1. Innovations in Climate Tech: finding partnerships

    Yesterday was the second Innovations in Climate Tech event. People from councils and organisations came along and discussed all kinds of projects and ideas.

    The key question? What they might do with a small injection of money designed to kickstart digitally based, local climate related projects.

    If you’re ready to go ahead with your application, start here. Otherwise, read on.

    Projects beginning to form

    You can see all the ideas that were floated in our first meetup on our Padlet, but here are a few of the projects that emerged and appeared to be gaining the most momentum yesterday. 

    • A national knowledge sharing tool This project would seek to create a comprehensive list of what has been done digitally around Climate Adaptation, showcasing lessons learned, successes and failures. The instigators could also develop playbooks, open source tools and a knowledge sharing forum for councils and citizens. Notes here.
    • Community resilience to extreme weather events A plan to bring people together to embed community resilience, sharing information about flood risk, how to make your home more able to cope with the effect of climate change and extreme weather events. There was also a suggestion of broadening the existing community warden role to encompass community resilience issues. Notes here.
    • Adaptation gardens Showing people how they could garden in a different way to adapt to a changing climate: eg with drought resistant plants, water conservation methods, pollinator friendly plants and other eco-friendly methods. Notes here.
    • Digital toolkit for events Putting together a digital toolkit that people can use for climate-related community events, ensuring it’s accessible and reusable in lots of different situations. Notes here.

    Seen a project that you’d like to try too?

    Maybe you’re a council officer who thinks one of the ideas above would fit well within your constituency.

    Or maybe you’re a community group that could help shape the project and replicate it in your area.

    There may be an opportunity to join up with other folks working on the idea, and perhaps expanding their plans into more than one region. 

    Feel free to fill in our form and indicate that you are open to working with others on one of the existing ideas. 

    What you should know about the grants

    • You do not have to have attended either of the prior sessions to bid, but please do give consideration to what we are looking for: small, locally-based trials of projects that work with a local council at the intersection of democracy (broadly defined) and climate. A local authority must be involved in the project.
    • Need to find a partner council? Let us know and we’ll shout out on Twitter for you.
    • This is seed funding, designed to allow for testing, planning and trying new approaches; things that aren’t possible with restricted grants. So don’t worry about having a detailed plan — your application can be short and simple.
    • Applications close at 23:59 on Monday 31st October 2022. We aim to have made our decisions and awarded the grants by Monday 7th November 2022.
    • Funding will cover the period until March 31 2023  — though your project may continue onwards for as long as you like. We’ll hold a wrap-up event in spring showcasing the work to date.

    Apply now

    Ready to bid? Apply here.

  2. First Round Shortlist

    The response so far to our Call For Proposals has been astonishing. We had more submissions in the first round alone than we suspected we might get over the whole period, and there were so many good ideas that we’ve had a hard time narrowing them down. However, we’re finally able to release our shortlist of what we think could be the most promising projects from the first round.

    When we launched the call, we knew we were looking for sites that were “mySociety-esque”. We didn’t set out any explicit guidelines for what that meant, but based on certain patterns in the submissions so far, we can enumerate some of what we’re looking for. In general we prefer sites which:

    • don’t require significant ongoing manual work.
      • The primary focus of the project should be in setting up clever technological solutions to automate the ongoing maintenance. After launch, it should be possible for the site to be run almost entirely by its users. This rules out, for example, most of the “Politifact” types of sites, which although certainly very useful and important, require considerable significant ongoing research to avoid becoming a ghost town.
    • don’t require government buy-in or legislative change to be successful.
      • A site to visualise Parliamentarians’ travel expenses, for example, is unlikely to be successful unless there is already a mechanism for the release of the underlying data.
    • don’t need a significant amount of users before becoming useful.
      • Sites that function well with even a handful of users and are able to build up slowly are usually more effective and have significantly less risk than ones that are a failure unless they reach a certain critical mass.
    • aren’t so trivial they shouldn’t need our help
      • If a site could be built using something like WordPress or Drupal with very little additional customisation, it’s likely not a good fit for this program, even if it might otherwise be a worthwhile project.

    We also prefer ideas that are focussed and practical with a clear understanding of the technological requirements, rather than those which talk solely in buzzwords and seem to expect unspecified technical wizardry to magically solve big social problems.


    The Shortlist

    A number of the most promising submissions from this round are for Parliamentary informatics sites, focusing on the activities of politicians and parties in government. One of the most important stories in the history of mySociety involved taking an already started, but non-funded and unsustainable project called TheyWorkForYou, and growing it into what it is today. So in addition to funding one or more similar sites to do likewise in their own countries, we are hoping that we will also be able to use this opportunity to help create something slightly bigger that can help make it easier for others to build this sort of site in future. This is unlikely to be as simple as a common technology platform, but we hope that if we can foster some degree of joint effort in this area we can help bootstrap a community of interested parties who can work together. The primary candidates we’re considering in this area from the first round are:

