News from mySociety

New research

Reforming Freedom of Information

Our new policy paper on how FOI could work better across the UK is now available — thanks to everyone who joined us on Zoom for the launch. Catch up with the event here, and read the paper in full on our Research site.

UK-wide deprivation dataset

If you know, you know: deprivation, and rurality, are measured differently across the devolved nations. Our researcher Alex describes the approach we've adopted here. We're already hearing it's useful to others.

Vacancies

New job opportunities

mySociety is growing, and we're looking to fill a bunch of new roles: a Delivery Manager for our Climate Programme, a Perl Developer (hurry - applications for that one close at 10am tomorrow) and a Service Manager for WhatDoTheyKnow. There are also several volunteering opportunities at WhatDoTheyKnow for anyone who'd like to help promote transparency in your free time.

So please spread the word to anyone who might be suitable; and, if you'd like to know about upcoming vacancies too, sign up to receive our jobs newsletter.

Events

TICTeC: Lessons learned from online deliberation projects

The second in our series of ‘Show and Tell’ TICTeC events focused on online deliberation and participatory democracy.

We heard of projects in France, South Africa, USA and the UK, where digital technologies have allowed citizens to feed into public decision-making processes. Find all the materials, from slides to Q&A, and the presentations themselves, in our round-up blog post.

Transparency

Be the first to use our latest FOI tool

Here's a great opportunity for researchers, campaign groups or newsrooms to try out our new, helpful tool for free — if you know of one that's using multiple Freedom of Information requests to uncover data, pass the news on!

Meet Ma Dada

It's always so interesting to talk to people running Freedom of Information sites in other countries, and find out where our work is the same and where it differs.

Talking to Ma Dada in France revealed at least one fact that we found very surprising indeed: to see what that was, you can read our conversation here.

Passports for fish

This month's silliest FOI request may actually have had net value, or was it just a red herring? See what you think.

New bodies on WhatDoTheyKnow

Adding a number of new authorities to WhatDoTheyKnow provided a good chance to list the typical tasks our volunteers undertake to ensure the site runs smoothly. If keeping everything shipshape is the sort of thing you enjoy, then you might consider becoming a volunteer too.

SocietyWorks

Wasteworks

What we're reading and listening to

• Care about the policing of protests? NetPol are inviting you to write to your MP to demand greater transparency and accountability...
• ...and more than 14,000 people responded to the Petitions Committee's survey on protest, with some great quotes in there.
• We were interested to see that What3Words may not be the best choice in an emergency.
• Tch! Entitled behaviour from game streamers over Google Streetview volunteers.
• Did you know the House of Lords has a podcast?
• And here's a collection of comics for good.

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