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/RSS FeedOver the past decade, mySociety has convened a global community with a shared interest in how digital tools can defend and advance democracy, via our TICTeC events and activities.
This new report draws on dozens of TICTeC presentations, and interviews with global civic technologists. The result? A practical framework for navigating different approaches to using technology in the service of democracy, bringing out examples of innovation, and guidance on how to use the best tools available. It’s designed to be a practical jumping-off point for practitioners and funders seeking to understand more about using digital technology to defend and advance democracy.
At this launch event, mySociety researchers shared key insights from the report, reflected on impacts of TICTeC initiatives, and discussed ideas of what’s needed next to protect and innovate democracy in a changing global context.
- Read the report: Shifting landscapes: what we’ve learned from TICTeC
- TICTeC Knowledge hub
- See the value in our work? Please donate.
- Sign up for our mailouts
Transcript
00:00 Louise Crow: Well, hello everyone. Welcome.
0:03 For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Louise Crow. I’m the Chief Executive of mySociety, and really appreciate you joining us for this session where we’re going to be launching our TICTeC landscape report.
0:15 We’ve called it ‘Shifting landscapes, a practical guide to pro-democracy tech’. We’re going to be pulling out some key parts of the report and basically discussing what we’ve learned from running TICTeC over the last couple of years. (more…)
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Understanding more about constituent communication
We’ve released a new report exploring insights from WriteToThem about the content of constituent communication – you can read the whole report online or a summary below.
WriteToThem.com is a long-running mySociety service that enables people across the UK to contact their elected representatives by entering their postcode and sending a message through the site.
This service provides a unique opportunity to understand the flow of communication between many constituents and many representatives. Our WriteToThem Insights report uses surveys to understand more about what people are writing about.
While previous work identified patterns in response rates and deprivation gradients, this experiment focuses on understanding what people are writing about, distinguishing between casework (individual problem-solving) and campaigning (policy-oriented advocacy).
A new survey and data-processing pipeline were developed to categorise and anonymise message summaries, applying machine learning and large language model techniques to cluster and label topics. Analysis of 5,400 messages from Q3 2025 found:
- Casework and campaigning form two distinct types of communication, with casework more common for councillors and campaigning dominant for MPs.
- The deprivation gradients of these two types differ sharply: campaigning is concentrated in less deprived areas, while casework is more evenly distributed, though likely still underrepresents the most deprived groups.
- First-time users are more likely to send casework messages and to receive responses.
- Top themes in casework include housing, local services, health, and anti-social behaviour; in campaigning, issues such as Gaza, climate policy, and digital ID predominate.
This data has limits. This covers only a portion of total correspondence, and with little information about whether the sample is representative enough to generalise to messages sent in general. That said, we think there are strong uses both for improving WriteToThem itself and for informing broader understanding of constituent communication.
We want to build on this work: refining the analysis process and exploring opportunities to collaborate. We see particular value in digging more into casework data as something that could inform more systematic approaches in this area, helping representatives across the country join up information and improve collective scrutiny of government services.
The full report can be read here.
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Image: Christopher Burns
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In our latest online webinar, we convened three experts to tell us about how Freedom of Information works in practice – in other words, how does the law work when it comes into contact with the real world?
You can rewatch the video on our YouTube channel.
Speakers were:
Toby Mendel, founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Law and Democracy, who have run the Right To Information rating since 2011. This makes it easy to see at a glance which countries are performing well across a number of different indicators around transparency and FOI, and which not so well.
Toby explains how a ranking can have interesting effects – not least encouraging countries to compete against near neighbours to do a little better! For us, of course, it’s interesting to see this in the light of the Council Climate Action Scorecards, where this race to the top is also one of the positive outcomes.
Giovanni Esposito from the Université Libre de Bruxelles described a set of field experiments he conducted in collaboration with the Belgian Alaveteli site Transparencia.be, to see what factors make a difference to responsiveness when putting in a request for information. This involved asking for the same document from several different municipalities – and you can find out the results by watching the video.
