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Along with our parent charity mySociety, SocietyWorks is now formally sponsoring OpenStreetMap and MetaCPAN – two key external pieces of digital infrastructure that help us to run our services.

We use OpenStreetMap data in a number of ways, including background mapping on sites such as MapIt, or as an optional layer on FixMyStreet. Meanwhile, MetaCPAN is the Perl package manager that hosts all the third party Perl packages we use in FixMyStreet, WriteToThem, and more.

Why is sponsorship important?

Like many technology providers, we rely on a number of external dependencies in order to run our services. It’s been a long-held goal to be able to support such infrastructure, and give back to the technology and community on which we rely. 

XKCD has this famous comic which I’m sure many of you have seen before:

As the Explain XKCD page on the above comic says, “The current model of libraries and open-source development […] relies heavily on the free and continued dedication of unpaid hobbyists”, and has some interesting discussion and examples. There’s a lot of history behind how things have arrived here, and a number of people and organisations looking to try and improve the situation, and hopefully our contribution is part of that.

So yes, supporting digital infrastructure upon which you depend is a good idea, and I’m really pleased we are able to give back to OpenStreetMap and MetaCPAN. 

SocietyWorks’ Head of Product, Bekki Leaver, provides some frank food for thought on the topic of using AI to fix potholes.

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There’s a lot of buzz about AI and how it’s going to fix the UK’s pothole issues by using clever software and cameras, even drones, to help authorities identify them automatically. 

It all sounds very impressive, and as someone working in tech and digital transformation, I am truly excited about the potential of new technologies. Using tech to make services more efficient and proactive sounds brilliant.

But here’s the thing: I do not believe pothole identification is the problem.

To improve anything, you have to start with the problem.

While, naturally, authorities can’t be everywhere at once, generally speaking they already know where the potholes are. Residents report them, sometimes with creative photoshoots to show how big the pothole is (banana for scale anyone?). Inspectors are out there checking roads. Platforms like FixMyStreet help map and visualise reports in real time. We have no shortage of pothole identification.

What we do have a shortage of is capacity to do anything about them. Enough people, time and funding to fix the things once they’re found.

Seeing more < doing more

Imagine going to the hospital with a broken leg. You know it’s broken, the physician knows it’s broken, everyone knows! But instead of treatment a consultant wheels out an expensive new machine that scans it in 4K from multiple angles and tells you exactly how broken it is, only for there to be no staff to actually put it in a cast. That’s not helpful! That’s just frustrating. And this is where we’re heading with “better identification tech”. We’ve got more awareness, but no resources to act, in a system already stretched to its limits.

Let’s be clear though, this isn’t about authorities responsible for fixing potholes not doing enough. Working in partnership with highways teams at authorities across the UK, we see them pulling off small miracles on a daily basis, trying to keep services running in the face of ever increasing demand and diminishing budgets. Where AI tools can help prioritise workloads, assist in predicting seasonal pressures, or just reduce the mountain of paperwork, I am all for it.

Digital transformations don’t start with shiny new tech, sensors or algorithms. They start with people. Unless the system has the resources and flexibility to use what technology finds, all we’re doing is giving exhausted teams more things to feel behind on.

If AI could help us fight the causes of potholes, then great – I’m all for it. In the meantime, surely the focus should be on tech helping frontline services do more with what resources they have, rather than see more?

After all, if you hit a pothole this week, you won’t care if it’s been beautifully scanned, categorised, and added to a dashboard somewhere; you’ll just want an easy way to see if it’s been reported already and for it to be fixed.

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Read more posts from the SocietyWorks team.

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Image taken by a member of the mySociety/SocietyWorks team and used with permission.

Off the back of some recent news stories which purported to use FixMyStreet data to denounce the worst places in the UK for potholes and other issues, Bekki Leaver, Head of Product, explains how FixMyStreet data can be used – and how it can’t.

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I read a book once called How to lie with statistics. It’s a short book with entertaining illustrations and anecdotes about misrepresenting the facts with fancy diagrams. 

The book has stuck with me for years and I am reminded of it often when I see reports and articles from sources unaffiliated with us that try to present a particular worldview based on the data they’ve sourced from our FixMyStreet service, such as where the worst roads in the UK are for potholes.

Data from FixMyStreet alone does not tell you this, and we do not condone the use of it for such purposes.

In my role as Head of Product, I spend a lot of time dealing with data from FixMyStreet, so I wanted to share some insight and bust some myths.

What is FixMyStreet data telling you?

FixMyStreet is a single data point. That data is incredibly useful to analyse in a great number of contexts, from exploring what is being reported in a certain area to who is reporting it. 

FixMyStreet report data creates a snapshot of civic engagement within the individual areas where it is well used.

For the councils who use FixMyStreet Pro, the data goes even further, giving insight into, for example, time from report to resolution, contractor service levels and localised seasonal trends.

The limitations of the data

However, on its own it cannot tell you where is better or worse for certain problems.

If you’re after the reality of the situation, you’ve got to triangulate. In other words, you’ve got to use multiple data sources to have credibility and trustworthiness in the results.

