last 24 hours. Thanks to mentions in some of the mainstream press, but equally because of a veritable outpouring of tweets and retweets, word spread quickly. We experienced a 550% rise in visitor numbers (the servers took it in their stride, we are glad to say). Over the course of the day, the number of reports on the site doubled, with more than 70 totally new campaigns being created and many more problems being sent to operators. With each report came more tweets, more blog posts and more users signing up to campaigns.

We’re seeing the idea we worked on become a reality, and that’s both exciting and full of surprises. We knew what we would use such a site for, but we had no idea which issues would most motivate our users (at the latest reckoning, it’s poor air conditioning, delays, and, above all, a lack of decent information).

If you haven’t had a chance to see what FixMyTransport is all about yet, take a look at some of these examples:

• A passenger who has to travel west when she wants to go east
• What sounds like a complete no-brainer of a suggestion
• A sensible placatory move Virgin could extend to delayed passengers
• A call for longer commuter trains

Many of these examples see users (not just the operators, but ordinary people) who know a lot more than we do about public transport in this country weighing in with useful insights, which is fantastic.

Don’t forget you can search your local region for reports. If you find one you agree with, lending your support is as easy as clicking a single button, and then spreading the word with a tweet, a Facebook status or however you see fit.

Excuse the puns – they are hard to avoid – but we have the sense that we’re at the beginning of a very exciting journey here. And we’re sure we’re going to enjoy the ride. Thanks to everyone who’s come on board so far.

Member of the National Secular Society Robert Christian used mySociety’s Freedom of Information site, WhatDoTheyKnow to ask all 227 English NHS “provider” Trusts about how much they spend on chaplaincy.

On the 28th of February 2011 the results of his research were published in an article on the National Secular Society website (full report [PDF]). He found that £29m of NHS funds were used to pay chaplains in 2009/10 and also observed a wide variation in the amount, as a fraction of total spend, that specific trusts were spending on chaplaincy.

The publication of the research prompted a number of articles in the UK media. eg. (Daily Mail, The Independent, The Mirror).

Mr Christian has commented:

“To have identified the right FOI contact for every provider NHS Trust in England would have been daunting if not impossible. I doubt that my study would ever have got off the ground without WDTK. I particularly valued the way that the site tracks which Trust has and has not yet responded. I liked the capability to thank each FOI lead after they had responded.”

The fact that making requests via WhatDoTheyKnow allowed Mr Christian to cite the source of his raw data was important to him. He added:

“The transparency of the raw data is, I think, one of the main strengths of the WDTK website for three reasons. First, I was able to hyperlink every piece of data back to its source – and that meant that it was easy for colleagues from the NSS to check the accuracy of the data (with so many Trusts a transcription error was always a possibility). Second, it ensured that if anyone had wanted to challenge the accuracy of the data they could be directed to see that the study was simply quoting the Trusts’ own information. Third, it means that the data is there for future reference to see if there are any changes over the coming years.”

mySociety and WhatDoTheyKnow are non-partisan and don’t get involved in campaigning except in specific areas relating to openness and transparency. We take no view on issues such as how much, if anything, the NHS ought be paying for chaplaincy. However we welcome campaign groups making use of our services.

Bulk Requests

WhatDoTheyKnow currently has around 2-4 “bulk requests” per month made via its site. At the moment we don’t provide any mechanism to make bulk requests automatically. We are considering adding such a system, for requests which have been sanity checked by the WhatDoTheyKnow team. The provision of such a system would probably be associated with a mechanism for preventing other “bulk requests” from being made without the site administrators’ explicit approval.

Making the requests is only a small part of the work involved in a study such as that carried out by Mr Christian. Chasing public bodies for responses, as well as collating and analysing the information released is likely to be much more time consuming than submitting the requests themselves. This is something Mr Christian agrees with, stating:

“If enquirers are not prepared to individually contact each organisation to ask the question, I would doubt their commitment to retrieve and analyse the information (as that is actually a much bigger task)”.

Clearly any facility for enabling requests to be made in bulk will have to incorporate safeguards to ensure responsible use.

Whereas Mr Christian has been happy to conduct his research in public, and still been able to generate media coverage following publication, we are aware that many campaign groups, and others such as journalists, like to make Freedom of Information requests in private.

