News

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

We recently added a new feature to FixMyStreet Pro enabling authorities in London using the solution to export data on reports made within their boundary of abandoned hire bikes and e-scooters, even though the reports themselves are sent directly to the responsible operators.

This new feature comes at the request of several of our London-based clients, who wanted to know how many reports are being made within this category to help them identify trends, keep track of service levels and monitor usage.

CSV files containing this data are now available to export on a daily basis. Exports can be accessed by staff with the appropriate permissions through the FixMyStreet Pro administration dashboard, or programmatic access can be established via the API for automatic importation into a business intelligence platform. 

Reporting abandoned hire bikes and e-scooters via FixMyStreet

The ‘Abandoned bikes/scooters’ category has been available to users in London on FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro since 2023. 

Reports submitted under this category, whether made on the national FixMyStreet site or via an authority’s own branded FixMyStreet Pro service, are sent directly to the operator responsible for the abandoned bike or e-scooter, including Lime, HumanForest and Voi. 

Abandoned Santander Cycles can also be reported under this category and will be triaged directly to Transport for London.

As part of the reporting workflow, report-makers are asked to select which operator is responsible for the bike or e-scooter they need to report. 

Reports are then sent to the corresponding operator, containing all of the other useful information included as standard in a FixMyStreet report, such as the report-maker’s details, easting and northing, latitude and longitude and the nearest postcode to the pin placed on the map.

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “There is no doubt that the provision of hire bike and e-scooter schemes is an effective way for councils to reduce emissions and promote more active lifestyles, but when instances of abandonment occur they create nuisance and obstruct others from using roads safely.

“We hope the ability to easily access data on abandoned bikes and e-scooters reported via the FixMyStreet network enables councils in the capital to have better oversight of such schemes and can inform strategies to make them work well for everyone.”

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While the reporting of abandoned hire bikes and e-scooters is currently only available in London, we would love to be able to open up reporting of such issues to members of the public in other locations where hire schemes are in place. 

We are keen to hear from authorities and operators outside of London who share our appetite to make this happen. If that’s you, please send us a message and let’s see what we can do. 

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Image: Ben Wicks on Unsplash

Residents in the London Borough of Bexley can now use the Council’s dedicated version of our WasteWorks service to request new or replacement rubbish and recycling bins, and to request the removal of an existing bin.

This is the second phase of an ongoing transformation project we are undertaking in partnership with Bexley, the first of which completed earlier this year and included an API integration into Whitespace Work Software, the in-cab system used by the Council. 

The addition of rubbish and recycling bin maintenance to Bexley’s WasteWorks service means that residents can now use it to access the following services:

• Check bin days on-demand;
• Add waste collection days to a smartphone or computer online calendar (they update automatically when changes are made);
• Report missed collections;
• Request a new rubbish or recycling bin;
• Request a replacement bin;
• Request the removal of a bin (without needing to request a new one).

Future phases of the project will introduce functionality for bulky and garden waste services, assisted collection requests and clinical waste collections.

Rob Flicker, Project Lead and Digital Manager at London Borough of Bexley, said: “The London Borough of Bexley have been busy working on the new Waste solution to improve our resident journey, providing an easy-to-use reporting tool and full integration with our Waste Management system.

“Bexley’s project team have launched the replacement bins service for Bexley residents as part of the new functionality within WasteWorks.

“The SocietyWorks team have delivered an excellent product that enables Bexley residents to order new bins and request for existing bins to be collected. The system offers an easy-to-use user interface, displays clear real-time status updates and dates for this service. 

“I would like to take the opportunity to thank the Society Works Team for getting the replacement bins feature Waste Works solution live on-time and on-budget.”

Reducing avoidable contact with WasteWorks

Through its connection to Whitespace Work Software, Bexley is able to manage resident expectations and reduce avoidable contact by displaying detailed information and service updates to users about the collections associated with their property. See an example below:

Where information surfaced from the in-cab system shows that there was a problem with the way the waste was presented, the ‘missed collection’ report feature is disabled and relevant information will be shared with the resident to explain why.

