Blog posts about Events

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

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

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 were recently invited to discuss the benefits and challenges of using data and digital twins at a roundtable event hosted by the Chartered Institute of Highways & Transportation (CIHT) and Ringway. The roundtable focused on the data rich delivery of highway maintenance specifically, but the experiences and advice we shared during the event are applicable on a broader scale, so we have detailed them in this blog post.

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If our many years of experience providing citizen-centred digital solutions to the public sector have taught us anything it’s that being able to collect and share up-to-date data ultimately helps you to deliver a better service – and by association, nurture a more engaged population.

As Alessandro Fornaroli and Daniel Gatica-Perez write in the introduction to their research article published in the July 2023 edition of the Digital Government: Research and Practice report: “Data availability is paramount to the functioning of a city, and therefore platforms allowing to collect data generated by people represent a key element in the transition towards more citizen-centric cities.”

How we help authorities deliver data rich services

Whether it’s being able to display accurate asset information on a map or communicating that a certain road is due to be resurfaced on a certain date, we have always strived to help local authorities enrich their digital services with data through integration. 

Among its many benefits, when used effectively, we’ve seen how data can help to reduce failure demand, increase accuracy and eliminate duplication or avoidable contact.

For example, where Buckinghamshire Council has been using integrated asset layers within its FixMyStreet Pro service, duplicate reports have dropped by 99.5%. The Council also uses asset layers to triage reports to parish and town councils based on the latest information available relating to speed limits, which has created anticipated savings of over £50,000 just for grass and hedge cutting reports alone. 

Or take the way FixMyStreet Pro is used in London as another example, where the borough council users of the solution benefit from automatic diversion of reports not only between each other, but also between other public bodies operating in the capital, such as Transport for London (TfL) and the Peabody Housing Association.

In Bexley and Greenwich, for example, reports are triaged between the two borough councils, TfL and Peabody in the Thamesmead area, which straddles the border between the two boroughs. To help users visualise where certain issues are the responsibility of TfL or Peabody, we display polygons and what we call ‘red routes’ on the in-report maps.

Any issue within a certain category reported on a ‘red route’ is automatically sent directly to TfL, while the polygons represent areas in which issues are the responsibility of Peabody. Equally, if a resident tries to report a problem to Peabody or TfL which is actually the responsibility of Bexley or Greenwich, the report will be diverted. 

The same can be done for triaging problems to National Highways elsewhere in the UK. 

Other examples include the use of QR codes to make it quicker to report problems with assets like street lights or bins, special map pins to represent issues you’re already aware of or live updates pulled from in-cab systems to inform of why a bin collection is delayed.

The challenges of a data rich service

As digital transformation accelerates at a faster and more competitive pace, and the sector and its suppliers begin to explore increasingly innovative uses of data, including the use of AI, there are challenges and unintended consequences that need to be considered.

Take this as an example: if residents can see at the click of a button a digital twin of each of your assets which tells them exactly how many streetlights are broken or gullies are blocked, you need to communicate what you’re doing about that – and if you’re not doing anything, why? 

Resident-facing, front-end solutions which enable closed feedback loops are vital here, otherwise you risk creating more pressure on customer services or on other service areas not equipped to cope with an unintended increase in contact.

Similarly, if your use of data is intended to enable you to create more cohesion across council service areas, provisions need to be put in place to ensure everyone can provide the same level of service to avoid inconsistency and failure demand. 

For example, when we implemented an asset layer for Buckinghamshire Council’s FixMyStreet Pro to enable the automatic triaging of reports to parish and town councils, we also delivered some functionality for those parishes to be able to update the status of reports even though they do not have case management systems of their own. 

Crucially, consideration needs to be given to how the use of data could affect the accessibility of a service. This includes permanent or temporary physical and situational impairments which may cause people to be unable to, for example, use QR codes, operate digital maps or start reports from photos. Alternative steps need to be built into user journeys to ensure no one is locked out or left behind. 

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The landscape of public sector digital services is ever-changing, and we’re proud to be a part of it, working in partnership with a growing number of forward-thinking local authorities and other public bodies like Ringway, who sparked the idea for this blog post through their roundtable. 

