mySociety
Read my posts on the mySociety blog. Portfolio below updated periodically.
CAPE is our data-packed website that makes it easier for everyone to track and improve local action on climate change, built in collaboration with Climate Emergency UK.
When CAPE launched, it was basically a list of councils' climate action plans — but we've continued to make regular improvement
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How we support other crowdsourcing projects, and think about crowdsouring in our core work.
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A story in this week's Financial Times [paywalled] has brought the EPC ratings of council-owned properties into the public conversation. This story was based on data obtained through FOI requests as part of the Council Climate Action Scorecards project, which we've been working on in partnership wit
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Our summary and response.
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New constituency data, and how we should steer the process of boundary reform towards making our politics easier to navigate.
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Changes to how MPs vote can improve both transparency and the parliamentary working culture.
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Using new techniques to identify common features and help search documents.
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Connecting our thinking on democracy and climate.
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How does the way the site is used suggest it should change?
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TheyWorkForYou is lowering the bar for small, often underfunded organisations to engage with Parliament.
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A new series from mySociety
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We're looking for a researcher to improve our understanding of Environmental Information Requests.
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Read the new mySociety/Centre for Public Data report about improving government data publishing.
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Read our draft response, give us feedback, or submit your own views to the ICO.
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Freedom of Information has been used by millions of people - we want support and advocate for you.
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More details on our FOI polling, and how it compares with other polling and estimates of FOI use.
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Updating our deprivation and rural-urban datasets to cover more kinds of geographies.
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Looking for experiences and frustrations of running into fragmented public data: and views on solutions.
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Templates! Automated testing! Exploring the data in your browser! And much more.
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We have a load of climate and local government data waiting to be used - and if you're not sure how to, we can help!
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The goal of mySociety’s Climate programme is to reduce the carbon emissions that are either directly controlled or influenced by local government in the UK.
From 5-8 July, we will run a prototyping week to understand what mySociety could bring to the problem of improving energy efficiency in the
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An ambitious and welcome vision for FOI in government, but big changes are needed to see it happen.
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Learning from different approaches across Europe
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What we learned about the public's understanding of local government.
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Dividing local government services into service delivery, regulation, and place making.
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ARIA's exclusion from FOI is part of a broader attack on government transparency.
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Our polling finds support for making voting instructions public, but also that MPs are seen as responsible for their own votes.
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What if, instead of one way of comparing local authorities, you had... five?
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Focusing on the effects on FOI of proposed changes.
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mySociety's evidence to the 2021 PACAC inquiry into the Clearing House
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What are users of TheyWorkForYou alerts interested in?
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Party comparisons are displayed in more places and calculated in an improved way.
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FOI is in trouble, and needs its own defender.
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Work-in-progress: Using BEIS emissions data to identify similar councils, and put them into clusters.
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Explore FOI statistics for UK central government and Scotland.
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Appealing to the Court of Accountants.
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How do appeals to ICO and OSIC vary in outcome and time taken?
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Understanding what makes Environmental Information special in Freedom of Information and the (minor) differences in how this is interpreted in Scotland.
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Improvements to strengthen access to information in the UK
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How we combine national datasets to analyse UK-wide services.
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Councillor attitudes towards citizen engagement
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For some categories of reports, including a photo makes it more likely an issue will be resolved.
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How we're approaching official and user collected data.
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What is Beneficial Ownership? How can the data be used?
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Looking at the different demographics of use of civic tech services.
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Different uses of civic tech sites have different demographic profiles, allowing multiple interpretations of their impact.
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mySociety/Public Square report about the current usage of digital tools for democratic participation.
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A small number of people are often responsible for most of the data - but is this good or bad?
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mySociety report exploring WhatDoTheyKnow statistics for central government
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mySociety paper replicating finding of gender differences in categories of reports to FixMyStreet.
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mySociety report exploring how digital tools can contribute to a Citizens Assembly.
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mySociety paper exploring the scale and administration of FOI requests to local government.
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University of Stirling, the University of Sheffield and mySociety collaboration looking into the spatial patterns of reporting on FixMyStreetthe
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LSE blog post exploring if the gender of a representative affects how likely men and women are to write to them.
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mySociety blog and minisite exploring the role of party in the gender balance in Parliaments around the world
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Democratic Audit blog post detailing how features of the electoral system affects responsiveness to constituents.
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Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 3, July 2019.
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mySociety paper looking at current patterns of reporting of dog fouling to local authorities, and the history of this as a social problem.
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