About WasteWorks

WasteWorks launched in 2021 and was co-designed with the London Borough of Bromley, where its intelligent features have helped the Council to achieve a 40% drop in avoidable customer contacts about waste services.

Shortlisted for the Public/Private Partnership Award at the LGC Awards 2022, WasteWorks is designed as a Progressive Web App (PWA). This means it functions beautifully on any device, and can be downloaded to mobile devices to be used as an app, without the need to maintain a separate app codebase.

Find out more about WasteWorks.

At SocietyWorks we’re proud to have a small but incredible team of people using their skills and experience to support our public sector clients and help our parent charity mySociety achieve its ambitious objectives. 

In this series of blog posts, we interview members of our team, including our board of directors, to find out more about them and why they chose SocietyWorks. 

Our first interview is with Anna Scott, one of our non-executive directors. 

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Anna Scott joined the SocietyWorks board of directors in June 2024. 

As a non-executive director Anna volunteers her time to provide strategic advice, drawing upon her extensive background working mostly within the third sector to help us build our brand and communicate effectively. 

Anna also sits on mySociety’s board as a trustee. 

We sat down with Anna recently to get to know her better and find out what brought her to SocietyWorks.

Do you want to start by telling us a bit about yourself and your career up to now?

“I’m Anna. I live in Frome in Somerset with my husband, our two-year-old son and our dog Cilla the King Charles Cavalier (also known as the family hot water bottle).

“My background is in global development and human rights, and more recently open data, digital transformation and user-centred design. I did a Master’s degree in human rights at UCL, and since then have worked mainly in content, communications and policy engagement roles.

“I started my career at the Centre for Global Development which is a big, not-for-profit think tank based in Washington DC focused on reducing poverty. My job there in a nutshell was to help start the European office, so I was involved in organising lots of events, preparing newsletters and generally building strong relationships with European and US stakeholders.

“After that I spent some time working as a content creator, first for The Guardian, where I covered global development, and then for The Mirror, where I was essentially responsible for making things go viral! It was a good lesson in what makes content engaging!

“Then I  joined the Open Data Institute (ODI), another non-profit focused on promoting open data, open innovation and data ethics. As Head of Content, I built the brand and content strategy. It was an amazing experience working across lots of content channels and formats, from podcasts to whitepapers, artworks to even a hand puppet shadow video. I worked closely with designers and the policy team, finding the best ways to communicate complex policy ideas, and curated the annual ODI Summit. 

“After that I led on content and communications for 360 Giving, and worked for varied clients, mainly also in the civic tech space, on content and brand strategy.”

It’s certainly a varied career! And what about now? What are you up to these days (aside from sitting on the SocietyWorks and mySociety boards, of course)?

“Since becoming a parent I’ve been working part-time. I’m currently involved in a digital transformation project at Defra, focusing on making forms more user friendly.

“I’m also involved in lots of content design community projects, namely a working group to help people to advocate for content design. I also co-lead the Defra Digital blog, commissioning posts from across the User Centred Design professions.”

What about outside of work? What do you do in your spare time?

“I don’t have a lot of spare time these days, but when I do I love to make music! 

“I’m a classically trained singer, but what I’m really enjoying at the moment is playing synths (the synthesiser). I love how accessible and expansive these little boxes can be. I’ve been performing at local Electronic Music Open Mics (EMOMs) – my stage name is Astral Synthesis.”

That’s very cool! You’ve clearly got lots going on, so how did we come onto your radar?

“During my time at the ODI I was very lucky to be engaged in discussions and content creation on lots of subjects around open data, data ethics and data infrastructure, in particular who owns data, who’s responsible for it and what policies create or steward it.

“At the time, mySociety was promoting its vision of having open, sustainable infrastructure for political data, and I became really interested in its tools and how they empowered citizens to engage more in democracy.

“We also ran some really great Friday lunchtime lectures at the ODI about various civic tech tools and mySociety came up quite a lot!

“I’ve been interested in civic tech and transparency ever since, so the opportunity to be part of the mySociety and SocietyWorks boards and engage more in this space was really exciting for me.”

What are you hoping to achieve as a member of the SocietyWorks board?

