News

We have a busy schedule of events coming up over the next few months, and we’d love to see you at some of them!

Take a look at where you’ll find some of the SocietyWorks team this autumn:

 

LocalGovCamp, Birmingham

26 September

We’re returning to LocalGovCamp this year as a workshop sponsor, where Bekki Leaver, Head of Product, and Matthew Somerville, Head of Development, will be in attendance. 

Matthew has been involved with mySociety since the early days of the charity and is the brains behind many of our most well-used services. Meanwhile, Bekki has a wealth of experience in civic service design and development, and will be leading a workshop on how to help your teams through transitions and remove barriers to digital transformation.

Definitely go and pick their brains if you cross paths!

Find out more.

 

Strictly Highways, Blackpool

1 – 3 October

We’re very excited to be sponsoring and exhibiting at the Local Council Roads and Innovation Group’s (LCRIG) Strictly Highways conference for the first time. 

Swing by stand 38 for a chat over a tea and some biscuits with Amelia Nicholas, Head of Client Partnerships, and Sally Reader, Account Manager. Ask them everything you’ve ever wanted to know about FixMyStreet Pro and how it helps councils, highways agencies and other public sector organisations to transform highways fault reporting for the better. 

Register your ticket.

 

Highways UK, Birmingham 

16 – 17 October

Join us once again at the NEC in Birmingham for Highways UK, where we’ll be exhibiting our FixMyStreet Pro solution from stand 281A.

Do come and see us, and stay for chat over a coffee from our on-stand barista. Amelia Nicholas, Head of Client Partnerships, will be there on both days, joined by Sally Bracegirdle, Marketing Manager, and Sally Reader, Account Manager.

Highways UK is always such a busy conference, so if you’re attending and you want to meet, please do let us know when you’ll be around so we don’t miss you!

Get your tickets.

 

APSE Waste and Recycling Management Seminar, Nottingham

1 7 October

While Amelia and the two Sallys will be talking all things streets and highways at Highways UK, our two other account managers Chris Edwards and Nicolle Whitehead will be focusing on residential waste management at the APSE Waste and Recycling Management Seminar.

If reducing unnecessary contact and improving the customer experience for your residential waste service is something you need help achieving, head  over to our stand and speak to Chris and Nicolle about WasteWorks. Ask them about integrations, preemptive messaging and anything else that’s challenging you at the moment when it comes to residential waste. 

Learn more.

 

LGA Conference, Harrogate

22 – 24 October

After being postponed due to the general election, the LGA Conference will finally be taking place in Harrogate between 22 – 24 October and we’ll be there as usual at stand Q59. 

Come over and talk to us about improving interactions with citizens and aiding digital transformation across a variety of service areas, from highways and waste, to FOI and licensing. 

Amelia, Sally B and Chris will be joined by Julia Cushion, Policy & Advocacy Manager at our parent charity mySociety. She’s hoping to hear councils’ thoughts and challenges around data, public engagement, and responding to the climate crisis. She’ll also be sharing useful tools and resources that can support progress at the local level.

Sign up and join us there.

 

GovCampCymru, Cardiff

8 November

We’re delighted to be sponsoring GovCampCymru for the second year running. Amelia will be there on the day, along with some of our other Wales-based team members. 

Like last year we’re hoping to be inspired by all the unconference sessions and, hopefully, provide some inspiration of our own! 

Do say helô if you see us around. 

Find out more.

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Not going to be at any of those events but want to chat to us about citizen-centred, open source civic services? Drop us a message and we’ll get back to you. 

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Image: Nick Fewings on Unsplash

All categories, or all subcategories within a parent category can now be viewed via a toggle on FixMyStreet Pro, making it easier and quicker to navigate to the reports in which you are interested.

Categories on FixMyStreet Pro

From potholes to grass cutting to stile maintenance and beyond, public authorities can accept reports about a vast range of problems via FixMyStreet Pro. Essentially, if it’s a place-based problem that can be plotted on a map and for which you would be responsible for fixing, it can be incorporated into your FixMyStreet Pro service. 

This is good news for everyone, because it means there’s only one user experience no matter what you want to report. Naturally though, the more categories you have to choose from, the harder it might be to find the one you need.

Keeping things simple

To mitigate the risk of category-related overwhelm for report-makers and staff users, we introduced the ability to search for categories via a search bar. We also have parent categories under which authorities can assign related subcategories to make it easier for report-makers to select the most appropriate one for their report. 

Earlier this year we updated the way categories are filtered from the administration area to give staff users with the associated permissions the option to select groups of reports via parent categories or even select multiple categories at once for export.

