Blog posts about Thinking out loud

This post is the first in our Responsible Tech series, in which we explore open source technology and data privacy, security, and sovereignty. Written by our Managing Director, Angela Dixon, this post is aimed at executives who care deeply about delivering citizen and societal outcomes but also understand they have to balance the books.

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I’ve often warned my team to beware of people like me; the leaders or executives who hold the power of decision making in areas outside their expertise. We may be deeply versed in traditional approaches to strategy and have risen through the ranks due to our level heads, our commitment to real world results, and demonstration of returns on investment. What we know is useful and important, but it is what we don’t know that creates risk in the organisations we serve.

No one can be an expert in everything and that’s ok. But for decisions about complex problems that exist within even more complex systems with evolving and uncertain variables, if we (and others) don’t recognise our knowledge gaps and limitations, then we risk the outcomes we are working for. 

The technology choices made for public services are of critical importance. These decisions intrinsically contain the power for improving lives and the potential to cause significant harm. Any executive who makes decisions over which technology is to be deployed in the service of the public good has the responsibility to hold a good enough understanding of what effective and reliable technology looks like and be open to listening and asking the right questions of the experts. 

The benefits of open and reusable source code

UK Government Service Standard 12, the standard used to define what “good” looks like for digital public services, states ‘Make new source code open’. All new source code should be open and reusable and if this is not possible, a convincing explanation should be provided. Deviation from the use of open-by-default is the exception, not the rule. But why is this important? 

• Open source code can be reused by developers working in government, avoiding duplication of work and reducing costs
• Publishing source code under an open licence means that you’re less likely to get locked in to working with a single supplier.

The Technology Code of Practice has also shared guidance on the open source preference for software advising public services to be open and use open source to improve ‘transparency, flexibility, and accountability.’

Commercial software suppliers vs open source

Open source software shared and reused across Government creates the opportunity for large financial savings and maintains the balance of power with the commercial software market. Whether software is built and maintained in-house or outsourced to a supplier, if it is the product of public spend, then it should be built to be reused and shared.

Commercial software suppliers may try to prevent this as it will erode their profit margins. However, there is a negotiation to be had if public authorities worked together to address the balance of power. MHCLG has undertaken work to develop their understanding of the local government software market and address common concerns about poor interoperability between systems, lack of transparency in pricing, limited competition and choice, and difficulties with migration and implementation. There will hopefully follow heightened expectations for more suppliers that are paid by the public purse to be open by default. 

“If it is the product of public spend, then it should be built to be reused and shared”

There are already private-public sector partnerships that exist to maintain open source software for the public sector. These operating models balance the paying of sensible wages to the private suppliers (who accept they will not become rich out of public funds) with having a sustainable model for implementation, development and maintenance of public sector open source software. For example, LocalGovDrupal, an initiative originally funded by the Local Digital Fund, is now governed by a cooperative model to sustain and develop its open source web publishing platform for councils. SocietyWorks represents another sustainable model: a social enterprise that develops and runs citizen-centred, flexible, open source software for local government and other public bodies. Phil Rumens, Principal Technologist for GDS Local posted that “Open‑source products can deliver significant value for local government, but adoption is often held back by risk and uncertainty, not a lack of options.” 

Open source software is designed to be publicly accessible which means it can be seen, modified and reused. While originally intended for distributed communities to contribute and develop together, this does not mean that it is at risk of any member of the public changing live code. People outside of public authorities may voluntarily submit suggested improvements or bug fixes, and there should be processes baked in for review before accepting any new code or changes to the live sites.  

Reducing risk with open code

The NHS created an outcry when it reversed its long-standing open source policy citing cyber security and hacking fears, specifically the ability of advanced AI models like Mythos to spot vulnerabilities. The Government Digital Service and DSIT promptly responded by publishing guidance on AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector. The guidance emphasises that “the primary driver of exploitation risk is the presence of weaknesses in systems – including unpatched vulnerabilities, insecure implementation, and unsafe configuration or deployment – and the inability to remediate them quickly” and that publishing open source code reduces those risks. Open code is a strength, not a vulnerability.

