News from mySociety

Welcome to 2021

A Happy New Year to you all, and thank you for continuing to follow along with mySociety.

We know everything's a bit strange at the moment. But no matter what happens, we'll still be here, doing our best to help you navigate these unexpected times with our tools for Democracy, Transparency and Community. Let's do good things this year!

Transparency

Give Them Time: how FOI helped pre-schoolers in Scotland

"WhatDoTheyKnow has had an absolutely invaluable impact on the campaign" — that's what Patricia Anderson told us when she described Give Them Time's successful efforts to get the law changed in Scotland.

Thanks to this campaign's use of our FOI website, parents of preschoolers now have a much clearer set of rights as regards nursery provision. Read all about it here.

Climate

Can civic tech help the Climate?

That was the topic of the last TICTeC online Seminar of 2020, in which speakers from the Centre for Sustainable Energy, the Institute of Government and Open Data Charter joined us to speculate on what's needed for our sector to address the Climate Emergency.

Wishing you hadn't missed it? That's fine: you can rewatch the session here.

Design

What is Consequence Scanning?

You might have seen this phrase crop up in a few of our recent posts. Now we've written a post to explain what Consequence Scanning is, and how it can be of help when designing potentially contentious new services.

Get the low-down here.

Don't miss our Annual Report

If the pre-Christmas period all got a bit hectic for you, perhaps you missed out on the best* read of the year - the mySociety Annual Report.

Linger over every word or skim to the good bits, we don't mind... but do give it a read!

What we're reading

• Here's lots more background to the issue we highlighted last time: FOI requests from outside the UK being blocked.
• We're well into a more blanket lockdown, but while we were all in varied tiers The Conversation examined why England's political geography complicates COVID rule-making.
• In case you don't have enough to worry about, why not browse this database of incidents caused by AI?
• Or fret further when you see the effects of climate change on your own neighbourhood.
• Then feel better when you see all the companies that deliver by bike.
• And admire LinkedOut, a French project that helps homeless people share their CVs with users' professional networks.

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