Following this, we have introduced the ability to toggle categories when viewing them from within the reporting workflow, from the ‘All reports’ page and from the heatmap. 

Category toggling

Let’s say, for example, you want to view on the map all reports relating to parks maintenance issues, such as full litter bins, fly-tipping and path cleaning. Instead of having to manually select the relevant categories, you can instead select the parent category ‘Parks maintenance’ and all associated categories will be toggled. Once you’re done, click the parent category again to deselect all associated categories. 

Equally, if you want to view reports from all available categories, you can click ‘Everything’ at the top of the list to select all categories, and click again to deselect them all.

Watch a very short demonstration video below:

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Categories on FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro are dictated by the authority using the service to reflect the issues they can deal with. Where an integration into a backend system is in place, categories on FixMyStreet Pro correspond to those within the integrated system.

For more information about how the service works, please get in touch. 

Merton Council is the latest in a growing number of local authorities to use WasteWorks for providing self-service online access to residential waste services.

SocietyWorks has launched a brand new installation of WasteWorks for Merton Council, including integration into three of the Council’s systems to enable a seamless flow of data and ensure residents can access up-to-date information on-demand.

Branded to complement Merton Council’s existing online environment, WasteWorks enables residents to self-serve information about the waste services associated with their property, including checking their bin days, monitoring the status of their collections and reporting problems such as missed collections or damage once the collection round is completed.

Users can also request new or extra containers, request assisted collections and book, subscribe to and pay for green and bulky waste collections using the service.

Data on collections is surfaced for users via integration with the Selected Interventions Echo in-cab system, used by the Council’s waste services provider Veolia. The service is also integrated into the Council’s own CRM system, powered by Microsoft Dynamics 365, to enable council staff to manage all reports and requests from a central system. Meanwhile, payments for one-off or subscription services are handled through integration with Adelante SmartPay.

WasteWorks was launched in 2021 and designed in collaboration with Bromley Council, where it produced a 40% drop in unnecessary contact within the first few months of launching and a continual rise in subscriptions to waste services. Shortlisted for the Public/Private Partnership award at the LGC Awards 2022, the solution aims to reduce avoidable contact and simplify access to waste services.

SocietyWorks is already partnered with Merton Council for the provision of its street, highway and environment reporting service, which has been powered by FixMyStreet Pro since 2021. 

Maureen McKean, Customer Access Point Team Leader at Merton Council, said: “The transition to WasteWorks was pretty much seamless and the level of support during the go live period superb. Any issues were rapidly dealt with. Users have been able to adapt to the new process well.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “The implementation of WasteWorks marks a new chapter in our partnership with Merton, and as a small, not-for-profit supplier we are delighted to have Merton’s trust in supporting them with another service area transition. We look forward to seeing the impact WasteWorks has in the borough.”

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Find out more about WasteWorks.

We’re delighted to be providing the London Borough of Bexley with a dedicated installation of WasteWorks, our integrated front-end residential waste portal.

We are working in partnership with Bexley using agile methodologies to provide a phased roll out of WasteWorks.

The first phase of this project delivers the initial functionality of the service, including an API integration into the Council’s in-cab system, which is provided by Whitespace Work Software. This enables residents to check their bin days on-demand, and report missed collections within specified timeframes (e.g. only after the waste crew has completed its round).

Following this, future phases of the project will introduce functionality including bulky and green garden waste subscriptions, new container and assisted collection requests, clinical waste collections and more. 

WasteWorks is the second SocietyWorks solution chosen by Bexley, where FixMyStreet Pro has been providing an easy way for residents to report local street, highway and environment problems since 2019. The two services will sit alongside each other, sharing the same accessible and user-friendly design.

Rob Flicker, Project Lead and Digital Manager at London Borough of Bexley, said: “Bexley were looking for a new Waste solution to improve our resident journey, providing an easy-to-use reporting tool and full integration with our Waste Management system. We evaluated several different options and selected WasteWorks as the best fit for Bexley.

“The first phase of the project delivered by SocietyWorks was to provide residents with a Bin Collection Day look up together with the ability to report Missed Bins as part of the new functionality. The SocietyWorks team have delivered an excellent product that provides Bexley’s residents with an easy-to-use reporting tool and displays clear real-time status updates for this service.

“I would like to take the opportunity to thank the SocietyWorks Team for getting the WasteWorks solution live on-time and on-budget. I am looking forward to working with them to implement the Garden Waste and Replacement Containers services for the next phase of this project implementation.”

