Devolved parliamentary registers of interest now on TheyWorkForYou
New pages and downloads for parliamentary registers of interest, and UK gov ministerial gifts and hospitality
mySociety
mySociety’s democracy work in 2025
Upcoming work around registers of interest, votes, and political monitoring.
Updating TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries
What's we've added in this round, and our plans for a new voting platform.
Beyond Transparency: Q&A
A few extra answers about this project, our future work, and prospects for reform.
WhoFundsThem Update: December
What we've been doing to improve information about MPs financial interests and APPGs.
The Big Ben rule: Reducing Parliamentary Jargon
Parliament has accumulated some jargon over the centuries, let's have a clean out.
Democratic Transparency Organisations - moving beyond PMOs
How pro-democratic technology is applied at the local and municipal level.
To fix Parliament, fix the Public Ombudsman
Dare to dream of a world where you can complain to the ombudsman without complaining to your MP first.
Using citizen assemblies to set standards and support for MPs
How we can unblock conflicts and create a better Parliament for everyone.
WhoDoesWhat - a great idea we didn’t get funded (but we’ll keep trying)
Do you have a million pounds and want to make democracy in the UK better?
Modernising the House of Commons and stand-in MPs
The new House of Commons Modernisation Committee has made a call for submissions to reform House of Commons procedures, standards and working practices. We’re going to make a submission to the Committee, focused around a set of practical fixes. But there are also bigger issues that will take long
Keeping track of citizens assemblies
There is no higher virtue than making lists of things and assigning unique identifiers.
Pro-democracy tech - reframing civic tech for the current moment
Technology for realising and defending democratic values.
Better declarations of interest for Parliamentary Questions
We found a problem, Speaker's office doing a review, another win for noticing things.
Interest disclosures for last week: landlords and tennis
How MPs talk (and don't talk) about conflicts of interest in debates
Democracy month notes: October 2024
Ok, doing these regularly fell apart at *about* when the election happened - but let’s get back on track! WhoFundsThem On the WhoFundsThem work, last week we inducted the 50 volunteers who are going to answer 32 questions for 650 MPs. We’re using the crowdsourcing software we developed for the Cou
What do we know about MPs' financial interests?
What we've learned ahead of starting our WhoFundsThem volunteer project.
New register of interests spreadsheet - with much richer data
Parliament has released better data about MPs financial interests - we've made it easier to explore.
mySociety's approach to AI
We’re making our internal AI Framework public as a way of being transparent about the kind of questions we’re asking ourselves about using AI in mySociety's tools and services.xa0
TheyWorkForYou: understanding the new parliament
What happens now, and tools to understand the new Parliamentary geography
Off by one: How Parliament counts votes is out of date
We shouldn't have several different tallies for the same vote.
Improving TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries
Updating how we make decisions and display our voting summaries.
Democracy month notes: February
Available to buy wherever you buy monthnotes (don't buy them, they're free on the internet)
Gaza Ceasefire votes and voting records
More information on the House of Commons votes, and lack of voting record, on a ceasefire in Gaza.
Democracy month notes - January
What we've done in 2024-01.
Improving the register of MPs interests
Tl;dr: We’re now releasing our register of interests data as a spreadsheet.
How we improved CAPE this year
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
Providing tech for effective crowdsourcing
How we support other crowdsourcing projects, and think about crowdsouring in our core work.
CE UK and mySociety are using people power and Freedom of Information to bring transparency to local climate action
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
ICO advisory note on publishing spreadsheets
Our summary and response.
Navigating the new constituencies
New constituency data, and how we should steer the process of boundary reform towards making our politics easier to navigate.
It should be easier for MPs to vote
Changes to how MPs vote can improve both transparency and the parliamentary working culture.
Machine learning can make climate action plans more explorable
Using new techniques to identify common features and help search documents.
Giving more power to Parliament helps MPs keep their promises to us
Connecting our thinking on democracy and climate.
Learning from the way people use TheyWorkForYou
How does the way the site is used suggest it should change?
TheyWorkForYou provides essential services for civil society — and beyond
TheyWorkForYou is lowering the bar for small, often underfunded organisations to engage with Parliament.
Repowering Democracy: new ideas, straight to your inbox
A new series from mySociety
Call for proposals - Environmental Information Regulations: How are they working in practice at the local level?
We're looking for a researcher to improve our understanding of Environmental Information Requests.
Unlocking the value of fragmented public data
Read the new mySociety/Centre for Public Data report about improving government data publishing.
Have your say on the ICO’s prioritisation consultation
Read our draft response, give us feedback, or submit your own views to the ICO.
1 in 10 have made an Freedom of Information request - we want to support you
Freedom of Information has been used by millions of people - we want support and advocate for you.
How many people use Freedom of Information? The numbers blog post
More details on our FOI polling, and how it compares with other polling and estimates of FOI use.
Local authority and Westminster constituency deprivation datasets
Updating our deprivation and rural-urban datasets to cover more kinds of geographies.
