Don't replace the Lords - split the Commons
What an elected second chamber is for.
Everything
Devolved parliamentary registers of interest now on TheyWorkForYou
New pages and downloads for parliamentary registers of interest, and UK gov ministerial gifts and hospitality
Updating TheyWorkForYou’s voting summaries
What's we've added in this round, and our plans for a new voting platform.
mySociety’s democracy work in 2025
Upcoming work around registers of interest, votes, and political monitoring.
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
What differences are there between a normal and landslide majority?
A large landslide is better for a party than not having a large landslide - but has its own challenges.
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.
Nuance isn’t important - accuracy and clarity are
Appeals to complexity are for the writer's benefit, not the reader.
House of Review - A synthesis option for Lords reform
The problem? Three approaches to Lords reform. The solution? A fourth.
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.
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.
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.
Local authority and Westminster constituency deprivation datasets
Updating our deprivation and rural-urban datasets to cover more kinds of geographies.
Why MPs shouldn’t decide their leaders, and we should do something more interesting
The case against members deciding is compelling, but so is the case against MPs - we need new approaches!
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.
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!
Publishing and analysing data: our workflow
Templates! Automated testing! Exploring the data in your browser! And much more.
Starter python library template
Solving very meta problems
It’s weird when we pick prime ministers without elections
Picking a PM is obviously what elections are about, but it turns out that was optional? Weird!
Function pipes in Python
Different approaches (and why I'm adding a new one)
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
Mutable function defaults
Defaults should be the same every time.
Connecting a BBC Micro Keyboard to a Raspberry Pico
Taking a long time to learn how one of the simple bits of a computer works.
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.
Week notes 20 Feb
A technical notes week
Week notes 13 Feb
The lure of counter-intuitive effects, and inevitably being wrong about things
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.
Week notes 6 Feb
When transferring lessons between places, the optimal policy depends where you're starting from
The harder problem than votes for children
If accepting that anyone who wants to can vote, what about people who can't understand that choice?
Week notes 28 Jan
What is the book project anyway
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?
What we learned about research commissioning
A report about how to commission people to write reports.
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.
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
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 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.
Overdispersion and variants
Very overdispersed viruses have interesting population dynamics, but how this applies to the real world is unclear.
Exploring information about Freedom of Information in the UK
Explore FOI statistics for UK central government and Scotland.
Voter ID discriminates against older voters
Arguments that the government should not implement Voter ID should focus on harm to the government's supporters.
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.
Network Rail: how accounting definitions of control can expand FOI/EIR coveragexa0
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?
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
Publishing less: our current thinking about comparative statistics
How we're approaching official and user collected data.
Do photos help resolution of FixMyStreet reports?
For some categories of reports, including a photo makes it more likely an issue will be resolved.
Beneficial ownership blog series
What is Beneficial Ownership? How can the data be used?
Equal seats, unequal voters: The gap between numerical and political representation
Arguments about equal constituencies are also arguments about different ways of being represented
Improving old work
Updating political advertising notes
Free and Fair: Regulating political advertising
The history and international context of preventing misinformation in elections (extension of MSc research).
Different ways of equalising constituencies
Equalising on population, registered voters and eligible voters leads to different outcomes.
Un-straightforward lessons from history: reading about Cable Street
Using history in our modern arguments brings a lot of baggage
Reporting neighbours: what to make of covid reporting forms
Creating new forms of anti-social behaviour means scaling up old forms of reporting - how should we feel about this?
Criteria for political equality: Reframing Still’s 1981 criteria
How can we describe harm to individuals from a lack of equality in elections?
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.
Political animals
The changing face of the political chicken.
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.
Being generous to petititons
Motives for signing petitions are complex, whether about a TV show or brexit.
Research Notes: Continued Prosecutions for Attempted Suicide
In some circumstances legal punishments for attempted suicide remain.
Freedom of Information in Local Government
mySociety paper exploring the scale and administration of FOI requests to local government.
Factual content in political advertising should be regulated — or we need posters telling people it’s not
Regulating truth in elections may have limited returns, but it's a problem people don't know what the current arrangement is.
Retrospective on lettingfees.co.uk
Experiences of using crowdsourced data for research and activism.
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.
The free speech game
If your limit on free speech can be summed up in a tweet, it can be turned against you.
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.
Measuring the politics of Eurovision with data
Sometimes it's all about the music.
Voter ID and administration
Practical questions about how ID will be used in voting.
Votes for children
The most convincing reason to extend the vote to minors is their difference, not similarity, to adults.
How many colours would you need to make London's bus network more comprehensible?
Colourful network analysis.
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.
Letting Fees: 2017 Update
Report (with Generation Rent) examining how fees had (or hadn't) changed in the year since the previous report.
Four short stories about sovereignty
How the term is used to claim (and criticise) rightful power.
Don’t let them lie: how we can start holding political advertising to account
Democratic Audit blog post summarising political advertising research.
Drawing Lines on Maps: Arguments about Political Boundaries
Essay on the conflicts at the heart of arguments over political boundaries.
"The City & The City & The Squirtle": What can China Mieville teach out about Pokemon Go? (CityMetric)
CityMetric article about overlapping worlds and also Pokemon.
Traditional names are drenched in meaning - so how will what3words change how we see the world? (CityMetric)
CityMetric article about how mapping, names and technology.
From coconuts to GPS: A brief history of navigation (CityMetric)
CityMetric article on the history of technology that knows where you are.
How suicide became legal
The broad history, and very specific events, that led to legal change.
Letting Fees: What We Know And Why They Need To Go
Report (with Generation Rent) arguing for a ban on letting fees based on our data collection of how they were being charged.
From Titan's Doom Mons to Mercury's Pourquoi-Pas: how did the landscape of space get its names? (CityMetric)
CityMetric article about the the themed names for places on other planets.
Gerrymandering in the Public Interest?
Patching the electoral system through boundaries is more complicated than it seems.
The unclear history of pregnancy tests
Following a phantom citation trail.
The limits of Latin
What's the evidence for the benefits of Latin education?
Process and risk of boundary reforms
Reducing the number of MPs creates internal opponents to Conservative boundary reforms.
Reporting on suicide notes
There are considerations beyond fear of contagion.
What is 'excessive detail' in suicide coverage?
How regulators give insufficient thought to descriptions of 'common' methods.
Going home to different places
Players and characters in ‘Gone Home’
Dimensions of power in the modern screenplay
Industry conventions are rooted in historical battles over control of the story.
Democratic games
From Pong to Pokémon.
The Strange Asymmetry of Curling
How curling does the opposite of other sports to keep matches interesting.
PCC elections: Some loose thoughts on authorisation in elections
If elections have an authorising role then turnout has to, at least sometimes, be practically significant.
The Strange Maths of Mandates
Giving practical (rather than political) consideration to manifesto promises leads to strange places.
Facebook and the legible person
As Facebook grows, it blunts expression to make it easier to understand.