Mr Christian has commented on the issue of “scoops” and the effect of conducting his research in public:

“The question of ‘scoops’ is an issue for journalists and in fact this problem did happen in this case. Someone appears to have trawled the WDTK know site and noticed what I was doing. A short piece was run by the Daily Express before we completed and published the study. So clearly this might be an issue. But the risk of a spoiler being run will tend to be low when the number of organisations being contacted is large. This is because the amount of work needed to collate and analyse the data is enormous and so casual trawling will show only that a question is being asked – not what the conclusions are.”

In order to get as great a fraction of the total number of FOI responses available on WhatDoTheyKnow we have also been considering an option for making requests in private, for a fee. The idea would be that once the findings were published then the FOI response could be opened up to the public providing access to the source material backing up the story.

Any views on our ideas for the future and on the way WhatDoTheyKnow has been used for this, and similar, research would be welcome in the comments below.

The two days leading up to election day are a hugely important time for less politically-obsessive voters. The parties know that a lot of people are only starting to seriously think how to vote today and tomorrow, and TheyWorkForYou saw its biggest spike ever the day before the election, way back in 2005.

This means it’s a super-important time to get trustworthy, non-partisan information in front of as many people as possible. And you can help by doing the following simple things:

1. Go to your constituency page on the TheyWorkForYou Election Quiz and take a good look at the answers. Is there anything surprising in the answers? Has anyone failed to respond who really shouldn’t? Is there anything funny in the responses? Make a couple of notes about what you think are the most interesting findings.

2. If you know the name of your local papers or radio stations, try to Google for the email or phone number of the news desk. If you don’t know the names, try sticking the name of your nearest town into a media database like this, to get a phone number or email address.

3. If possible, you should start your pitch by phoning rather than emailing. If you get a phone number for a news desk, give them a bell and say that you’re a volunteer from “The country’s largest non-partisan election information project”, and ask for the email of a specific person who might be interested in a story about what local candidates are saying.

4. Once you have an email address of a specific journalist, compose a locally specific email for them, along the following lines:

“Hi X,

I’m a resident of Z constituency, and this election I’ve been one of 6000 volunteers helping  to build an unprecedented project to get candidates across the country to go on the record, in conjunction with the website TheyWorkForYou.com. It’s a strictly non-partisan project, aimed at giving voters a really clear, spin-free view of what their candidates stand for. I’d really appreciate it if you could give it some coverage before election day.

In my constituency, N candidates have completed our survey. From this we can see some quite interesting things, namely:

* Candidate A thinks…

* Candidate B thinks…

Would you be so kind as to print a story encouraging people to check our their candidates via TheyWorkForYou.com, and mentioning some of the highlights I’ve included?

all the best,

Your name, email, phone”

5. An hour after you send the email through, give the journalist a call back to see if they need any more help.

6. If you do this, please leave us a comment on this post so we know who’s had a go!

Thank you for helping spread some non-partisan information this election time, and enjoy the election…

Update: The Telegraph posted a retraction yesterday.

You may have seen coverage on various websites saying that a civil servant was sacked after posting a comment on TheyWorkForYou.

We’ve no idea what this story is about, but we’re pretty certain it has nothing whatsoever to do with TheyWorkForYou. No journalist bothered to contact us before running the story.

• There is no comment on TheyWorkForYou containing the text quoted in that article, nor anything like it, nor has there ever been. Nor in fact (as we’ve checked), on HearFromYourMP, WriteToThem, or WhatDoTheyKnow.
• Only one comment has been left on any contribution by Hazel Blears in 2009, and it’s definitely not related to this.
• 27 comments were left on 13th May, the date the comment was apparently posted; we’ve read them all and they’re all nothing to do with this.

So frankly, we’ve no idea what’s going on.

What we do know is that the implication that mySociety would merrily hand over sensitive personal data that ends up in getting someone sacked, without fighting tooth and nail for their privacy every inch of the way, is a complete misinterpretation of the way we work and the things we hold most dear. No-one has ever contacted us to ask us to hand over such data, nor have we ever done so.

