New ideas, new directions

All through this year, we'll be doing some serious thinking about the state of democracy and mySociety's place within it. We're inviting guest speakers to lend their thoughts, too.

Read all about the Repowering Democracy series here — and sign up to follow along.

Keep up with the Senedd

Thanks to funding from the Welsh Government, our parliamentary website TheyWorkForYou now includes debates and all Members of the Senedd.

So now you can follow along with everything that happens in English and in Welsh — and our alerts service covers Senedd activity, too.

Completists will be glad to know that, with this addition TheyWorkForYou now covers all the law-making parliaments of the UK. See more about the background to this development in our blog post.

Share your memories of mySociety

It's taken a lot of people to get mySociety to where we are now. Are you one of them?

We're collecting memories from folk who were around in our earlier days: staff, volunteers, trustees, friends — anyone who remembers part of the journey we've been through over the last 20 years.

If you've got a memory to share, or thoughts about what mySociety means to the UK or indeed, the wider world, please share them here.

There are many reasons to use FOI

We've heard some really great stories around our Freedom of Information service WhatDoTheyKnow recently. The main takeaway? People really are using Freedom of Information to achieve all kinds of things.

So why not read about the campaign to save a local running track, a collaborative tool for investigative journalists, and how FOI helps when you just want to know something — like how many rubber bands the Post Office uses each year!

More transparency around removed requests

It's rare, but the WhatDoTheyKnow team sometimes have to remove requests, or parts of them, from the site. Now a new piece of development is allowing them to be more transparent when this happens.

Different councils have different decarbonisation potential

Some areas of the UK face more systemic barriers to delivering climate plans than others: that's the thrust behind Alice Garvey's research.

She told us all about it, and how the Council Climate Scorecards have supported her investigation into this subject. See the whole story here.

What we're reading

• Everyone's talking about AI, but here are two on-topic reads for us: Can ChatGPT do a civil servant's job? and Welsh politician uses AI chatbot to write speech (then go and read that speech on TheyWorkForYou, of course!)
• Preliminary findings from the Electoral Commission on the impacts of the new voter ID requirement.
• Time to stop worrying about your carbon footprint and start thinking about your point of leverage.
• Coming soon, the UK’s first permanent, public collection of national security documents.
• Interesting job alert: could you be a Wikimedian in Residence for the National Trust?

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