Blog posts by Angela Dixon

It’s National Pothole Day 2025, and Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, shares her thoughts on the cyclical dilemma faced by councils when dealing with potholes and why one-off injections of funding to fix them do not go far enough to help solve the problem. 

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Potholes are inevitable. We have a changing climate producing extreme weather events, which can make our roads more susceptible to damage. Car usage continues to exceed that of public transport, putting more pressure on the road network. SUVs are repeatedly topping the list of the UK’s best-selling cars, the weight of which contribute to the weakening of road surfaces.  

At the end of last year, the UK government announced a £1.6 billion injection of funding for councils to repair roads and fill potholes.

Extra funding for councils to repair potholes is a great thing, but as an annual industry report from the Asphalt Industry Alliance (AIA) suggests, over 10 times as much money is estimated to now be needed to properly repair all of our roads…until they need fixing again. 

Having run a street and highway reporting service for over 17 years, working directly with councils and highways agencies, here at SocietyWorks we understand clearly that funding is only a small part of the pothole puzzle. 

Beyond one-off injections of funding, no matter the amount, councils need ongoing support, joined-up community engagement and wider systems thinking to ensure they do not run out of road in the battle against potholes.

Further than funding 

Being part of a civic tech (or pro-democracy tech, as we’ve recently been referring to it) charity, it is brilliant to see members of the public being encouraged to report potholes as part of the solution. 

There is plenty of research which explores citizen reporting and its impacts in relation to the fixing of local problems like potholes, the findings of which support our experience of running FixMyStreet and then FixMyStreet Pro. We have seen how much more likely people are to engage with councils if they can see that making the report makes a difference.

Given that, as the data from the AIA suggests, the current amount of funding available is nowhere near the amount needed to fix every pothole on our roads, what councils really need is to have the iterative processes and civic-centred technology in place to, at the very least, respond to all reports and communicate their ongoing strategies in order to build trust and mitigate disengagement. 

This is particularly important when considered in relation to the emergence of automated pothole detection systems on certain vehicles, which may skew data, and therefore intervention, to particular areas. 

Automation in processes can be incredibly effective; it is something we ourselves help councils to implement as part of the fault report management process to help close feedback loops and improve satisfaction, irrespective of the outcome of the report. 

As the use of automation and AI models accelerates when it comes to the actual reporting of problems, it is so important that the public sector does not lose sight of the value in providing robust and community-centric reporting services, ensuring parity in the reporting process and enabling positive acts of citizenship to inspire further engagement.

In the spirit of building trust in the gaps that funding alone cannot fill, we have also seen time and time again that when councils and other authorities work together efficiencies can be made that will make what funding is available stretch further. From reducing duplication to avoiding incorrectly-routed reports, everything that benefits councils and saves some money also benefits those who make reports in an effort to take care of their community. 

The long and winding road

The main problem about potholes that cannot be solved by funding for councils is that it is not getting to the root of the problem. Councils are responsible for maintaining our roads, but by no means are they solely responsible for the potholes themselves.

As well as funding for fixing potholes, we need funding for improving public transport and cycling infrastructure, among other initiatives that would help reduce the pressure on our road networks.

The problem is bigger than council funding, but councils take the brunt of public anger. 

As the people behind FixMyStreet, we are frequently asked by media outlets for data on the worst place for potholes, to which our response is always that we do not condone the simplistic use of report data in this way. It does not tell the full story, and it is unfair on councils who are fighting a battle that, without a lot more funding on an ongoing basis, they can never win.

Our focus is always to support councils to better serve citizens with technology that enables them to improve interactions and harness existing capabilities to problem-solve in a scalable way. 

I am proud of the work we do to support both councils and their residents in making it easier to report and respond to potholes and other local issues with cost-effective, integrated and open source software. 

I am also proud to work in partnership with organisations such as the Local Council Roads Innovation Group, who work tirelessly to educate, improve and bring together the industry. 