Angela Dixon, Managing Director at SocietyWorks, said: “Providing simple, self-service digital access to residential waste services is essential for local authorities looking to improve service delivery while keeping costs down. We’re so pleased to be working with the team at Bexley on this project, and look forward to seeing the impact WasteWorks makes.”

Mike Nicholls, Chief Commercial Officer at Whitespace Work Software, said: “Whitespace Work Software plays a crucial role in our mission to modernise waste management services for the London Borough of Bexley. Through API integration into the WasteWorks portal, residents will benefit from seamless access to vital information regarding bin days and reporting missed collections.”

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 here.

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 Head of Development, Matthew Somerville, writes about his experience attending the Open Data Camp 9 unconference in Manchester on 6 and 7 July 2024.

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Last weekend, I went to the Open Data Camp 9 unconference in Manchester. I hadn’t been to an Open Data Camp before; it was very well organised, with good food, lots of volunteers, a creche, people from Drawnalism making lovely pictorial summaries of many of the sessions (see the website link above, and I’ll embed some from the sessions I went to below so you can see how amazing they are), they organised accommodation (if you needed it), and more.

For those who might not know what is meant by “open data”, there was a session about that – there’s a really good summary in the session notes at Open Data 101: Open Day for Newbies (2024 edition). The definition given there is: “Open data is data that can be freely used, reused and redistributed by anyone, subject at most only to the requirement to attribute and share alike.”

Here at mySociety and SocietyWorks, we use, reuse, and publish a lot of open data. For example, MapIt is based on open data, as is FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro. TheyWorkForYou is repurposing open data into a slightly better format and WhatDoTheyKnow also includes a lot of open data.

The venue was the Engineering building of the University of Manchester, which was round the corner from where I went to school (more on that later), and perfectly designed for an unconference, with four separate rooms all coming off a central hub room for food/ drinks/ chats. They had a Lego board to show where people had come from, and a pile of old out-of-copyright Manchester maps.

At this unconference, the pitches were ideas that people wanted to talk about and discuss as a group with interested others – I was happy just to see what came up and hopefully have some interesting conversations.

Day one

In the morning, I first went to a talk about deleting data and having too much data, which was a broad look at the costs of maintenance and APIs vs datasets. I raised the idea of it being much easier to maintain/look after if the open data is embedded within the processes of that data (e.g. your street light asset management system leading directly to the publication of that street light data, not requiring a special export to a special open data platform that could be subject to the vagaries of the current postholders). Following this I attended a discussion about the digital/data priorities of the first 100 days of the new Labour government.

In the afternoon, I went to a session about data on elected officials / elections by Open Data Manchester, who had made e.g. a poster of deprivation vs representation, and were looking at doing more with councillor information and data. I contributed some info on how TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem works, our combined IMD dataset, and the popolo standard for representative data.

Then it was over to Owen Boswarva’s session on the campaign/case for open addresses. This has always been a topic dear and core to us; WriteToThem and TheyWorkForYou cannot provide accurate answers for every single postcode due to the lack of open address data. I/we were well-known by everyone there, and it was a look at the current situation and what could be done to push this forward. The new government is of course one possibility, and the new Business & Trade Minister (in charge of Royal Mail, if not Ordnance Survey) has met with people on this exact topic.

The last session I went to on the first day was about web scraping, open data, and ethics. Lot of self-awareness at this, looking at my and our history with TheyWorkForYou, Mapumental, traintimes, Theatricalia, someone else’s project on scraping Warm Spaces locations, and what differences are there in terms of ethicalness and behaviour.

Day two

Day two, after catching the same bus I used to catch as a kid to school (ever so slightly more expensive now), I went to a session by two people from Raileasy, wanting to talk about open data success stories in public transport. Lots of good chat about train data, bus data and the pros and cons of decentralisation.

Being that it’s a phrase we use often here at SocietyWorks when talking about what we help local authorities with, I couldn’t not go to a session called “Closing the feedback loop” by someone from Open Data Scotland discussing how do/can producers of open data be made aware of how their data is used; e.g. in the government case, generally so they know they shouldn’t just turn it off (though turning it off does bring people out of the woodwork, certainly!). Other possibilities discussed included asking for an email as ‘payment’ for getting the data, and in order to get notified of updates or deletions; or having a place to show/link to examples of how that specific data is used.

After lunch, the organisers ran a “go outside and explore” session to try and notice things you might not normally notice, with an animal avatar. I wanted to go back and see my old school, so I co-opted the octopus group to do this, and we had a nice walk around the area (which again, is quite changed from the 1990s and the Crescents), finding a wildflower meadow while we discussed open data.