Then finally, Mária Žuffová of the European University Institute shared her research into what the UK public actually want to know, based on analysis of WhatDoTheyKnow requests – as one might imagine, this was of great interest to all of us here at mySociety, as it will be to everyone with a curiosity about humankind!
Enjoyed this?
We’ve put on a lot of online webinars and events recently, all with the aim of sharing knowledge among our global networks of civic tech organisations, and beyond to anyone who has an interest in our topics of democracy, transparency, climate and community. If you’d like to be kept informed about upcoming webinars, sign up for our newsletter and be sure to check the box marked ‘conferences and events’ (or just tick the topics you are most interested in, and then we’ll let you know everything we’re doing in those areas, including events).
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Thanks to new funding from the Welsh Government’s Democratic Engagement Grant, we’re going to be doing some really exciting work around WriteToThem over the next couple of years, specifically focused on helping people in Wales. This grant is both an opportunity for us to improve our approach, and to help get our tools into the hands of people who can take it further.
WriteToThem’s core mission is to make it very easy to send an email to your politicians — and to help people send the right message to the right representative. This is especially relevant in Wales, where devolution brings decision-making closer to people, but can also mean people have to discover who is responsible for different public services.
And so, what does this new bundle of work look like?
- First off we’ll be doing some concentrated research with representatives and community groups to understand barriers to constructive communication, which we’ll use to inform new development on the site.
- We’ll also be doing work to ensure that more people are supported to write to representatives for the first time, particularly in the most deprived areas of Wales, where typically there is less engagement with democracy — and all the more need for it!
- Just as important will be the translation of every part of the WriteToThem user flow into Welsh — that’s webpages, buttons, confirmation emails, error messages, the lot.
- And finally, there’ll be improved guidance about where to send messages — people already appreciate WriteToThem for its succinct descriptions here, but we know there are improvements that can be made, especially in the devolved regions.
We’re excited to get going on this, and to work with other grantees on how we can help each other go further. We’re starting to plan our research phase, and will have more to say about our plans soon, so watch this space or sign up to our newsletter to be the first to know.
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Image: Catrin Ellis
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Often, responses published on our Freedom of Information site WhatDoTheyKnow result in newspaper stories, or feed into campaigns or research.
When this happens with one of your own requests, you can add a link to the page. These then appear in the side column, like this:
It’s a great way for other users of the site to see the direct results that come from the simple act of making an FOI request — and now we’ve also added an ‘FOI in Action’ page, where you can see all of them in one place.
Here are five stories that have caught our eye from that page:
- A request for all communications around Eric Trump’s March 2025 visit to Edinburgh allowed the public to see the briefings made to the First Minister of Scotland ahead of their meeting — and resulted in this national news story.
- Minutes from the Ministry of Justice’s Working Group on Unregistered Marriages, acquired via this request, fed into a chapter of research on many aspects of modern marriage, this one being on unregistered Muslim marriages.
- All evidence points to this response being the basis for the New York Times piece [paywalled] that broke the massive story of the government’s £2.4 million expenditure to hide a life-or-death data breach, concerning Afghans who worked with the British forces.
- A 2022 report into misogyny in the British Army was not released until requested and then pursued via the user’s right to an internal review. The user knew of its existence thanks to previous news stories referring to it. The Byline Times reveals the report’s shocking findings in this news story.
- This 2019 report from The Bureau of Investigation looked into public sector adoption of algorithmic and data-driven systems, presciently foreseeing the explosive adoption of AI in our public services. This was based on several requests from a single user.
We’re not far off listing 3,000 citations on WhatDoTheyKnow — and these are just the ones users have added. If your request resulted in a piece of journalism, informed a campaign or fed into research, do add it in. As well as helping to show others what FOI can do, it provides a significant link back to the external site, helping bring it more readers.
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Image: Peter Lawrence
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AI and automated decision-making technologies are increasingly being used in government, and due to their opaque nature, it’s vital that we bring more transparency to their workings. In this event, three researchers and civil society actors talk about how they have used Freedom of Information to do just that.
