Tag: Reference

Today we’ve published a new report with Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund, exploring how a future European civic tech hub could strengthen democratic participation across Europe. You can read it online, or download as a PDF.  Drawing on interviews with 19 civic tech organisations from 12 countries, we’ve wrestled with the opportunities and challenges facing…

Whether or not you voted, or no matter who you voted for, every person in Wales is now represented by six MSs in the Senedd.  And the good news is, we’re here to help you navigate the new system! ✉️ You can find out who your six MSs are, and contact all or some of…

For the the third in our series of discovery workshops, we invited people working with FOI in public authorities to discuss how a network might support them — and we had more than 50 attendees joining us from a range of organisations and specialities.  Discussion was lively and informative, with many expressing a thirst for…

We continue with exploratory work that will help shape what the FOI Network will become, and how it will best serve specific types of those who use Freedom Of Information. Last week, in our second workshop of three, we convened journalists and specialist users to help us understand what the barriers are to their use…

Liz Vango-Smith is Sustainability and Climate Change Officer at Hart District Council, where she manages the climate change programme, helping to meet their carbon reduction targets both internally, and across the district. She recently took the time to speak to us about the part that the Council Climate Action Scorecards play in her work. Liz…

Have you visited sewagemap.co.uk? If you care about your local rivers, lakes and seas, you might want to take a look at this very graphic display of where sewage is being discharged across England. If you’re wondering which sense of ‘graphic’ we mean, well, it’s both: first, it’s easy to see the information at a…

LLMs can increase demand on public systems by removing the friction that previously limited access. One potential result of this is new forms of unconsidered rationing that recreate that friction. Instead, we should move away from zero sum systems and aim for technical and policy approaches that turn unscalable private benefits into efficient collective ones. …

The FOI Network is an informal coalition of civil society organisations, journalists and academics with an interest in Freedom of Information, convened by mySociety and State of the Future. Last week, we held our first meet-up, in the shape of an online workshop, to discuss and prioritise the ways in which we might strengthen and…

We’ve just started a new project exploring how improved data and training could help youth services in England – building their financial sustainability and representing their communities at a national policy level. Working with the Social Investment Business (SIB), which coordinates the government’s Youth Investment Fund, we’ll be talking to youth organisations across the North…

In a recent blog post, we set out why proposals to reduce the Freedom of Information cost limit would reduce government transparency, without meaningfully reducing the burden on public authorities, since then the opposition to the move has grown.  What’s the problem? On 18 March 2026, The Financial Times reported that the government is considering…