Research has shown that the user demographics for FixMyStreet tend to skew towards people living in the middle of the deprivation spectrum.

That’s not to say the spaces where those people live are in a higher state of disrepair than others; only that more people there are reporting more faults and defects to their council through FixMyStreet.

Why is this? To report a problem you have to A) have a problem B) know how to report a problem and C) have belief the problem will be fixed. A FixMyStreet report represents both “here is a problem” and “hope in a functional government”.

Other limitations include differences in categorisation (straight to potholes or through roads and pavements first?), variations in council participation (e.g. in some areas we are the primary reporting mechanism acting as the council’s own reporting system, whereas in others we run alongside other reporting channels, or sometimes councils refuse reports from third parties entirely) and we’re only a small part of the maintenance workflow, with inspectors and sensors doing a lot of the heavy lifting too.

Being data-savvy

Whenever you’re looking at a report or article that’s making a claim using data, consider the validity of that claim, especially if it’s in some way disparaging! 

Firstly, consider who benefits from it – that will help determine whether they’ve used data in good faith. 

Then see if they’re using more than one data source. If they are using multiple sources, check they’re recent and relevant. 

And if you’ve got the time and the desire, pick up a copy of How to lie with statistics and forever be a little bit cynical of what those statistics someone is presenting are telling you.

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See more posts from the SocietyWorks team.

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Image taken by a member of the mySociety/SocietyWorks team and used with permission.

Our front-end designer Lucas Cumsille Montesinos highlights some of the work he’s been doing recently to make FixMyStreet and all integrated co-branded versions of the service running on FixMyStreet Pro more accessible.

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Over the past year we have been collaborating with users of FixMyStreet and FixMyStreet Pro to enhance the solution’s accessibility, making improvements to the user experience for people using assistive devices. 

One of our clients, Transport for London (TfL), shared an accessibility audit of their installation of FixMyStreet Pro with us. The document listed issues detailing information regarding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and some improvements that could be applied.

Here are some of the points they shared with us:

• Description of the issue.
• Level success criteria using the WCAG standard: Level A (lowest), AA, and AAA (highest).
• A link to the page and location of the component where the issue can be found, along with instructions for replicating the problem if necessary.
• Status of the issue: Pass, Pass with comments, N/A, Fail.
• They also provided recommendations made by the auditor.

What improvements did we make?

The report from TfL allowed us to work on different areas of improvement, for example:

• Meaningful Sequence: We focused on making the order in which assistive devices present the information match the order in which the page is visually presented.
• Non-text Content: We hid purely decorative elements from screen readers, reducing unnecessary clutter for users when navigating the site.
• Info and Relationships: We improved and updated the role and attributes of some HTML elements so assistive devices can better understand the context and how to use those elements.
• Focus Order: When someone is tabbing through a website (using their keyboard instead of a mouse), everything should flow naturally and make sense. It’s making sure that when you hop from one thing to the next, the order matches how you’d understand the content – no jumping around to random spots that leave you scratching your head.

What did we learn?

• Include the WCAG conformance level (from A to AAA), where level A is the minimum. Ideally, you would like the website you are working on to comply with all Level AA success criteria. Using the conformance level makes it easier for you to prioritise which issues should be tackled first and which ones can be done later.
• Some issues won’t require a lot of time to fix. This can be your second factor when it comes to prioritising which improvements to make first. For example, easy fixes like adding aria-labels or increasing the contrast between the text and the background colour can be done in little time and greatly improves the user experience of your website.
• If you find an accessibility issue, always try to provide as much detail as possible, especially if someone else will be doing the work to fix it. The TfL document made solving the issues much faster and minimised any back-and-forth. Even sharing which browser you were using when experiencing the error can make a difference.
• One of the most interesting experiences was solving issues that didn’t seem like an issue (at the time), but once you deprive yourself of literally looking at the screen and using an assistive device, then the problem starts making sense. For example, the action of a button can make sense when you are looking at the screen and the elements that are surrounding it, but if you can’t see the context, the elements around the button, then the button might not make much sense. Adding further instructions like an aria-label that provide the context that the eyes are missing can help users understand where they are and what they can do much better.
• Finally, it is a great exercise to be more conscious when designing a website. Yes, a certain text, link, or button colour can look great, but can it be read easily? What about colourblind users? You can install plugins in your browser to help you see the page the way they would see it.

Our accessibility improvements were rolled out to the national FixMyStreet site and all co-branded FixMyStreet Pro sites. However it is worth noting that FixMyStreet Pro is designed to accommodate the branding and styling of each authority that uses it, which can mean that some of our accessible default settings are overridden. This is why we always recommend that authorities carry out an accessibility audit on their own services.

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Thanks for sharing, Lucas!

Read more about how we design accessible digital services, or browse more posts from the SocietyWorks team.

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

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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lack of resources and funding 

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

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

Running before you can walk

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

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

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

Here is the extract…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Image: Jonathan Farber on Unsplash

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

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!

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.

—

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>