“Sitting across both SocietyWorks and mySociety, I want to use my brand and communications experience to help keep comms activities aligned and complementary across the group. There are two separate but connected brands here, and I’d love to help each develop their individual voice while also supporting each other’s objectives.

“I’m an advocate for accessibility and user-centred design, so I intend to be a champion for making sure our tools are accessible for users across society.

“I’ve also got a real passion for staff wellbeing, developed over years of leading teams. In fact, I’m actually training to be a psychotherapist, although it’s sort of on pause at the moment while I navigate life as a working parent. Those insights are still there, though, and I believe it’s really important to have someone with this perspective on a board of directors to keep wellbeing a priority.” 

We’re happy to have you! And what about you? What does it mean to you to be on the board of a not-for-profit organisation like SocietyWorks?

“It means a lot to me! I’ve spent most of my career working within the third sector and during that time I’ve reported to some really great boards. 

“I’ve seen firsthand what a difference it can make when you have a board of directors that is truly engaged, asks constructive and challenging questions and genuinely wants to help you succeed.

“Having been a fan of mySociety for a while, it’s a privilege to be here and to have the chance to help both the charity and SocietyWorks progress.” 

Thank you so much for talking to us, Anna!

A new version of the open source software upon which our FixMyStreet Pro solution runs has been released.

Version 6.0 of FixMyStreet includes new features such as:

• The ability to add a category filter to the reporting process, letting people search for a particular category. (This involves adding a category_filter.html template to your cobrand, similar to the one used on fixmystreet.com.)
• A new geolocation button to centre the map at your location.
• Adding the report ID reference to lists of reports in emails.
• We redirect to a confirmation page when creating a report, reducing the risk of Safari creating a duplicate report.
• Cobrands can have different map display times for open/closed/fixed reports.
• All uploaded images are now converted to JPEGs.
• Users can opt out of questionnaires.

Admin improvements

• We have improved the navigation in the admin, moving the main navigation to a sidebar. This is accompanied by minor display and performance improvements in various admin pages.
• Extra questions can now be multiple-choice using checkboxes, or a datetime picker, in addition to the existing options of text field, text area, and single value.
• You can make a phone number required for a particular category.
• On the dashboard, you can now filter by multiple categories, and we’ve fixed the CSV export to not ignore reports that had updates that were only unconfirmed or hidden.
• A long standing bug viewing a category when it has more than 1,000 history entries has been fixed.

Development improvements

• FixMyStreet has been around for a long time, and implemented its own way of sorting extra data on a per-report or update basis. Since then, PostgreSQL has added JSON support, and we have now moved the database tables to store data in this standard way.
• The site can now automatically spot a favicon.ico file present in the web/cobrands/<your-cobrand> directory, rather than having to add your own header template.
• Cobrands can provide (optionally per-category) custom distances for duplicate lookups.
• The daemon will deal with waiting reports in a random order.

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Version 6.0 of FixMyStreet is available to anyone running a site on the FixMyStreet platform, which includes: our own fixmystreet.com; the installations we host and manage for councils and other authorities; and the FixMyStreet instances run by others all over the world.

Developers and other technical-minded folk can view the full release notes on the FixMyStreet Platform website.

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Image: Tania Malréchauffé on Unsplash

Matthew Somerville, Head of Development at SocietyWorks, shares his experience of speaking at a conference dedicated to discontinued civic tech and what can be learnt from it.

Read more posts from the team talking openly about what they’re up to.

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A few weeks ago, I gave a short talk at the second Workshop of Discontinued Civic Tech, held online and in person in Japan. The topic was “What does ‘Failure’ Mean in Civic Tech?” (or should we call that pro-democracy tech?).

My talk was about PledgeBank, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

Matt Stempeck first gave a talk about the Civic Tech Graveyard, what themes and lessons can be drawn from the entries there, and how more research is needed into the current state of affairs. It was interesting to see that the top category in the graveyard was collective action, and in there that the number one example shown was PledgeBank – as that was the subject of my presentation that followed straight after.