Lastly, I went to data horror and data joy stories, where you can probably imagine some of the things talked about – one thing I mentioned was the opening up of Bank Holiday data in an official GOV.UK JSON file, which meant I could submit a Pull Request on GitHub when there was a mistake, and from there find out that Scotland had forgotten to create a Bank Holiday in 2010 and 2011…

Other sessions I didn’t go to, but would have liked to…

• Refreshing our approach to government transparency
• Sustainability: how can open data help?
• Public/private sector marriage guidance (from, understandably, a data point of view)
• AI: Ethics and implications for open data
• Open data, communities, and the role of gamification

And probably more – do take a quick look through their blog.

That’s it! Thanks for having me, Open Data Camp!

We are delighted to have appointed two new members to our board of directors: Anna Scott and Alastair Tibbitt.

Both Anna and Alastair join us as non-executive directors, each bringing a wealth of experience and insight that will help us to ensure we are providing the highest level of support to our public sector clients. 

Anna and Alastair have also taken seats as trustees on the board of our parent charity mySociety.

Meet Anna

Anna is a content, brand and User Centred Design specialist with a background in data and human rights. She directed content and brand strategy at Open Data Institute, 360Giving and clients across data ethics and civic tech, and cut her teeth as a Guardian journalist.

Anna currently designs digital public services as a Senior Content Designer at Defra. She has a Masters in Human Rights from UCL. Outside work, Anna spends time chasing her toddler around and working on an electronic music project.

Meet Alastair

Alastair is a journalist and digital audience specialist with decades of experience in digital media and developing new models for public interest news.

Alastair currently works at The Conversation, and has previously worked with broadcaster STV, along with a number of other non-profit news projects. He is a founding co-director of Scottish investigative journalism co-operative, The Ferret. He also provides training and mentoring to journalists and campaigners on how to make the most of their information rights.

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As a not-for-profit organisation wholly owned by a charity, our board members give their time and expertise voluntarily. We’re grateful to each of them for their guidance. Get to know the rest of our board or get in touch to ask us a question. 

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 Head of Development, Matthew Somerville, writes about a new waste container generator for our WasteWorks solution which uses CSS to make it easier to generate waste images tailored to individual councils’ branding and bin types.

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WasteWorks is in use by a number of different councils, all of which have their own types of bin, in various colours and sizes (you can see a large array of photos of bins in use by local councils at the lovely govbins.uk site). An image of each type of bin associated with a property is displayed to residents from the WasteWorks homepage.

Our designer Lucas came up with some nice simple iconography for us to use on bin day pages, including domestic wheelie bins, communal bins, sacks and boxes. When we’ve had a new client, whose bins are differently coloured to any previous council, Lucas has been providing us with new PNG images to match the bins the council uses, exported from the source vector images. As well as the right colours, each PNG had to be provided at two different sizes, to work with high-resolution displays, and so we’ve built up a small collection of such bin images over the years.

These pictures only vary by colour (and the presence of a recycling logo), so I wondered if there was a better way we could generate these images. SVGs are vector graphics – they scale to any resolution, and importantly for this can be styled with CSS, the same mechanism used to style a web page. CSS also has “variables”, where you can define e.g. a variable to be a particular colour, and then use that variable in a different part of the document (or SVG image).

Lucas and I worked together to come up with SVGs for the various containers, which instead of specifying any fill colours directly, used one or more CSS variables to specify the colours. For the recycling logo, we set a variable for the opacity of the logo – defaulting to 0, so invisible, but we can set it to 1 to have it appear.

We’ve added a page to our user manual where you can play around with the colour of our new bin images in real time:
https://www.societyworks.org/manuals/wasteworks/container-picture-generator/ :-)

More technical details

The header of our domestic wheelie bin SVG looks something like this:

<svg class="waste-service-image">
 <style>
  .wheel { fill: #333333; }
  .main { fill: var(--primary-color, var(--default-color)); }
  .lid { fill: var(--lid-color, var(--primary-color, var(--default-color))); }
  .recycling-logo { fill: #ffffff; opacity: var(--recycling-logo, 0); }
 </style>
 ...

See that the CSS uses the var() fallback parameter so that the lid colour will e.g. default to the primary colour if not specified.

We used CSS mix-blend-modes in order to have shadows and highlights that would work regardless of the colour they were placed on top of; here’s an example shadow:

<g style="mix-blend-mode:multiply" opacity="0.12">
  <path fill="black" d="M95.1227 90.7581L120.495 681.301H79.3654L50.9626 90.7581H95.1227Z">
</g>

Then when we embed an SVG in someone’s bin day page, the web page itself, outside the image, can specify what colour to use by setting the corresponding CSS variable, and the picture will then appear in the right colours. When we have a new bin colour, we don’t need to create a new image, only set the right colour.

