Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments & assemblies
“We can all be improvers of our built environment”, with FixMyStreet
21 August 2025 @ 7:55 am
Nothing makes us happier at mySociety than finding out that our work is doing some good in the world — and an unexpected email from a happy FixMyStreet user certainly put a big smile on all of our faces. Michael, who lives and works in London, wrote: “FixMyStreet has allowed so many people to report…
New ways in to Freedom of Information
20 August 2025 @ 8:05 am
We launched WhatDoTheyKnow with two goals: to make Freedom of Information more accessible to all; and to provide a free public archive of all the information that is released as a result. Today, 17 years later, those goals still guide us, and there’s more we can do towards them every day. Most recently, we’ve developed…
How access to information can help us understand AI decision making
19 August 2025 @ 3:41 pm
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…
Using LLMs to write text classification rules
12 August 2025 @ 4:26 pm
I’ve written before about how we’re thinking about “low resource” use of Large Language Models (LLMs) — and where some of the benefits of LLMs can be captured without entering the “dependent on external API” vs “need new infrastructure to run internally” trade-offs. One of the use cases we have for LLMs is categorisation: across…
Summer 2025 Update: Strengthening our networks, sharpening our tools, sharing our ideas
6 August 2025 @ 3:28 pm
Partners across the Access to Information Community of Practice have been hard at work this summer. Read on to find out what we’ve been up to, and book your tickets for our exciting new webinar! At mySociety, we’ve had a packed few months: in May we kicked off a new three-part webinar series on the…
Work in progress: Statements, EDMs and open letters
31 July 2025 @ 9:57 am
Here are some notes on our in-progress work on TheyWorkForYou, including what we’re doing around Early Day Motions (EDMs) and open letters. To put this link at the top, we’re looking for more examples of open letters signed by MPs – if you have any, let us know! Showing signals better Our trajectory with voting…
TICTeC videos, slides and photos now live
31 July 2025 @ 8:05 am
So many insights were shared at TICTeC, from so many practitioners who joined us, in person or remotely, from all around the world. You can access their presentations now in a variety of ways: via the conference schedule – click the ‘see session detail‘ button on any session to find the links to the associated…
The best of both worlds: combining parliamentary video and official records
23 July 2025 @ 8:00 am
Transforming and publishing official Parliamentary transcripts is one of the key activities of parliamentary monitoring organisations (PMOs) — in our case, that means running our website TheyWorkForYou, but there are many organisations around the world doing the same for their own parliaments. Building on top of transcripts means that PMOs can focus their time on…
Election reform: a solid start with work ahead
22 July 2025 @ 8:15 am
We don’t talk a lot about elections at mySociety: we see our unique contribution as being about the democracy between elections, with a focus on how democratic institutions work (sometimes how they can work better), and the connections between the public and those institutions. But whatever part of the democratic system you care about, elections…
The Climate Coalition Mass Lobby: #ActNowChangeForever
21 July 2025 @ 2:05 pm
Here at mySociety, we’ve built a number of tools around data and the climate: CAPE, the Climate Action Plans Explorer; the Council Climate Action Scorecards, and, most recently, Local Intelligence Hub, which allows you to look at climate-relevant data in your own area and compare it with the nation as a whole. All these sites…