You’ll hear from Morgan Currie from the University of Edinburgh; Gabriel Geiger of Lighthouse Reports, and Jake Hurfurt from Big Brother Watch. Learn what concerns them about this new age of automated decision-making; the practical tips and techniques they’ve used to bring hidden algorithms to light; and what needs to change in our laws as a matter of urgency.
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More information
- Blog post, with links to the video and slides
- Morgan Currie’s research (with Alli Spring): Algorithmic Transparency in the UK
- Lighthouse Reports’ Suspicion Machines, as presented by Gabriel Geiger
- Big Brother Watch’s report on the ‘error-riddled AI tool to be used by the Home Office’.
- Find out more about the Access to Information Network
Transcript
Louise Crow 0:03
Hello, everyone, welcome. I’m Louise Crow, Chief Executive mySociety.Louise Crow 0:08
Thank you for joining us for this one hour session on how Access to Information can help us understand AI decision making in government. (more…) -
If you were one of the 100+ people who joined us for today’s webinar, you’ll already know it was hugely informative and timely.
We packed three fascinating speakers into the course of one hour-long session on using FOI to understand AI-based decision making by public authorities. Each brought so many insights that, even if you were there, you may wish to watch it all over again.
Fortunately, you can! We’ve uploaded the video to YouTube, and you can also access Morgan’s slides on Google Slides, here and Jake’s as a PDF, here (Jake actually wasn’t able to display his slides, so this gives you the chance to view them alongside his presentation, should you wish).
Morgan Currie of the University of Edinburgh kicked things off with a look at her research ‘Algorithmic Accountability in the UK’, and especially how opaque the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP)’s use of automation for fraud detection has been, over the years.
Morgan explains the techniques used to gain more scrutiny of these decision-making and risk assessment processes, with much of the research based on analysing FOI requests made by others on WhatDoTheyKnow, which of course are public for everyone to see.
Secondly, in a pre-recorded session, Gabriel Geiger from Lighthouse Reports gave an overview of their Suspicion Machines Investigation which delves into the use of AI across different European welfare systems. Shockingly, but sadly not surprisingly, the investigation found code that was predicting which recipients of benefits are most likely to be committing fraud, with an inbuilt bias against minoritised people, women and parents — multiplied for anyone who falls into more than one of those categories.
Gabriel also outlined a useful three-tiered approach to this type of investigation, which others will be able to learn from when instigating similar research projects.
Our third speaker was Jake Hurfurt of Big Brother Watch, who spoke of the decreasing transparency of our public bodies when it comes to AI-based systems, and the root causes of it: a lack of technical expertise among smaller authorities and the contracting of technology from private suppliers. Jake was in equal parts eloquent and fear-inducing about what this means for individuals who want to understand the decisions that have been made about them, and hold authorities accountable — but he also has concrete suggestions as to how the law must be reformed to reflect the times we live in.
The session rounded off with a brief opportunity to ask questions, which you can also watch in the video.
Presented in collaboration with our fellow transparency organisations AccessInfo Europe and Frag Den Staat, this session was an output of the ATI Community of Practice.
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Image: Michael Dziedzic
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It’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. (more…)
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For a while now, there’s been a feature on WhatDoTheyKnow that lets you link your Freedom of Information requests to news articles, campaigning pieces or research papers.
We’ve recently made it easier to link your batch requests to these types of stories in the same way.
To celebrate, we’ll be offering free credit for WhatDoTheyKnow Pro subscribers who add links from their batch requests to the stories or papers that the requests have fed into.
For each qualifying link added during August, we’ll credit your account with a coupon that gives you a 20% discount on one month of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro.
Add several links, and you’ll get several coupons — so you could be enjoying that 20% discount for many months to come.
It’s easy to add them – go to the batch request via the dashboard and you’ll find the section in the right hand column. Just click on ‘Let us know’:
…and paste the URL in:
If there’s more than one story, you can click ‘New citation’ to add another one.