How to unlock the value of fragmented public data: your views wanted
Looking for experiences and frustrations of running into fragmented public data: and views on solutions.
Publishing and analysing data: our workflow
Templates! Automated testing! Exploring the data in your browser! And much more.
We want you to build on our local climate data. Tell us what you need!
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!
Prototyping week 5: Improving energy efficiency in the private rented sector
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.xa0 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
New report: Improving oversight of Access to Information
Learning from different approaches across Europe
PACAC makes the positive case for FOI, but there is more work to do
An ambitious and welcome vision for FOI in government, but big changes are needed to see it happen.
New research: joining up local government and citizens in climate action
What we learned about the public's understanding of local government.
Categorising local government services for emissions reduction
Dividing local government services into service delivery, regulation, and place making.
Freedom of Information is good, and stops bad things happening
ARIA's exclusion from FOI is part of a broader attack on government transparency.
Public understanding of local authorities and climate: starting the research
Welcoming Tom Sasse to the project.
Party voting instructions should be public
Our polling finds support for making voting instructions public, but also that MPs are seen as responsible for their own votes.
New in CAPE: Five different ways of finding similar councils
What if, instead of one way of comparing local authorities, you had... five?
Call for proposals: Public understanding of local authorities and climate
mySociety is looking for an individual, organisation or joint team to research public understanding of what local government does, and especially its role in combating climate change, primarily through conducting a literature review, to be completed by the end of March 2022.
What we learned about research commissioning
A report about how to commission people to write reports.
Your help please: designing a research commissioning process for mySociety
Help us design a good approach to research commissioning
mySociety’s response to ‘Data: a new direction’
Focusing on the effects on FOI of proposed changes.
PACAC Clearing House Inquiry - evidence submission
mySociety's evidence to the 2021 PACAC inquiry into the Clearing House
Changes to party comparisons on TheyWorkForyou
Party comparisons are displayed in more places and calculated in an improved way.
What do people find useful about TheyWorkForYou Alerts?
What are users of TheyWorkForYou alerts interested in?
To defend FOI rights, we need a separate FOI Commissionerxa0
FOI is in trouble, and needs its own defender.
Identifying councils with similar emissions profiles
Work-in-progress: Using BEIS emissions data to identify similar councils, and put them into clusters.
Exploring information about Freedom of Information in the UK
Explore FOI statistics for UK central government and Scotland.
FOI and appeals to the regulator
How do appeals to ICO and OSIC vary in outcome and time taken?
Network Rail: how accounting definitions of control can expand FOI/EIR coveragexa0
Appealing to the Court of Accountants.
What are environmental information requests and how do they differ in Scotland?
Understanding what makes Environmental Information special in Freedom of Information and the (minor) differences in how this is interpreted in Scotland.
Reforming FOI
Improvements to strengthen access to information in the UK
Unified UK measures of rurality and deprivation
How we combine national datasets to analyse UK-wide services.
Participation vs representation
Councillor attitudes towards citizen engagement
Do photos help resolution of FixMyStreet reports?
For some categories of reports, including a photo makes it more likely an issue will be resolved.
Publishing less: our current thinking about comparative statistics
How we're approaching official and user collected data.
Beneficial ownership blog series
What is Beneficial Ownership? How can the data be used?
Explorer series
Looking at the different demographics of use of civic tech services.
Assessing success in Civic Tech: Measures of deprivation and WriteToThem
Different uses of civic tech sites have different demographic profiles, allowing multiple interpretations of their impact.
Digital tools for democratic participation
mySociety/Public Square report about the current usage of digital tools for democratic participation.
Super contributors and power laws
A small number of people are often responsible for most of the data - but is this good or bad?
Public FOI
mySociety report exploring WhatDoTheyKnow statistics for central government
Digital Tools for Citizens Assemblies
mySociety report exploring how digital tools can contribute to a Citizens Assembly.
Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com
mySociety paper replicating finding of gender differences in categories of reports to FixMyStreet.
Freedom of Information in Local Government
mySociety paper exploring the scale and administration of FOI requests to local government.
FixMyStreet: The geography of citizen reporting
University of Stirling, the University of Sheffield and mySociety collaboration looking into the spatial patterns of reporting on FixMyStreetthe
When people decide whether to write to their MP, does the MP’s gender matter? (LSE British Politics and Policy)
LSE blog post exploring if the gender of a representative affects how likely men and women are to write to them.
Exploring the representation of women around the world
mySociety blog and minisite exploring the role of party in the gender balance in Parliaments around the world
Evidence from Scotland and Wales: representatives elected via party lists are less likely to reply to constituents (Democratic Audit)
Democratic Audit blog post detailing how features of the electoral system affects responsiveness to constituents.
Did They Write Back? A Mandate Divide in Response to Constituent Casework in Devolved Bodies
Parliamentary Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 3, July 2019.
Dog Fouling and FixMyStreet
mySociety paper looking at current patterns of reporting of dog fouling to local authorities, and the history of this as a social problem.