Whenever I am frustrated by the vicious cycles councils find themselves in with potholes, I must also remember that there are solutions to be found that can help councils navigate the terrain and make what funding is available to them stretch as far as possible.

If you have any thoughts to share about potholes or would like to discuss how we can make dealing with them smoother, please do reach out to me at angela@societyworks.org. 

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If you’re interested in hearing about what else the SocietyWorks team is interested in, working on or learning about, there are plenty more posts like this one on our blog.

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Image: Matt Hoffman on Unsplash

At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from.

In this blog post our managing director, Angela Dixon, shares some thoughts on what failure means in the civic tech space, and what we can learn from it.

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Over the past week, I’ve been having an incredibly thought provoking dialogue with a truly awesome mind, Matthew Somerville (aka dracos; aka the traintimes guy; aka civic tech pioneer; aka Head of Development, SocietyWorks). 

The question… What does ‘failure’ mean in civic tech?

Two serendipitous strands of thought and activity led us here. Firstly, I recently decided that in order to make better decisions as we move into the future for SocietyWorks, I had to better understand its past, which is rooted in mySociety’s rich history. Thankfully, this history has been documented across two decades on mySociety’s blog; a riveting read uncovering hidden treasures and heroic feats from the early civic tech pioneers. Secondly, Matthew was interested in responding to a call for participation in a Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech exploring this very question.

I’ve been at mySociety for three years now. I am not a techie. I am the person who talks about strategy, business cases, investment for growth and impact. All the annoying stuff amongst a group of nimble fingered, creative minded, agile spirited engineers who can design, build, and iterate citizen centric digital services at an astonishing speed. So it’s always intriguing when a question has the power to bring together different world perspectives as we seek shared understanding.

You probably know that the mySociety of now continues to run the widely used sites: 

• WhatDoTheyKnow (FOI request site); 
• TheyWorkForYou (parliamentary monitoring site);
• WriteToThem (communicating with your representatives); 
• FixMyStreet (street and environment fault reporting); 
• MapIt (geographic boundaries mapping). 

In more recent years, we have added climate focused initiatives, including Climate Action Plan Explorer; Neighbourhood Warmth, and Local Intelligence Hub. Research has continued across the years, with all activity focused on a vision of a transparent, resilient democracy; and a mission of using our data and digital skills to put more power in more people’s hands so that together we can build a fairer, safer future.

Our current sites could be considered civic tech successes, if we define success as: 

1. over 30 million sessions across our sites each year; 
2. continued existence of our sites in spite of the odds stacked against maintaining important infrastructural civic technology, tech that nudges systemic change, on a shoestring budget; and 
3. wider impact in the sense of enabling other individuals and groups, by extension, to deliver important societal initiatives. 

These current sites are just a handful of the many sites and services that mySociety spun up with their wizardry over the years. Other sites were either transferred to new ownership or were closed down and consigned to the graveyard of civic tech.

A quick look back over some of the past feats of civic tech heroism by mySociety will include: 

• Mapumental (with maps that display transit time rather than distance); 
• Scenic or Not (a gamified approach to mapping aesthetic qualities across England, Scotland, and Wales); 
• Collideoscope (an initiative to create safer road infrastructure, including for cyclists); 
• FixMyTransport (identifying damaged transport infrastructure and directing reports to the responsible authorities); and
• Pledgebank (mobilising community action). Oh, Pledgebank. More on this service to come.

On my journey through the past, over and over again, I see inspirational services built, and importantly, used, by multitudes of citizens, sometimes globally. And I began to question why aren’t these services, or iterations of these services, that were in many cases well loved, still in existence today? Were they failures, if failure is to be defined as no longer in existence and no longer having impact? Some broad themes have emerged in this initial dialogue. 

