mySociety provides technology, research and data to help people be active citizens, in more than 40 countries around the world.
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Scrutinising governments’ use of AI is turning out to be one of the pressing demands of our time, so we’re very glad to have received funding from the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust that allows us to conduct meaningful and sustained work in this area. The project has already kicked off with fact-finding, consultation and exploration,…
Governing Freedom of Information in the UK Tl;dr: the governance model of the ICO is changing and FOI isn’t well-represented in their new strategy. Here is how it could be made better. Freedom of Information gives us the power to ask public authorities for information about their work. It has been used to uncover wrongdoing,…
The EIR is a similar set of rights to those we have under Freedom of Information, but specifically give access to environmental information held by public authorities. Those who remember reading about the sewagemaps project in our blog post of last April will recall that the discharge of sewage falls firmly under the category of…
Our website WriteToThem helps you contact your elected representatives, quickly and simply. In a recent blog post, we explained that we’ve added a Welsh translation across the site, and made it easier to navigate recent changes to the Senedd. And while those improvements clearly have a great benefit for residents of Wales, the work has…
We think it should be easier to reliably answer the basic questions: what AI systems are public bodies using? How are those systems affecting people? To help civil society actors work out how to get better answers to these questions, we brought together people working across academia, law, journalism, technology and public policy to discuss…
The democratic landscape in Wales has changed… and so has our ‘contact your politician’ website WriteToThem. In a webinar today, we invited Jess Blair from ERS Cymru to talk through how the Senedd looks, how the power balance has shifted and how that affects those living in Wales. Now that each Welsh resident has several…
Authors: Ben Worthy (Birkbeck), Laszlo Horvath (Birkbeck), Julia Cushion (mySociety), Alex Parsons(mySociety) — Artificial Intelligence, as we know, is everywhere. For governments and public bodies, the possibilities for policy-making seem endless. As the UK government put it in its AI playbook ‘the potential of AI to transform public services is enormous, giving us an unparalleled…
The effects of AI are making themselves known across every sector, and Freedom of Information is no exception. AI has lowered the bar to making contact, in every place where citizens interact with public authorities, from making pothole reports to submitting FOI requests. On the face of it, this is a good thing for individuals…
With all the fuss about Andy Burnham becoming Prime Minister, it may be easy to forget that he’s been in Parliament before — as an MP. That means that he already had a page on TheyWorkForYou, our website that makes Parliament easier to follow. And, as Burnham originally entered the House in 2001 and didn’t step…
In a speech introducing his political agenda, the (in-all-likelihood) future Prime Minister Andy Burnham discussed changes to the whipping system in Westminster, with promises of “letting MPs be authentic representatives and not using the whip system to create fear or close down debate”. This is a theme he covered at more length in his book…