If you’d like to talk more about data rich citizen solutions to help you provide better services, please get in touch.

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Image: Eric Weber on Unsplash

This week was Public Sector Insight Week 2023 – an annual event dedicated to bringing together government and businesses to help each other use digital more effectively.

As part of the event, our managing director Angela Dixon delivered a best practice session on closing the feedback loop between local authorities and residents.

Closed feedback loops are essential to building trust, managing expectations and increasing efficiency.

In our twenty years of experience working within the public sector, we have seen how difficult it can be for councils to keep feedback loops closed, with over-stretched budgets, the transient nature of local authority staffing and a multitude of different systems used for dealing with different issues.

Angela spoke about the common problems local authorities in particular face when feedback loops are broken, how to fix them effectively and shared some of our lessons learned from our experience of helping to bridge the gap between citizens and the public sector with innovative open-source digital solutions.

If you couldn’t make it to Angela’s talk, but you are interested to hear what she had to say, you can watch the full session on YouTube.

On 25 April we’ll be hosting a webinar for local authorities focused on our digital residential waste management service WasteWorks, and we’d love for you to join us.

During the webinar we’ll demonstrate how the service works for local authorities, show how it integrates with different in-cab and payment systems and discuss the impact it has had so far for councils, their residents and their contractors.

Now available on the recently launched G-Cloud 13 framework, WasteWorks was designed in collaboration with Bromley Council and Veolia to simplify access to waste services online and reduce unnecessary contact to the council. It was also shortlisted for a LGC Award 2022 in the Public/Private Partnership category.

Come along to the webinar to:

• learn about WasteWorks’ features and see how they work;
• understand how different councils are using the software and how it is achieving a 40% drop in unnecessary contact while increasing Direct Debit subscriptions;
• have the chance to ask questions about how the software could work for you.

Get your free ticket for the webinar on Eventbrite.

User groups are among our favourite events in the calendar year. We love to bring together the organisations that use our products – from councils to highways agencies to housing associations – for a few hours to share experiences, ask questions and learn from one other. 

Last week we hosted another of our FixMyStreet Pro user groups, centred on our street, highway and environment reporting service. 

There’s a recording of the user group available to watch for anyone who wanted to come but couldn’t make it, or you can find a brief summary of what you missed below. 

Recently added features

From scheduled emergency messages to easier displaying of asset IDs on a report page, Senior Developer Chris Mytton gave us a tour of the latest features to be added to or updated for FixMyStreet Pro. Watch Chris’ session here.

Process changes and intended outcomes

Head of Product & Service Design Bekki Leaver ran a session explaining some recent changes we’ve made to our development and delivery processes, and exploring our intended outcomes for the future of the product. Take a look.

Parish councils and FixMyStreet Pro in Buckinghamshire

Matthew Somerville, our Head of Development, gave us a demo of some new functionality we’ve been working on with Buckinghamshire Council, which allows principal authorities to use FixMyStreet Pro to easily and intelligently triage reports to parish councils. Check it out.

Report status mapping

‘Don’t mark reports as fixed unless the problem has actually been fixed’ was the main take-home from developer Moray Jones’ session on making sure your report statuses are mapped correctly on FixMyStreet Pro. More on this here.

Empathy mapping

We handed back over to Bekki who guided small breakout groups through an empathy mapping exercise to answer the question: why should I add a photo to my report? Each group had a different persona and situation to explore. If you’re interested in the work Bekki does, get in touch.

Case study: Peabody housing association and FixMyStreet Pro

Tom Broad, Head of Environmental Services Thamesmead at Peabody, joined us to talk about how the housing association is using FixMyStreet Pro, which involves some complex routing of reports between Peabody and the London boroughs of Bexley and Greenwich. Watch the case study.

Communication top tips

Best practice advice for communicating FixMyStreet Pro to residents from our Marketing & PR Manager Sally Bracegirdle. See what Sally had to say.