Lack of resources and funding 

For sites to continue to develop and iterate in a fast moving external environment, you need competent people and maintained infrastructure to be able to do this responsibly. While we still see the sacrificial acts of civic technicians maintaining services off their own backs with altruistic motivations, there are only so many services that can be carried like this and only so many of these unique individuals about. 

In general, without funding, you can’t pay salaries for the people and the supplier costs for maintaining infrastructure for services. I know that in the early days of mySociety there were a number of initiatives employed to commercialise aspects of services with the objective of self funding. This is hard to do and often requires years of commitment and investment in order to realise returns. In the case of the aforementioned services, these strategies didn’t work out. We were fortunate that FixMyStreet did become a success story in this sense.

Running before you can walk

Perhaps some of the sites were before their time and the conditions in the world around them had not yet emerged sufficiently to allow them to reach their potential. Certainly, more commercially focused organisations would come to spot this potential and capitalise on the opportunities presented by tools such as Pledgebank (think Kickstarter and Groupon).

So back to the question, what does ‘failure’ mean in civic tech? Do we define failure as an impactful site no longer run and maintained for current and future users? Or do we see success in what it achieved whilst it could, when it was properly funded and maintained?

The extract we’ve submitted to the Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech focuses on Pledgebank. It could have been another project, but Matthew had me rambling on about how the community engagement and activating approach is still relevant today, a problem that has not yet been solved by society at large in the context of citizen voice and community action. 

Here is the extract…

“PledgeBank was a website run by the UK charity mySociety from 2005 to 2015.

It let people set up pledges in the form: ‘I will do something, but only if a certain number of people will help me’ – one of the earliest attempts to use the internet to gather people together in a common cause, getting them past the barrier of acting alone; a model which was later used to great effect by Groupon, Kickstarter and similar sites.

Translated into 14 languages, with early features such as SMS signing, PDF poster generation and local alerts, PledgeBank was used for pledges as wide-ranging as collecting underwear for orphans in Liberia, donating books to create a town library in India, setting up the Open Rights Group in the United Kingdom, raising money to rebuild a furniture store after riots, and burying buckets to create homes for stag beetles.

The site never grew as much as we might have hoped, and was closed after running for ten years, due to mySociety concentrating on its core sites and international partnerships at the time. I will provide information on its successes and failures, going into possible reasons for its failure.”

As we come closer to landing, I’m going to disappoint by not providing a three point summary defining what failure in civic tech looks like to me. Rather, I’m going to leave it as a question for ongoing pondering, and I’m certainly interested in the reflections of others.

If we get the opportunity to present at the Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech, Matthew has promised to follow up with a post to share his reflections on this, and perhaps we’ll be able to converge on a definition. [edit: read Matthew’s follow up post]

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Connect with Angela on LinkedIn, or drop her an email (angela@mysociety.org) if you’d like to discuss your own definition of and learnings from civic tech failures.

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Image: Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

At SocietyWorks we believe in transparency. One of the ways we live this value is by working in the open, and giving our team members space on our blog to write about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from. 

This blog post has been written by Angela Dixon, our Managing Director, who shares her thoughts on financial forecasting and decision making in uncertainty.

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As well as being Managing Director of SocietyWorks, I am also an accountant.

This is not a confession about my number crunching roots, but rather a reflection on how leadership’s approach to utilising financial information for decision making can either enable or inhibit teams. Our approach can either carve out pathways through difficult budget and resource constrained terrains, or reinforce walls that stop our teams from even glimpsing the potential of the land beyond.

I have been a chartered accountant for twenty years and served in a number of financial leadership positions across industry and the third sector. This experience has provided me with a unique lens through which to assess decision making at the most senior levels of organisations. 

At SocietyWorks, we are fast approaching our financial year end and have recently presented our analysis of the year-that-was alongside our plans and forecasts for the year-to-come to our board for accountability and scrutiny. 

