Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments & assemblies
Proxy use of WriteToThem
15 September 2025 @ 1:29 pm
Our WriteToThem website makes it easy for anyone to send an email to their elected representatives. That’s the core concept, and it works brilliantly for millions of users every year — but that said, we’re aware that even when a website is simple and built with usability at its core, not everyone has an equal…
Supporting democratic engagement in Wales
15 September 2025 @ 1:21 pm
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…
Using FOI for a cross-border investigation into immigrant detention
4 September 2025 @ 8:19 am
Did you know that Home Office data doesn’t include the reason that individuals have been taken to immigrant detention centres? Or that the UK is the only country in Europe with no limit on how long they can hold someone in such facilities? One organisation keeping a careful eye on the situation is Spanish investigative…
How FOI feeds into public conversation
3 September 2025 @ 8:50 am
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…
“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…