With the power and availability of AI-assisted software analysis moving at pace, doubling down on robust secure-by-design architecture and implementation, deployment, configuration, dependency hygiene and access control is the pragmatists approach to secure public service software. Embedding secure-by-design principles to software development and maintenance at the outset and throughout the service lifecycle is how the public sector will also continue to benefit from reuse and transparent delivery, as well as avoid the duplication of builds, costs and vendor lock-in. 

Open source software provides “the freedom to keep the repair path open after the original author is gone”. This is critical for infrastructure sustainability and succession planning. Access to legacy or proprietary closed code, that which the majority of technology vendors provide to the public sector at high cost, can be lost if an authority ends a contract. Open source software avoids vendor lock-in as a public authority may switch vendors to continue developing or maintaining the software and are equally free to bring this in house. This is the strategic move for the pragmatists undertaking sustainable infrastructure planning.

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Connect with Angela on LinkedIn to chat more about open source software.

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Image: Alice C via Pexels

At SocietyWorks we run a service for local authorities called WasteWorks, one part of which includes, alongside bulky collections, garden subscriptions and the like, the important service of finding out when your bin days are (speaking as someone who hasn’t had a recycling collection in 18 months due to the Birmingham bin strike).

I was recently reading Tom Loosemore’s blog post about AI agents (meaning LLM-powered services operating browsers directly or requesting things from websites, notionally on someone’s behalf), and his previous post about being “beaten” by council websites when trying to make a national bin day site (due to the variations in council websites being too much for his attempt), and got to thinking – AI agents can be useful to individuals, but using them in this way is collectively causing problems, and we need to keep the focus on improving and fixing the plumbing that helps us deliver sustainable digital services.

Tom’s Bluesky post led to a number of follow-on discussions about bins:

• Tom Steel mentioned localgovdrupal’s bin module, which acts in a similar way to our own sites, and would let councils that use localgovdrupal more easily add a bin day section to their site – a win for collaborative and shared working;
• Phil Rumens and Paul Connell had a discussion about data publishing and a previously proposed waste data standard that wasn’t adopted;
• And Rachel 🦁 via Owen Boswarva linked to the UKBinCollectionData project.

The last of those is especially interesting, as it is an existing way of getting the data Tom was trying to, with collaborative (169 contributors so far) open source software, and it even handles the one (Westminster Council) that stumped Tom’s AI fine. It integrates with Home Assistant, if you use that, and could presumably be used as a base for other things. It may be boring, compared to the thought of a magic-seeming “agent”, but scrapers/agents that accept instructions from what they read, where there is no privileged set of instructions or separation of data, are fundamentally risky (e.g. “Word worm crawls into Copilot”) compared to a script using and reading an open standard.

Meeting user needs in a simple, sustainable way

I wonder whether people actually would want a single national service to look up their bin days. They just want to find out when their bin day is, and I wouldn’t search for a special app/site for that. People might go on their council website (it’s printed on the bin), they might search, they might ask AI (though Google’s AI overview being asked when is your bin day currently says “use the council tool” but asks for your postcode(!), then says “use the council tool” but still asks for your precise address(!!), and then says… “use the council tool”), they might (shock) ask their neighbour – but what’s needed by all of those is for the data to be available in some manner for all these routes to use, which doesn’t need consolidation.

All WasteWorks bin day pages publish iCal feeds (.ics files) of collections, an old (RFC 2445 was in 1998) data standard for publishing calendar events. They can all utilise UPRNs, the UK data standard for uniquely referencing properties (though in some places for performance reasons we use other property identifiers). They all have nice, bookmarkable URLs, so people can save their bin day page in their bookmarks, or as a progressive web app, if that’s how they want to get the information.

