Keeping tabs on the UK’s parliaments & assemblies
We’re putting more ‘local’ into the Local Intelligence Hub
25 April 2024 @ 7:51 am
Tl;dr: We’ve added lots of local council data to the Local Intelligence Hub. In February, we launched the Local Intelligence Hub, and today we’ve released a huge new update. We designed the Local Intelligence Hub — in collaboration with The Climate Coalition and supported by Green Alliance — to provide all the data you need,…
Improving TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries
23 April 2024 @ 10:58 am
If you value the work mySociety and TheyWorkForYou do, please consider whether you can make a donation. We have a good track record of making Parliament more open, provide essential tools to civil society and small charities, and with our platform a little support can go a long way. If you would like to make…
The Council Climate Scorecards project is having international impact
23 April 2024 @ 8:12 am
Canada differs from the UK in many ways: obviously it’s vastly bigger, extending across many more latitudes; its climate, nature and terrains vary hugely; its cities are more dispersed and diverse — and accordingly, the challenges the two countries face around tackling the climate emergency are different, too. But there are some significant ways in…
What happened to all the APPGs?
9 April 2024 @ 11:20 am
Over Easter, some groups went missing in Parliament. No, not lost tourists: of the 722 All Party Parliamentary Groups registered in March, only 444 are left – a 39% decrease in the space of a month. What caused this, which groups have been removed, and what happens next? Tl;dr: we’ve published the changes as a…
Council Climate Action scorecards support climate officers
8 April 2024 @ 8:08 am
Lucie Bolton took the position of Climate Strategy Officer at Rother District Council in 2022. Since then, she’s found the Council Climate Action Scorecards project an invaluable support for her work. Hearing this, we were of course keen to find out more — so we asked Lucie to share her journey, from brand new climate…
Access to Information network: data visualisation Show and Tell
3 April 2024 @ 10:24 am
Organisations all around the world run Freedom of Information sites based on our Alaveteli platform. There are also sites running on other codebases. Either way, we’re all working to the same goals, and we believe that each site can learn from the others: for that reason, we’ve set up the Access To Information (ATI) network,…
TICTeC keynote speaker announcement: María Baron
25 March 2024 @ 9:03 am
We’re excited to announce the first keynote speaker for our 2024 Impacts of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC)! Join us on 12 and 13 June — in London or online — and you’ll hear from María Baron, founder and now Global Executive Director of Directorio Legislativo. This year, one of the major themes at TICTeC will…
“Don’t be afraid to copy” and four more highlights from the Scorecards Successes Conference
22 March 2024 @ 2:48 pm
To reach the UK’s 2050 net zero target, all local authorities need to take serious action across all of their operations. But what exactly should they do, and in what order? To get the most out of the brilliant data uncovered by the Council Climate Action Scorecards, Climate Emergency UK commissioned Anthesis to research and…
Creating datasets from FOI data
21 March 2024 @ 4:24 pm
Responses obtained from a widespread FOI project can be difficult to analyse, until they are sorted into neat datasets. This allows you to make valid comparisons, pull out accurate statistics and ultimately ensure your findings are meaningful. In our third seminar within the Using Freedom of Information for Campaigning and Advocacy series, we heard from…
Guest post: What are the questions MPs ask that don’t get answered?
19 March 2024 @ 5:21 pm
This blog post is part of our Repowering Democracy series. We are publishing a series of short pieces of writing from mySociety staff and guest writers who are thinking about how our democracy works and are at the frontlines of trying to improve it. This week, we’re re-publishing a blog post from Anna Powell-Smith at…