Here’s the outline of an SVG on a bin day page, for a grey bin with a blue lid, showing the recycling logo:

<span style="--primary-color: #767472; --lid-color: #00A6D2; --recycling-logo: 1;">
 <svg class="waste-service-image">
  <style>
   [... style as above ...]
  </style>
  [...]
 </svg>
</span>

We are pleased to announce that SocietyWorks has been accepted onto the Crown Commercial Service’s (CSS) Low Value Purchase System (LVPS).

The LVPS is specifically for low cost and uncomplicated goods and services. Our SaaS products can be purchased through the LVPS either through direct award or via what’s known as a mini competition. 

As a not-for-profit SME, being accepted onto the LVPS opens up a vital new route to market, while giving our customers another Public Contracts Regulations 2015 compliant and pre-approved way to procure our solutions.

Our acceptance onto the framework is also testament to our belief that pricing should always be transparent and costs should always be kept to a minimum, even when the impact is high. Visit the CCS website for more information on how the LVPS works.

Our products and services are also available on G-Cloud and Digital Outcomes.

If you have any questions about procuring SocietyWorks’ solutions, please get in touch and we’ll be happy to help. 

We are delighted to share that SocietyWorks has been awarded a Cyber Essentials Plus certification, along with our parent charity mySociety.

 

 

The Cyber Essentials Plus audited certification follows our existing Cyber Essentials certification, which we have been awarded yearly since 2019.

As a supplier of digital products and services to local authorities and the public sector, we know that cyber security is of the utmost importance to our customers.

Achieving the Cyber Essentials Plus accreditation reflects our continued commitment to cyber security, with robust policies and technical controls in place to defend against the most common cyber threats. 

You can find more information about Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus on the National Cyber Security Centre website.

Or you might like to read more about our approach to security and secure hosting for our digital solutions.

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Image: Image by Freepik

As an organisation we talk a lot about how our civic tech products are able to flex around individual authorities’ needs. This is not something we say because it sounds good; it is a commitment from us.

Take our residential waste management portal WasteWorks as an example. 

A waste service that works for everyone

WasteWorks is a front-end SaaS product which integrates with in-cab systems to simplify online access to all waste services associated with a property’s address, such as checking your bin days, ordering a new container or reporting a problem with a collection.

We built the core WasteWorks service in 2021 in collaboration with the London Borough of Bromley, who wanted to reduce the amount of unnecessary contact they were receiving about residential waste services caused by their existing processes. 

With that goal in mind, we equipped WasteWorks with the ability to not only let residents self-serve up-to-date information about their waste collections (including being able to download a live schedule to their device’s calendar), but also to ensure that reports of, for example, missed collections can only be made after the crew has completed their rounds.

Since launching for Bromley, WasteWorks has consistently achieved a 40% drop in unnecessary contact, and made the final of the LGC Awards 2022 in the Public/Private Partnership category. 

As more authorities have adopted the service, we have continued to add new functionality in alignment with the needs of our community of users, including:

• Green garden waste subscriptions – enabling residents to subscribe to and pay for green waste collections
• Bulky waste collection bookings – residents can book and pay for a one-off collection or subscribe to repeat collections if required
• Small item collections – take bookings for the collection of small items, such as batteries and textiles
• Assisted collection requests – let residents request help from your waste crew with their bin collection(s)
• New container payments – take payments for new containers when requested by residents

The implementation of these features differs per council, adapting to their different rules, workflows and seasonal circumstances. 

For example, where an authority needs to understand what and how many containers a property already has we are able to add in extra questions to gather this information.

In other instances, where an authority experiences shortages of sacks, we are able to give council staff the ability to temporarily switch off orders and communicate transparently. 

The future

Each council using WasteWorks has made it their own, with slightly different configurations to make it exactly what they need.

We can facilitate this because our software is built with local authority differences in mind. We have learned from delivering our long-running street and environment reporting service FixMyStreet Pro across over 30 authorities that even when the goal is the same, the approach can differ. We embed that flexibility into all of our products.

In terms of new developments, we will continue to be led by our users (both residents and staff) following our citizen-centred design principles. User groups enable us to bring everyone together to discuss ideas, while customers have the opportunity to log suggestions through our helpdesk service at any time. 

Waste is a service area that will be subject to much change over the coming years in response to new regulations and legislation aimed at helping us respond to climate change.  

However requirements change, we will be there to support our local authority clients along the journey.

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If you’d like a conversation about transforming online access to residential waste services with scalable open source software, get in touch.

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Image: Abel Matthew via Pexels