In terms of standards, I think a good role of the centre is to provide platforms and ways for things to operate, and inter-operate, as we talk about in our paper Unlocking the value of fragmented public data. In this case, for example, they could recommend that councils provide such iCal feeds for bin day pages, so people, scripts, or agents don’t have to parse HTML web pages or PDFs; they could propose a URL standard for the location of a bin day page via UPRN, so automation could locate them more easily (https://www.gov.uk/rubbish-collection-day already exists, at a less automated level, for example). Backend systems can’t publish all the data, and I’m not sure we need them to, but locating that information is what people want to do, and we then surface what we can.

The tragedy of the commons

However, we also, like many others, are under increased constant barrage by badly written AI bots (perhaps running off your cheap streaming stick). Be that for scraping for training data, bots trying to find security holes, or people making badly written apps to look up information on a large scale, such activity can potentially cause knock-on issues for actual users of the site. And if everyone is doing the same thing, wasting resources over and over, with no thought to the collective benefit or disbenefit, then we find ourselves in a tricky situation.

My colleague Alex talks about 3 types of state interaction in the context of AI-driven demand – private benefit (for the requestor, e.g. a grant, or a benefit application), collective benefit (benefits the requester and wider society, e.g. a public FOI request, or reporting a pothole), or a zero-sum interaction (e.g. planning). Getting a script, or AI agent, or whatever today’s buzzword is to fetch bin day information is a private benefit, whilst having some shared code on GitHub helps turn that into a collective benefit. And having easily usable bin day pages with iCalendar feeds helps increase the collective benefit.

In that vein, I have submitted a Pull Request to the UKBinCollectionData project to switch to using our iCal feeds for all the council bin day pages we run, rather than the various more brittle web scraping that they currently use, which should help both users and us, providing more data, in a more performant manner. This I feel is how we best deliver what people want – when is bins?

Bin photo CC-BY, by David Merrett

After decades of technological progress, it is no secret that today’s technology acts as a mirror to human bias. Take this famous case in the US as an example, in which risk assessments used by the police to predict future criminals were resulting in an inaccurate prediction of reoffence for black Americans. ProPublica’s analysis of a series of such cases sparked outrage across the globe, with people expressing disapproval of the use of algorithms in justice calculations, where the decision could have a significant impact on people’s lives. 

Whilst EnviroWorks, our private and secure environmental health reporting and case management system, does not use algorithms to make decisions on case prioritisation or issuing Community Protection Notices (CPNs), cases such as these show how technological systems can reflect bias and have significant consequences for marginalised groups. In our design, we wanted to be sure that we understood – and thus could prevent – the possible unintended consequences of our environmental health reporting tool. 

As EnviroWorks could involve the collection of personally identifiable information (PII), including video, voice or images of people and their homes, we knew there could be privacy concerns. As a long-time provider of reporting and civic engagement services, we were confident we could manage this risk effectively (see the end of the blog post for our design principles).

Our main concern with this service was that it could include people-reporting-on-people, meaning that biases and prejudices could play a part in reporting. By making it easier for people to report, we didn’t want to inadvertently increase reports against marginalised, vulnerable, or minority groups. We didn’t want technology to play a part in reflecting or amplifying existing human bias. 

In this blog, we detail our concerns around the ethics of this service, the findings of our research, and the guardrails we put in place to manage risk.

Understanding the risks

Environmental reports, particularly those related to noise and smell complaints, can cause divisions within communities. Reports are often social and moral judgements rather than objective facts – i.e. not just “I hear a noise” but “my neighbour is being inconsiderate or unreasonable”. They can therefore be wrapped up in a person’s opinions and biases. 

As such, marginalised and low income groups are more likely to be the subject of reports about antisocial behaviour (ASB) and environmental health concerns. There is a notable absence of research on who is reported and the consequences of such reporting, though news stories abound where minority groups are reported on for ostensibly routine activities, such as having small social gatherings or playing music. 