Roundtable: problem-solving with FixMyStreet Pro

A group discussion on any shared pain points when it comes to digital street and highway reporting, and how we can look to resolve them with future development of FixMyStreet Pro. This is something we’re interested in all year round – please speak to your account manager whenever you have a suggestion to discuss.

Want to join us next time?

If you’re interested in what we do and how FixMyStreet Pro works, why not come along to our next user group to meet our community and see what the product is all about for yourself. Let us know if you’d like an invite. 

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Image: Benjamin Elliott

We’ll be taking FixMyStreet Pro to Highways UK again this year, an exhibition for those working on the UK’s road infrastructure, taking place in Birmingham on 2 – 3 November.

If you’re heading to the event, stop by stand J7 for a fresh, barista-made coffee and learn all about FixMyStreet Pro, our map-based reporting service for street and highway issues, built on the national FixMyStreet website, launched by our parent charity mySociety in 2007.

Since 2012, FixMyStreet Pro, the fully integrated version of FixMyStreet, has been enabling councils, local government bodies and highways agencies to improve the way they take and manage reports from citizens about problems such as potholes, blocked drains and broken street lights.

Ask us about how FixMyStreet Pro can help you to, among other things:

1. reduce duplication and manual intervention;
2. automatically divert irrelevant reports on a nationwide scale;
3. close the feedback loop and avoid failure demand.

There’ll be a few members of the SocietyWorks team at Highways UK – why not connect with them on the event app and schedule a meeting?

Here’s where to find us on the day:

See you there!

SocietyWorks is going to SDinGov again this year, an international community event for anyone involved in designing and commissioning public services.

Taking place in Edinburgh next month, our Head of Product & Service Design Bekki Leaver will be sharing a case study on day 2 of the event, talking about our experience of how we used speculative design to reconsider whether we wanted to branch out into the area of anti-social behaviour reporting.

Over the last decade, we’ve been working with councils to design citizen-centred reporting services for issues in areas such as highways, waste and freedom of information. Anti-social behaviour (ASB) seemed like a natural progression from this, meeting demand from councils to address problems with reporting in this area. 

However, by nature, ASB is a complex issue, with disparate definitions depending on who you’re speaking to. Even with years of experience in user-needs focused design and consequence scanning, the complexity of this particular reporting area meant that we risked getting caught up in designing for one group of people, without truly considering the impact on other affected groups. 

For those of us designing for the public sector, it’s vital that we’re able to maintain the awareness to know when to pause for reflection, and that you have the design tools required to re-evaluate and decide whether to proceed or not.

Join Bekki to hear about the process we went through to reassess our perspective and how we used co-design future-casting to carve out the way forward.

Speculative design for product decisions in anti-social behaviour reporting takes place on 29 September at 12.15 – 12:45. 

We’re excited to be exhibiting at this year’s Local Government Association Annual Conference, taking place next month in Harrogate.

SocietyWorks will be based at stand Q21, right on the edge of the LGA Hub & Innovation Zone. If you’re interested in providing accessible, integrated and user-centred digital services for citizens, come say hello to us and let’s have a chat.

Who will be at the stand?

Amelia Nicholas, Head of Sales – Amelia joined SocietyWorks earlier this year and has really hit the ground running getting to know our public sector customers and helping them realise their digital transformation goals. Ask Amelia about our digital waste portal WasteWorks, which was recently shortlisted for a LGC Award.  

 

Clare Armiger, Account Manager – Clare will be joining Amelia in Harrogate. She has a wealth of experience working with local authorities, understanding their needs and helping to turn them into actionable projects. Be sure to ask Clare about ApplyWorks, our in development digital applications and licensing service for councils.

 

Sally Bracegirdle, Marketing & PR Manager – Completing the group is Sally, who helps the councils and other public sector organisations with which we work communicate effectively with citizens about their new digital services. She’s the one to ask about case studies for how we’ve helped our clients successfully introduce new and improved services.

 

The LGA Annual Conference takes place at the Harrogate Convention Centre on 28 – 30 June. You can find more information about the event and book your tickets here.

We’ll see you there!