    We are also very interested in projects aiming to providing increased transparency into government spending. In this area, however, it’s not enough to simply build some fancy reports on currently existing data (useful as that might be). To meet our criteria, it’s important to build something that can run with minimal human involvement: regularly spidering official datasources, converting them into usable formats, and updating the site with the results. Four proposals from the first round particularly impressed us in this regard, and we want to investigate further with each of them as to which could work best:

    Finally, we have shortlisted one proposal in a narrower version than was submitted:

    The full project here wasn’t a clear fit with our preferences: it’s a one-off site, rather than something with a longer lifespan, and a significant part of building something this is in the work of creating the questions to ask the candidates, rather than creating the site itself. However, after discussion with the submitting organisation, we believe there could be value in creating a more generic questionnaire-to-website tool that could be used in building not only this site, but also similar sites in future, and in other countries. In its basic form, this tool would take a list of candidates’ contact details, and a series of questions, generate both a web-based and offline interactive-PDF based version of the questionnaire, send these to the candidates, with automatic follow-up at regular intervals to candidates who have not yet answered, and then automatically build a website from responses in real-time as they come in.


    We’ll be following up with these projects over the next week or two, but in the meantime we’d love your comments on them too. These certainly weren’t the only plausible proposals from the first round — some of the others are strong contenders we’ll be reconsidering in the later rounds. And if anyone wants to resubmit any of their proposals, adjusted based on anything above, we’re perfectly happy with that. And with the final deadline for submissions coming up, perhaps some of this might give you some last minute ideas!

  3. First round almost complete

    The first deadline for our Call For Proposals is approaching this weekend, and we’ve had suggestions from almost every eligible country. The only ones missing so far are Albania, Lithuania, Montenegro, and Serbia. Let’s see if we can get at least one from each of those in the next couple of days!

  4. Call for Proposals launched

    mySociety has teamed up with the Open Society Institute (OSI) to help people in Central and Eastern Europe build transparency and democracy websites suited to the needs and realities of their countries. In the UK mySociety runs a variety of sites such as TheyWorkForYou.com, FixMyStreet.com, and our Freedom of Information website WhatDoTheyKnow.com. As a result of running these, we know that there are lots of people outside the UK longing to build similar sites that help increase transparency and accountability in their own government institutions.

    CEEsm

    derived from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern-Europe-map2.svg

    We have now launched a Call for Proposals for participants in Central and Eastern Europe, similar to the one we recently ran in the UK. The big difference is that this time we’re not looking for projects that we will build. We’re looking for projects you want to build, but that for lack of funds or lack of the right skills, you can’t get started yourself, so could use our help.

    Over the coming months we will be selecting a series of projects to fund and mentor — up to ten in total. At each of four monthly intervals, starting November 15th, OSI and mySociety will convene to consider and choose from the proposals submitted so far. To help us understand project strengths and weaknesses in the given local or national context we can draw on the knowledge of regional OSI staff, but we’ll also be paying very close attention to the public comments on the submissions — so please join in the discussion. The shortlisted projects, and the people behind them, will then undergo a formal vetting process, during which project funding details will be requested (but we can help you with that if you’ve no previous experience of budget planning). mySociety will work closely with the winning projects to develop specifications for the launch version of the tool, advise on technology choices and usability decisions, help hire suitable technical talent if needed, and help connect winners to the nascent but growing international network of transparency and accountability website builders.

    It’s crucial to note that this call isn’t solely for existing NGOs: the process is absolutely open to submissions from individuals or groups with no prior direct experience of working in the transparency and accountability sector. Experience from around the world suggests that some of the best websites in this field have been set up by individuals with no specific NGO background, such as New Zealand’s TheyWorkForYou.co.nz. Others are run by NGOs with strong track records — we will not discriminate either way. We will, however, look most favourably on applicants who already have access to the advanced programming skills required to build sites like this.

    The criteria are simple, though demanding:

    1. The projects have to generate some kind of meaningful transparency, accountability, or democratic empowerment of another kind.
    2. The projects must seize the unique benefits that the Internet brings with it, such as scalability, two way communication, easy data analysis and so on.

    Projects will be required to follow Free/Open Source licensing and development practices and to adhere to appropriate Open Data principles. Projects making use of mobile communications tools will also be considered. And although projects will obviously be delivered in appropriate local languages, proposals through this website must be in English.

    If you are based in one of the eligible countries and have an idea for a project (or, even better, more than one!), please submit a proposal. Even if you don’t, please help us spread the word! Tell everyone you know about this. Blog it. Link to it on Twitter or Facebook. Go to local events and make sure everyone knows about it (or ask us to come talk about it) — just talking about it could be the difference between someone building a KildareStreet or an OpenCongress in your country and them never getting started. For more ideas on how to help, please join our mailing list, or follow us on Twitter.

  5. Coming soon…

    Within the next couple of weeks we’ll be launching a joint project with the Open Society Institute Information Program to help individuals and organizations in Central and Eastern Europe use the Internet to increase transparency and accountability in their countries by building mySociety-esque websites.

    If you would like to be informed when it launches, then subscribe to our mailing list (using the box to the side), follow us on Twitter, subscribe to our RSS feed, or just keep checking back here!