A few studies suggest that cities with diverse ethnicities and religions and more deprived cities and regions receive more nuisance complaints. A 2013 University of Glasgow study showed how complaint systems can disproportionately target groups whose presence is viewed as socially undesirable, such as young people. 

According to research by the Housing Ombudsman, most noise reports can be better categorised as daily household noise, rather than being antisocial in nature. This shows how subjective reports can be.

Pursuing EnviroWorks as a democratic function

The issues of subjectivity and discrimination were at the forefront of our minds when developing EnviroWorks. The prospective tool would be people-reporting-on-people, as well as on “things”, adding a type of reporting that is different from our existing street, highway and environment fault reporting service, FixMyStreet. We were concerned that giving people the ability to more easily report certain environmental health issues, like noise or nuisance behaviour, could risk the further marginalisation of the already marginalised groups who are most often the subjects of such reports.

Local authorities have guidance for staff on dealing with environmental health reports fairly, including strict standard operating procedures and enforcement policies. For us, it was vital to ensure that the reporting mechanism itself does not create opportunities for unfair reporting, but rather assists council staff to best ensure fairness in case management. 

Councils have a statutory duty to protect public health and the environment by investigating issues that could impact health or become a nuisance, so people have the right to report and to have their reports addressed.  We knew that, if done well and fairly, a reporting tool could be a useful democratic function. Balancing this duty with the risks, the SocietyWorks team recognised the need for extra care in design, to ensure the service aligns with our aims to help the public sector better serve citizens, without unfairly favouring or excluding any group.

Putting the right guardrails in place

We had a good understanding of the potential consequences of noise reporting, based on a consequence scanning exercise we conducted in 2020. Through an exercise with Hackney Council staff during the development of NoiseWorks (the precursor to EnviroWorks), we were able to look at the positives and negatives from the different viewpoints of council staff, citizens and the wider community. Revisiting this work as we explored the development of EnviroWorks, this exercise helped us to understand what mitigations should be put into place.

As we developed our design principles, we integrated intelligence from desk research into environmental health reporting, including expertise from Freedom in Every Day Life on the current approaches to CPNs. CPNs are often issued in response to environmental and ASB reports and can have a detrimental effect on the subject of the report, such as stress. We followed their guidance, which aims to ensure that powers are used fairly, impartially, and proportionately.

Bringing together the findings from our consequence scanning with best practice from the experts, we solidified our understanding of how best to design a tool that suited the needs of case managers in local authorities, as well as the needs of reporters and report subjects. This process brought us to a set of design principles to act as guardrails and mitigate against risks of harm.

Design principles for EnviroWorks

1. Informal resolution. Recognising that the service is serving a statutory function, we wanted to ensure that people are able to report, but are not encouraged to report. By signposting to Citizens Advice, providing advice on mediation and informal resolution, and providing information on what isn’t a statutory issue, citizens have the information they need to make an informed decision on whether a report is appropriate and necessary. A reduction in reports can reduce unnecessary reporting against minorities and marginalised groups, and reduces the burden on already stretched environmental health teams. This benefits councils, the subjects of the reports, reporters, and has broader benefits for the social fabric of the community.
2. Accountability. In the fully-private, back-end case management system, all actions, decisions and reasoning are documented. This provides a full evidence trail for oversight.
3. Transparency. The case management system prompts council staff to update reporters and people being reported on. It is vital that both sides are updated, with the subjects of reports given rights of appeal information. The system also makes it easy to generate statistics, which allows staff to understand where reports are happening and identify clusters or trends. As our software is open source, a public repository provides publicly accessible information on what types of information is being collected and how it is processed.
4. Proportionality and due process. Prompts in the case management system encourage a problem solving approach. Staff are reminded to give informal warnings, communicate with the person who is the subject of the report, and provide them with the right to appeal. Prompts will be developed alongside the local authority’s own due process. 
5. Objectivity. When issuing formal Community Protection Warning (CPW) or Community Protection Notice (CPN), Officers could be provided with statutory guidance on objectivity from the Home Office and Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (as recommended by Manifesto Club). Complementing the council’s own guidance, this would support staff to engage with reports objectively.
6. Accessibility. As with all SocietyWorks products, EnviroWorks follows high standards of web accessibility. Our digital services are all WCAG 2.2 AA compliant, as per W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative. For example, we use clear language and ensure a simple user interface and provide information on alternative contact points e.g. telephone. EnviroWorks is a Progressive Web App, meaning the user does not need to download an app, but can use it in their browser. This makes it more accessible for people with older devices or wanting to work in a browser.
7. Personal data collection and access minimisation.  Reports are fully private on EnviroWorks. Personal data is subject to strict technical and contractual scope limitation, with data protection agreement clauses strictly scoped to environmental health reporting, data retention and anonymisation policy. We operate on a principle of requiring the least amount of data access necessary to do the job.

