News from mySociety

Research

Party voting instructions should be public

It's common knowledge that many votes in Parliament are 'whipped', with MPs instructed how to vote by their party leadership.

At the moment, it's a secret process — but our recent polling discovered that most people think this information should be out in the open.

Five ways of finding similar councils

CAPE, the Climate Action Plan Explorer, now provides a handful of different council matches, based on factors such as their levels of deprivation, how rural they are, and their emissions profiles.

Find out how we got this working, and then go and see which other authorities your council is similar to, on CAPE.

Events

Today! TICTEC Civic Tech Surgery #2: Accessibility and inclusivity

Climate

Council climate plan scorecards are live

Climate Emergency UK's massive project to score every council's Climate Action Plan, based on 27 points that every effective plan needs to have, is now up and available for everyone to explore.

How did your council do?

January progress

This month it's Lucas' turn to update us on what the Climate team have been working away at over the past month, and what we're planning to turn to next. Enjoy his first ever blog post for mySociety here.

Want more on climate?

We're adding new features and tools to the Climate Action Plans Explorer all the time. If you'd like to know when there's something new to try out, subscribe to our Climate mailing list.

What we're reading

• Boris Johnson's statement on the Sue Gray Report featuring, along with much else, Johnson's Savile remark, Keir Starmer's speech and Ian Blackford's expulsion.
• Requesting a new zebra crossing isn't as straightforward as you might think. We're glad to hear that WriteToThem helped play a part in one man's long but worthwhile journey.
• Very interesting news around rewriting the Chilean constitution.
• We often hear about GDP as a measure of a nation's prosperity: now how about Gross Domestic Wellbeing? Carnegie put the spotlight onto the current state of our democracy.
• Who knew council planning meetings and 80s indie music were such a good match?

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