For those who don’t know, PledgeBank was a website run by mySociety from 2005 to 2015; the second service created after WriteToThem. Its core idea was to help people overcome the collective action dilemma, of wanting to do something but being unable to do it alone; using the internet to gather people together in support. It let people set up pledges in the form: ‘I will do something, but only if a certain number of people will help me’.

With the initial launch and for some time after, plenty of work was done on the site with innovative features like SMS signing, PDF poster generation and local geolocation alerts – remember this was nearly 20 years ago now! But mySociety was and is a small organisation, reliant on a combination of funding, donations, and commercial services, and in 2015 it was decided to close some of our original services, including PledgeBank, to concentrate more on a few core services and our international partnerships at the time.

Certainly, PledgeBank did have a number of individual successes in the decade it was around. As well as various charity collection drives (such as underwear for orphans in Liberia or books to create a town library in India), notable lasting legacies of the site include the foundation of the Open Rights Group charity in the United Kingdom, and the fact that 1,000 people in the United States pledged to move house to New Hampshire as part of the Free State Project. And football fans raised over £20,000 for Ebbsfleet United, so that they could buy striker Michael Gash.

We also did some work with Barnet Council in London for a special custom version, where people could for example ask the council to approve a road closure for a street party, if enough residents of the road agreed. So it definitely proved that a website could solve some coordination problems by using the internet. And I’m unaware of any other successful socially focussed version of the same model.

But listening to all that, you’re probably thinking of some rather more ‘successful’ organisations using a similar model since then, for example Groupon, or Kickstarter.

So what happened with PledgeBank? In my opinion:

• The concept was too diffuse, and didn’t provide a reason for people to Do a Thing – pledges with a long lasting effect were more likely ones where people got something out.
• Lacked single-minded vision and the resource to implement it; we were and are a small organisation spread thinly
• Related to that, we did not do enough on the marketing side, both external and internal in terms of curating good pledges, working with potential pledgers, involving more people.
• We weren’t going to drop everything and try and turn PledgeBank into a profitable business in order to fund our charitable work, even if that might have possibly worked out in the end.

After my talk came a number of other interesting ones, including one by Gurden Batra from Dark Matter Labs (an organisation we have worked with on Neighbourhood Warmth, which has some PledgeBank related activity, where it was interesting to see them wrestling with the same issues of funding and longevity that we do.

Matt had also mentioned his Civic Tech Field Guide research – we talk all about the impacts of civic tech at our TICTeC conference, which will be held next year on 10 & 11 June in Mechelen (Belgium) and online. The Call for Proposals is now open, and hope to see you there.

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Image: Photo taken at the workshop by Discontinued Civic Tech

Senior developer Dave Arter talks through some exciting prototyping work he’s been doing recently exploring the use of geotag data and camera integrations to enable users to start reports on FixMyStreet with an image and fast track through the reporting workflow.

You can find more posts from the team talking openly about what they’re working on, something they’re interested in or even perhaps a mistake or challenge they’ve learned from here.

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Image first reporting is something we’ve had on our ‘wouldn’t it be great if’ roadmap for FixMyStreet, and by association FixMyStreet Pro, for a while now. 

When we say ‘image first reporting’ we mean giving users the option to start their journey by uploading an image, instead of this being a step that comes later on in the process. 

Thanks to recent improvements in iOS and Android,  this ‘nice to have’ idea is getting closer to becoming a reality, and I’ve been tasked with prototyping how it could work.

Extracting EXIF data to start reports

When you take a photo on a smartphone, the image file stores a lot of data in a standard known as Exchangeable image file format (EXIF). If you’re using a device that enables geo-tagging, then this data includes the location where the image was taken.

I’ve been prototyping a workflow for FixMyStreet whereby instead of the user finding the location of the problem they want to report (either by inputting the address or postcode, or by using the ‘Use my current location’ option) we can retrieve this information automatically from the EXIF data within an image of the problem at hand.

Why is this a good thing, and will it work?

There are lots of potential benefits to using geotag data for reporting problems on FixMyStreet. 

It would speed up the reporting process, for a start. It could also improve the location accuracy of reports, and remove the need for users who can’t or don’t want to report the problem at its location to remember exactly where it was at a later point in time. 