As with all of our tools, we will be learning with each new implementation and tailoring the system to meet specific needs of each local authority we work with. We’ll be back with case studies and lessons learned as we have them! 

Are you in need of a better environmental health reporting and case management service?

If you’d like to find out more about EnviroWorks, or any other aspect of the SocietyWorks local government suite, then please contact us through our online form.

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Image: Robin Vintevogel on Unsplash

This blog post was written for techUK’s Social Value Week campaign in April 2025. 

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The Public Services (Social Value) Act 2012 initiated valuable shifts towards integrative procurement processes within Local Government. It encouraged purchasing decisions to be taken from a strategic perspective to deliver as much real value as possible to communities.

When approached purposefully and with the genuine alignment of values, partnerships between the public and private sectors can deliver value well beyond the specific product or service being contracted. Over time, such partnerships can increasingly generate impact across economic, social and environmental priorities.

However, generally speaking, there is still work to do to improve the implementation of social value procurement practices within Local Government to facilitate fairness, extend impact and ensure rigid, quantitative procurement processes do not lock local authorities out of the most socially responsible and valuable opportunities.

Social value as standard, not as an afterthought

As an SME belonging to the long-running civic technology charity mySociety, whose mission is to deliver technology for the public good, we hold a unique position in our understanding and delivery of social value.

From the charity’s perspective, we deliver technology (TheyWorkForYou; WhatDoTheyKnow; Council Climate Action Scorecards; Local Intelligence Hub, FixMyStreet etc.) to empower more people so that collaboratively we can build a fairer, safer future.

Meanwhile, from the commercial perspective, SocietyWorks builds on over 20 years of experience to deliver fairly-priced SaaS products (FixMyStreet Pro, WasteWorks, ApplyWorks, etc.) designed to help build trust between local authorities and residents, a crucial component of civic engagement and flourishing communities. Any profits made are reinvested into the charity to support the ongoing delivery of our charitable services.

In essence, social value is embedded in all that we do, and local authorities and other public sector organisations that choose to work with us unlock unique opportunities to play their part in supporting wider civic improvements across the UK, and even internationally.

On paper, we are exactly the kind of supplier any forward-thinking, technology-driven and socially conscious authority would want to partner with.

The impact of social value and the value of social impact

Despite delivering social value for longer than the Act itself has been in effect, and despite offering support for local economies through initiatives that harness the vast array of skills and specialised knowledge within our organisation, we often find that our internal definition of social value does not match up with that of local authority procurement teams.

Procurement frameworks often prioritise tangible, place-specific outcomes measured strictly in monetary terms, rather than considering broader societal impacts.

While local authorities appreciate working with us due to our values-based approach and our mission-driven ethos, rigid definitions within procurement processes occasionally categorise our charitable initiatives as ‘social impact’, limiting their recognition in formal evaluation criteria.

