News from mySociety

Event report

Right To Know across Europe

If you missed our very special TICTeC for International Access to Information Day, never fear — the video is now available for a rewatch.

We heard incredible stories of the power of FOI, from speakers in the Netherlands, Croatia, France and Scotland, topped off with research and revelations from the UK. You definitely don't want to let this one go by! Find all the followup details here.

Climate

Scoring Climate Action Plans

We've seen the first major use of the Climate Action Plans Explorer (CAPE), by the organisation Climate Emergency UK.

They trained cohorts of volunteers to become experts in Climate Action Plans, allowing them to assess and compare plans from councils around the country.

The end result will be a league table where everyone will be able to check just how their council's plan to reach Net Zero stacks up. Learn more about this project here.

Our progress this month

Continue following along with everything we've been doing in the Climate programme. This month, it's Emily's turn at the keyboard, with news on new features for CAPE, the Climate Action Plans Explorer, and revving up on our outreach activities.

Transparency

The Campaign for FOI needs your help!

The Campaign for FOI is a constant and untiring advocate for Freedom of Information in the UK, always quick to point out where our rights are being eroded or the FOI Act is in danger.

As you can imagine, we wholeheartedly support their work, so we were sorry to hear that they've lost vital funding and may have to cease their activities if they can't raise it via another source.

If you care about transparency and can spare a few quid, now would be a very good time to throw it their way. Check out the Crowdfunder page here. And if you can't afford to donate, you can do almost as much good by sharing it far and wide.

FOI deserves better

John Edwards, incoming ICO Commissioner, gave some concerning responses on the subject of FOI when he was questioned in Parliament last month.

But we think the issues run deeper than whether or not he's the right man for the job — as our researcher Alex set out in this blog post, the problem is that two responsibilities have been shoehorned into a single role.

A decade of asking the EU

AskTheEU is the Freedom of Information site for the European Union, running on the Alaveteli platform. We helped set it up ten years ago, and we're delighted to say it's still going from strength to strength, having just processed its 10,000th full FOI request.

We looked back on its first decade here.

Democracy

Deliberative and representative democracy can work together

Those commemorative days are coming thick and fast: this month also saw the International Day of Democracy.

To mark this, our trustee Julia Keutgen, who also happens to be Senior Transparency Advisor at the Westminster Foundation for Democracy, shared a post about the changing perceptions of democracy given the increasing popularity of deliberative platforms.

Vacancy

Perl/Python Developer

Our commercial arm, SocietyWorks, continues its recruitment drive and is looking for experienced Perl and Python developers to work on our SaaS products for clients in local government.

Read the job description and see how to apply here.

What we're reading

1. If you live & work/study in certain London boroughs, researchers at Imperial College are looking for participants in their new study on air pollution in the urban environment. You'll find out more about your respiratory function, too!
2. Remember how we all* uploaded photos of election leaflets for posterity? Now there's this project as well, aiming to 'save local political websites from the dustbins of history'.
3. Open Democracy cracked open more details on how the UK government deals with its FOI responsibilities: with litigation.
4. There's a new generation of internet users... or we should say, an older generation.
5. We can't say we've never input silly names when developing a test website, so this story was both amusing and slightly worrying.
   
   *Just us?

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