mySociety news

Transparency

Surveillance tech in use by police right now

The chances are that you've never heard of some of the newest technologies being deployed by our police forces.

At AlaveteliCon, Camilla Graham Wood of Privacy International shared what the organisation has uncovered through their Neighbourhood Watched campaign. From capturing all the information on your mobile phone, to facial recognition, it's sobering stuff. Read the report here.

A cheeky approach to transparency

We also heard from German FOI organisation Frag Den Staat at AlaveteliCon. We had a chat with the founder Arne Semsrott, who explained why injecting a sense of fun into your campaigning can be all for the good.

Find out what high jinks they've been up to in the name of transparency.

Taking Parliament to court

And if you think what Frag Den Staat get up to is outrageous, how about issuing a lawsuit to your own parliament? That's what Vouliwatch in Greece did: here's more about how that went down.

From presentation slides to session notes, there are lots more AlaveteliCon resources here.

Democracy

Help TheyWorkForYou carry on making Parliament easier to follow

As you may have seen, we're crowdfunding to help keep TheyWorkForYou going, through the election and beyond.

We're off to a fantastic start, but we still need more contributions to keep the service running — and, if we raise enough, to add new features that will make following Parliament that bit easier for everyone.

We really appreciate every pledge... and spreading the word also helps a lot.

What to expect during the election period

mySociety's democracy services, specifically WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou, undergo some changes during the run-up to a General Election.

Find out what they are, and what other democracy services are available to you during this period, in this post.

Community

Goodbye spreadsheets, hello smooth reporting

Our recent FixMyStreet Pro installation for Peterborough was very gratifying — in that it was obvious that it would immediately be making a huge difference to both staff and residents.

That's because the council had been working with manual spreadsheet updates, as a stopgap when their previous supplier ceased to exist. They were definitely in need of something smoother! Read the whole story.

Events

Join us in Reykjavik

TICTeC will be in Iceland this coming March.

It's the world's only conference dedicated to sharing research on the impacts of civic technology.

Here's where to find out more. Apply to speak... or grab those earlybird tickets!

And also...

• The Orwell Prize is open for submissions to the two categories of Journalism, and Exposing Britain's Social Evils.
• Democracy Club built a great widget you can put on your own blog or website, to help people find out more about election candidates in their area.
• Here at mySociety, we're keen to do what we can to minimise our climate impact. If that's something you've been working on in your own organisation, we'd love to compare notes - please drop us a line!

What we're reading

• How do the party manifestos compare on climate action?
• Which parties are spending most on Google Ads, what are they saying, and who's violating ad policies? Google lets you slice and dice the data here.
• The Institute for Fiscal Studies reports on councils' spending and forecasts in this report.
• Files and folders made sense when computers were new, says Alex Danco, but these days nothing is quite so tangible.
• Hoping to fix climate change with an app? Maybe read this first.

Follow mySociety

Share this newsletter