Local authority and Westminster constituency deprivation datasets
Updating our deprivation and rural-urban datasets to cover more kinds of geographies.
mySociety
Read my posts on the mySociety blog. Portfolio below updated periodically.
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. 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
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 report: Improving oversight of Access to Information
Learning from different approaches across Europe
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.
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?
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
What do people find useful about TheyWorkForYou Alerts?
What are users of TheyWorkForYou alerts interested in?
Changes to party comparisons on TheyWorkForyou
Party comparisons are displayed in more places and calculated in an improved way.
To defend FOI rights, we need a separate FOI Commissioner
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.
Network Rail: how accounting definitions of control can expand FOI/EIR coverage
Appealing to the Court of Accountants.
FOI and appeals to the regulator
How do appeals to ICO and OSIC vary in outcome and time taken?
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
Validating gendered reporting behaviour on FixMyStreet.com
mySociety paper replicating finding of gender differences in categories of reports to FixMyStreet.
Digital Tools for Citizens Assemblies
mySociety report exploring how digital tools can contribute to a Citizens Assembly.
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.