While I am incredibly fortunate to work with a mission driven board that recognises the important financial and non-financial variables that matter for effective evaluation and decision making, ‘year-end’ has also got me thinking about the scale and complexity of the financial and bureaucratic challenges in the local authorities we serve. 

What follows are some humble reflections on year-end through a financial leadership lens, shared in full recognition that every organisation will have their own particular localised concerns, pressures, and complexities to navigate.

Reflections for public sector decision makers and financial leaders

When we operate in conditions of scarce resources, whether people or budgets, every decision counts. The bigger, more strategic, decisions we make in an organisation are the ones that have the most inherent uncertainties.

Uncertainty should not stop decisions being made, but rather challenge us to be more alert to the variables

All decision makers need to face up to the uncertainty in the environments we operate in. This should force us into meaningful collaborative dialogue about risk, proportionate mitigation strategies that may be available, and acceptance or non acceptance of risk that remains. 

Uncertainty should not stop decisions being made, but rather challenge us to be more alert to the variables in our internal and external operating environments, known and unknown. We should train ourselves and our teams to be alert to signals of potential risks materialising, and symptoms of those that may already have materialised, and be ready to respond swiftly through collaborative dialogue, problem definition and appropriate problem solving measures. 

Well presented financial modelling and indicators highlighting business critical variables can support the visualisation of potential future scenarios. This will support better quality decision making in uncertainty. While none of us has a crystal ball to predict the future, quality and iterative forecasting can help with futurecasting and the framing and defining of options. 

Monthly, quarterly, and year end financial accounts and analysis of historic reporting periods are useful for the recognition and evaluation of where we have been, but it is important to remember that none of us has the power to influence and change the past. We may think it is worth investing time and energy to change the overarching narratives that tell the stories of the past, but all that energy investment reduces that which could be spent on collaborating for more quality decision making to carve out a better future. 

Regular and iterative financial forecasting which highlights assumptions known and unknown, certainty and uncertainty, is more crucial to provide the critical information to inform decisions that will impact our future pathways. Quality financial analysis will support the revisiting of previously forecast futures and prompt collaborative reflection as to whether slight directional change, more substantial pivot, hold-our-nerve, pause or halt is the best response.

If experience has taught me anything it’s to experiment and take risks at scales that are acceptable within your own financial and organisational context and risk appetite

A financial year end is just a date. It is a line drawn in the sand. It is not tangible in the sense of a physical gate we pass through at a particular time. If a financial year end is treated as more than just a date when one reporting period ends and another begins, where an activity happening or budget spent on one day is so much more important than on the very next day, it will create perverse incentives that drive behaviours that will hinder effective prioritisation or distribution of resources. 

Days follow days and our planning, delivery, and evaluation cycles should be more fluid and responsive to our emerging operating environments. If they are not, then we will certainly waste time and resources and focus scarce energy on building narratives and past storylines that do not help solve our ongoing and future challenges.

Final thoughts  

I believe in failing fast and learning faster. If experience has taught me anything it’s to experiment and take risks at scales that are acceptable within your own financial and organisational context and risk appetite, and be happy to revisit past assumptions, decisions, and iterate or pivot when appropriate. 

At SocietyWorks our conversations are had transparently and in the open with our board which provides essential accountability and governance for a mission driven business. We speak about potential risks before they materialise and operate on a no-surprises basis. This has built open and trusting relationships between the board and executive team. We encourage critical challenge which is received with a spirit of openness, and responded to with collaborative dialogue and shared ownership for resolution. 

In this post, I have shared a handful of thoughts which I hope may be useful to prompt some reflection on the processes behind decision making in organisations. With leaders role modelling focus on the right things, we may open up the potential of our teams for better seeing the systems we operate within, and the different levers and variables that interact and influence our potential futures. This may in turn open up the space and creativity to work through pressing priorities in spite of challenging and difficult resource and budget constraints.

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If you’d like to chat to Angela about anything in her blog post, you can connect with her on LinkedIn.

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Image: Jordan Ladikos