Another challenge we face as a fully-remote SME belonging to a not-for-profit group, is that we encounter procurement assessments primarily designed for significantly larger, locally-embedded suppliers, where the total absolute value quantified in sterling is the only lens through which social value is scored.

Set up in this way, procurement frameworks only measure social value in monetary terms, excluding the rich qualitative data that would illuminate true social value.

Getting better value for local authorities

By integrating qualitative assessments into procurement evaluations, local authorities could better recognise and reward innovative solutions that deliver significant societal benefits extending beyond immediate geographical boundaries.

Recognising the qualitative impact delivered by social enterprises like ours would ensure greater sustainability and effectiveness of community outcomes.

Ultimately, enhancing procurement frameworks to acknowledge the interconnected nature of social value can lead to stronger partnerships between local authorities and mission-led suppliers, maximising long-term societal benefits.

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Connect with Angela on LinkedIn or drop us a message to talk more about the social value we deliver.

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. 

This blog post has been written by Bekki Leaver, our Head of Product, who shares her thoughts on the potential creation of a Local Government Digital Service. 

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There’s been some chatter around what a ‘Local Government Digital Service’ might look like, what it could offer, how it might contribute to digital services for local authorities and how it could be staffed. As a Government Digital Service (GDS) alumna and current digital service provider for local government, I have opinions on where there could be value here and what is likely to ruffle some feathers.

GDS have had considerable success at delivering tools to support central government (and local government, come to think of it) in building better services. They’ve centralised resource heavy processes others can simply tap into, such as GOV.UK Pay, Notify and the future One Login, to make complicated features easy to add. 

The design system and service communities have gone a long way to helping create accessible, consistent services. But now every department has its own iteration of the design system, because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all compendium of components and patterns, which highlights very well the problem with an alliance of local authorities working on digital services.

Even when authorities share a common goal and have the same internal systems, their approach and configurations can be wildly different

As an example, take FixMyStreet Pro and its integrated street reporting, our flagship product at SocietyWorks. While it could be said we “built it once” and can then ship that product out to whoever might want it, what actually happens is we do considerable customisation and configuration to our product so it can fit within the processes and ways of working within an authority. 

The experiences I’ve had at SocietyWorks clearly exemplify that even when authorities share a common goal and have the same internal systems, their approach and configurations can be wildly different, influenced by service level agreements, other systems or applications, or staff delivering a service.

The institution and its services need to reflect the people whom it serves. What works in a metropolitan city environment won’t work in a rural one

I think it would also be fair to say there’s a sense of personality and identity embedded in local authorities, a sense of pride for the place you live, and even a bit of competition with the neighbours. It’s not the faceless behemoth central government can be perceived as; it needs to be local and relevant to residents. The thought of imposing generic service provision onto these entities feels almost cruel. The institution and its services need to reflect the people whom it serves. What works in a metropolitan city environment won’t work in a rural one.

We all want to achieve the same goals, and regularly come across the same problems, but to solve them in the best way isn’t going to be some great overseer. It’s going to be collaboration on the ground at the most appropriate time. I see this in the partnerships throughout the UK of authorities banding together to solve their problems in smaller, more local ways, and in SocietyWorks’ own User Groups, bringing together those who use our services to learn from each other within a specific remit.

Overall, I’m really impressed with the things I see from these smaller partnerships and alliances, and I’m not convinced a LGDS is needed. Smaller partnerships definitely feel more approachable than a centralised organisation when, as part of an SME, I want to get involved. 

We need to properly establish the problem(s) and context we’re working in. We have regional specific groups, problem specific groups, and publications, communities, and awards to highlight the great work coming out of them. Do we need more channels to come together? I’m not convinced, but I’d absolutely volunteer to get involved in establishing the why, what and how!

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

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Image: charlesdeluvio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections for public sector decision makers and financial leaders

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final thoughts  

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

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

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

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

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Image: Jordan Ladikos