Of course, this feature will only work for users who have and are able to operate devices that enable them to take photos, and they will need to have enabled geo-tagging. Users will still be able to report problems on FixMyStreet the ‘usual’ way, without using a photo if they can’t take one or don’t have one. 

I’m also still investigating limitations and consequences around accessibility, browser settings, connectivity and file types, and how these elements impact the accuracy and availability of the data. One oddity on iPhones, for example, is photos taken using the camera then and there don’t include geotags – but photos chosen from the user’s camera roll do.

Future improvements could include adding the FixMyStreet app as a sharing destination, meaning you could share a photo from your camera roll straight into the FixMyStreet app to start a report, much like you would an email or a message.

There’s more work to be done before we can look to roll this out, but we’re certainly getting closer – and that’s very exciting!

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Click the following links to find out more about FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro.

We’re always happy to chat to councils and other public bodies who need help with improving their digital interactions with citizens by building trust and increasing efficiency. Get in touch if that sounds like you. 

National Highways’ installation of FixMyStreet Pro is now integrated with Microsoft Entra ID (formally known as Azure Active Directory).

The integration uses an OpenID Connect-compliant endpoint to enable National Highways staff users to sign in to FixMyStreet Pro using their Entra ID credentials.

Chris Livesey, Customer Service Performance Improvement Manager at National Highways said: “Our Single Sign On function with the FixMyStreet Pro platform went live this month as part of a four-year contract renewal earlier this year. This offers us increased security and reduced user-administration. The application now integrates with our Entra application ensuring a seamless exchange of data.”

Easy and secure staff access for larger teams

As well as increasing security by restricting log-ins to Entra ID accounts only, the integration reduces the administration associated with setting up staff user accounts for larger teams like at National Highways.

Existing account roles on National Highways’ Entra ID have been mapped to corresponding roles on FixMyStreet Pro to automate the account creation and permission-setting process.

Staff users on FixMyStreet Pro are able to use features including:

1. Viewing all reports
2. Editing or updating reports
3. Making reports on behalf of members of the public who call or email the contact centre
4. Assigning reports to inspectors
5. Creating and editing response templates
6. Viewing and exporting report data for analysis

Fixing England’s major roads and motorways

Members of the public can use National Highways’ FixMyStreet Pro service to report non-emergency problems on motorways and major A-roads managed by the highways agency.

Relevant reports made via the national FixMyStreet service, run by our parent charity mySociety, and those made via other authorities’ dedicated FixMyStreet Pro services are diverted directly to National Highways.

Conversely, reports made via National Highways’ FixMyStreet Pro service which are actually the responsibility of another authority are also redirected to reduce avoidable contact and failure demand. 

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Like all of SocietyWorks’ solutions, FixMyStreet Pro can be integrated via API with any combination of back end systems, from CRM to asset management to single sign on.

Find out about how integrations work or get in touch for more information.

A new integration has been completed into Camden Council’s FixMyStreet Pro service to enable reports of problems relating to trees to be sent directly into Confirm OnDemand, the asset management system used by Camden to manage its tree assets.

Being able to send reports directly into Confirm OnDemand instead of via email means FixMyStreet Pro can receive automatic updates to be shared with report-makers, helping Camden to manage expectations, improve the user experience and reduce failure demand.

The integration also enables the display of individual trees on the FixMyStreet Pro map via an asset layer, which helps report-makers accurately select the tree they need to report. 

Camden Council’s FixMyStreet Pro service launched in 2023 and is already integrated with Symology Insight for the seamless sharing of report data for other street, highway and environment defect categories. 

Ilesh Chavda, Head of Applications at Camden Council, said: “We’re really pleased to have integrated FixMyStreet Pro with our Confirm OnDemand back-office solution. This will help to create a more efficient and seamless experience for our citizens, when it comes to reporting Tree-related faults.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “Among its many benefits is FixMyStreet Pro’s ability to bridge gaps between different local authority service areas, while at the same time being able to flex around the individual needs of those services. We’re pleased to have been able to support Camden in extending the functionality of their FixMyStreet Pro service and creating consistency for users.”

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Find out more about FixMyStreet Pro or contact us to request a demo with the team.

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