Over the next few months we’re making some major updates to TheyWorkForYou improving our coverage of registers of interests, votes, and the email alerts system.
If you’d like to be updated as things are released, please sign up to our newsletter.
What do you value about TheyWorkForYou and our democracy work?
We want to understand what you value about our work, to better shape our plans. If you’d like to help us out, please take our supporters survey.
March
March is Register of Interests month.
At the start of the month we released a major new report and several new datasets onto TheyWorkForYou as part of our WhoFundsThem project.
We’ve been looking through the MPs Register of Financial Interests with a group of volunteers, and have published what we’ve found along with recommendations for change and what we think we can do next.
You can rewatch the launch event here.
Later in the month, we’ll be adding the Registers of Interests for the UK’s other parliaments to TheyWorkForYou and creating spreadsheet downloads.
April
April is Votes month.
We will be launching our new votes site to provide better resources on understanding parliamentary voting.
This new approach builds on the official data to provide:
- Automated party breakdown analysis and party alignment (“rebelliousness”) stats.
- Quick descriptions of parliamentary dynamics (which side proposed, strength of conflict) powered by a clustering approach.
- Links to motions that clarify what is being voted on (and power some additional analysis of motions)
- Detecting ‘agreements/consents’ when decisions are made without a vote.
- Tools to supplement official data with annotations (by division, or by MP’s vote) and recording of whip reports.
Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.
May
May is Monitoring month.
A major use of TheyWorkForYou is as a political monitoring tool, helping civil society keep up to date with Parliament, and keeping information moving around Parliament and government itself.
We have been working on a set of changes and guidance to make it much easier to use TheyWorkForYou to monitor areas you care about, helping you set up better alerts with a wider range of keywords, and manage a wider range of alerts.
As part of this, we want to improve our coverage of APPGs — building on our earlier lessons about how best to gather information.
Sign up to our mailing list to hear more about when this launches.
June
June is TICTeC!
Our global pro democracy tech/civic tech conference will be held in Mechelen & online on June 10-11th, and we’re excited to share our work with, and learn from, fellow pro-democracy technologists and thinkers from around the world.
Full schedule to be announced soon, but our keynote speakers are:
Learn more about we mean by pro democracy tech, and buy tickets now!
Second half of 2025
In the second half of the year, we’ll be overhauling the WriteToThem experience, with improved guidance, and the addition of questions to help us build a better systematic picture of what’s important to people in different areas, and when writing to different kinds of representatives.
We will also be revisiting TheyWorkForYou’s annotations feature, to explore ways we can make important parliamentary debates more understandable through better glossaries, annotations and explanations, either working alone or in partnership with other organisations.
We can make a difference together
Through TheyWorkForYou and our wider democracy work, we take a practical approach to improving politics in the UK, looking for opportunities to make things better through putting the work in — and where we don’t need to ask permission to succeed.
But to make this happen we need money and support to investigate problems and understand how we can best make a difference. We want to do more to improve the data that exists, and help support new volunteer projects to build better data and services.
If you support us and our work, please consider making a one-off or standing donation. It makes a difference.
If you can’t make a donation now, you can still help by telling us what you value about our work. If you’d like to do this, please take our supporters survey.
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Image: Matt Foxx on Unsplash.