You’ll then see all the links to sources where the requests have been cited:
They’ll also be shown on the pages for individual requests in the batch:
If you’re a journalist, campaigner or researcher, we hope this is a useful way to give your stories some more readership (not to mention a nice inbound link from a high-ranked site for your search engine ratings).
More broadly, when you use this feature you’ll be helping us to understand what sort of impact the site is having, too. We’re always keen to spot news stories based on WhatDoTheyKnow requests, but papers don’t always cite a source or link back to the site, meaning that our monitoring is often dependent on a manual search where stories look like they might have originated with one of our users.
The way we’ve set this feature up, WhatDoTheyKnow users can add a citation to any of their own requests — but if you spot a news story that’s linked to a request that isn’t yours, please do contact the WhatDotheyKnow team.
They’ll assess it and input it if they find it to be valid. Our aim here is, of course, to prevent spammers from adding irrelevant links to the site.
Users of WhatDoTheyKnow Pro, on the other hand, have the ability to add citations to any request.
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For a link to qualify for the discount, it needs to be a link to a specific story, report, paper or dataset where the information released in the FOI request has been used (ie not just a link to your organisation’s homepage, or a general overview of a campaign – though we’re always delighted to hear about these cases, too!).
We’ll cap the number of months on which you can claim a discount at 24, but we really do appreciate these links so please do add them even if it’s above the cap. We’ll apply coupons to any qualifying links at the end of the month.
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Image: Etienne Girardet
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It finally feels like Spring is in the air, and you know it’s been a busy start to the year when we’re rolling the first two months into one set of monthnotes – in the middle of March!
So, what have we been up to?
Well – we’ve been adding datasets to and testing our alpha version of the Local Intelligence Hub tool that we built with The Climate Coalition. Feedback has been really good and this feels like something that’s really going to level up the ability of UK climate organisations to share data and coordinate their actions, at both a local and national level. We hope to share more about this project in the coming months, once it’s been made available to TCC members.
We submitted talks to a couple of conferences/events – and lo and behold, we’ll be in Sheffield (and online) for the Festival of Debate on May 24, with a panel of exceptional guests. Our topic? “What if you could reshape democracy for the better — and you had 20 years to do so?” Climate is sure to be part of the answer. Fancy joining us? Book here.
Between all this we’ve been working hard with our friends at Climate Emergency UK on the next round of the Council Climate Scorecards. Their draft methodology was released in November 2022, and the first round of marking started in January 2023. Part of our support has included building a Django application to store the marking data – and this has already dramatically improved the experience for Climate Emergency UK’s volunteers.
Climate Emergency UK are also working with mySociety’s Transparency team, using WhatDoTheyKnow Projects (a WhatDoTheyKnow Pro beta feature that helps researchers crowdsource data out of batch FOI requests) to gather some of the data for the scoring. All their FOI requests will be published on WhatDoTheyKnow later this year.
Our IICT grants are coming to an end soon – we’ve put out a blog post about Lynsted Community Kitchen Garden and the data they’re collecting with the weather station we funded. They have a public event on March 25 if anyone lives near Lynsted and wants to visit to check it out! Updates from Possible and Better Futures should be coming soon.
On the research side, we launched our report on unlocking the value of fragmented public data, which is part of our work into the data ecosystem around climate data. Our plan over the next few months is to support a few research commissions which link in to this report and help to show use of climate data.
We’ve confirmed a partnership with Dark Matter Labs – we’ll be moving forward with them and our Neighbourhood Warmth prototype, exploring how we could encourage neighbours to come together to take their first retrofit action, such as getting a house survey. We’ll be building a working prototype over the next few weeks, then testing it out with communities in three pilot areas around the UK, to ensure that what we’re building makes sense to the people we’re aiming to serve.
And finally, we met up in person! We had a team meeting in early February which was a wonderful chance for us all to take stock of the last year, and discuss the future. We’ve been making some plans for year 3 of the Climate programme and after widening our scope through prototyping, now we’re going to be focusing back in again on building and proving the impact of the services we’re running.
That’s a very whistlestop tour of our first months of 2023!
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Image: Daniel James