We think what might have happened is a simple mis-remembering of the website that contained the problematic comment. We’re hoping to get in touch with Lisa Greenwood so we can get full details before asking the various media companies that have run with this for a correction.

7,000 members on the Facebook group, over 93% of MPs contacted. Lots of news coverage: BBC, Daily Mail, Guardian, Telegraph, Times. John Mann MP makes a good point in a letter to the Guardian: “Few of my constituents care about the detail of how I spend their money as long as I do a good job, but nearly all of them care that they have the right to find out if they really feel the need to.”

Tom has updated the main blog post with a quote from President Obama’s speech that I thought was worth repeating, on why this is a much bigger issue than some bits of paper and some minor embarrassment: “And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

If you haven’t already, do write to your MP, and pick up the phone and call your local radio and TV news stations to let them know about this.

According to some, today is the day when the world is going to be saved. Not sure if I agree with that, but recognise that the inauguration of Barack Obama is of some importance :-)). And, naturally, so is the work carried out by mysociety.org. I therefore thought today would be a good time to point to some of its achievements in 2008.

So where to begin? Well, personally I think the work with the Commuting Time Maps is worth mentioning. Developed in collaboration with the Department of Transport it enables users to work out commuting distances from one point to another. This is arguably very useful information if you are house hunting, looking for a new office or if you are an estate agent wanting to provide clients with that extra information.

Or how about picking up an award for FixMyStreet at the SustainIT eWell-Being Awards. The judges said it was “[a]n excellent example of an independent website which empowers the general public in their dealings with their local council. It is a relatively simple application, yet highly effective and replicable.” Very well done indeed.

I know I have mentioned it before, but an obvious achievement is for the charity to have stayed alive and kicking for five years. The main man behind mySociety.org, Tom Steinberg, was around the time of the anniversary featured in an article in the Guardian. Check it out for some more in-depth information about Tom and the rise of mySociety.org!

Full details of all the achievements and general ongoings in 2008 can be found on the blog, especially the successes and 2008 pages.

Obviously it’s always great when any paper gives mySociety coverage – it helps get the word about our services out and helps more people get things done that help their lives.

However, today’s look at mySociety’s 5 years in the Guardian makes a few claims I think it’s important to challenge, so instead of writing to the readers editor I thought I’d just seize the power of Citizen Media(TM) to note them here.

First, has the No10 petitions site had “little notable impact” on government policy? Given that that project appears almost single handedly to have bounced Parliament into developing an online petitioning system and devoting debate time to major petitions, I’d say that it certainly has had some impact. But there is indeed a bigger problem of pointing at No10 petitions and going “That one changed policy.” It’s a problem of two halves: scale, and deniability.  Governments almost never acknowledge that they were forced into anything, ever. Policy announcements are almost always framed as if the right course of action was being followed all along. So apart from the fact that I don’t know how one could possibly assess the impacts of so many thousands of petitions without a huge research project, I would expect that even those that do have in impact will still usually be denied by the government, even when shifting policy. I would encourage No10 and the whole of Government to take a look at directly challenging this culture, and employ someone whose job it is to find out which petitions are having an impact, and shout about them in plain English.

Second, the majority of mySociety’s sites are programmed by staff and contractors, not volunteers. The volunteers are super-essential to mySociety running every day, but the sheer size of some of our projects makes it unlikely a volunteer could have built them without giving up their day job for many months. This needs mentioning to explain why it matters if our finances are precarious!

Next – do councils find FixMyStreet an irritation or an asset? Well, last time we did a count a few weeks ago, we had 4 complaining emails from councils, and 62 supportive ones, with several linking directly to us. As for the Customer Relationship Management at councils, we’d be delighted to send reports straight into their databases without going via email first, it’s just that only one council has set up such an interface so far. I hope that FixMyStreet can put pressure on councils and their suppliers to build a small number of standardised interfaces for the good of everyone. And yes, we are building FixMyStreet for iPhone and Android, and I’m happy to talk to anyone who wants to build UIs for any other phones.

There – hope that doesn’t come across as too ungrateful to Michael Cross et al. See you at the next birthday party, I hope!

Update: I also meant to mention that I’ve never been a ‘Downing Street Insider’. I was a junior civil servant in the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, which is not in Downing Street and more loosely affiliated than the name might suggest.