mySociety

mySociety is an e-democracy project of the UK-based registered charity named UK Citizens Online Democracy, that aims to build "socially focussed tools with offline impacts". It was founded by Tom Steinberg in September 2003, and started activity after receiving a £250,000 grant in September 2004. Steinberg says that mySociety was inspired by a collaboration with his then-flatmate James Crabtree which spawned Crabtree's article "Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracy".

Projects

mySociety projects include:

• Downing Street e-Petitions — petitions are collated on the website of the Prime Minister's Office.
• FixMyStreet — a map based application that helps people inform their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as broken streetlamps etc.
• Gaze — a gazetteer web service
• GroupsNearYou — a map-based application to find local community groups in your area
• Hassleme — Because your mother can't remind you of everything, a website that sends reminders sporadically.
• HearFromYourMP — a site encouraging MPs to email their constituents.
• MapIt - maps postcodes and points to current or past administrative area information and polygons for all the United Kingdom.
• Mapumental — with support from Channel4ip this project shows accessibility from any location in Great Britain using public transport.
• Notapathetic.com — a site about people who planned not to vote in the United Kingdom general election, 2005.
• Placeopedia — an online gazetteer that is a mashup of Google Maps and the English Wikipedia.
• PledgeBank — runs pledges on all topics, of the form: "I will do x if y people agree to do the same."
• TheyWorkForYou — tracks speeches and activities of Members of Parliament, including presenting an accessible version of Hansard
• Travel-time maps — maps showing how long it takes to travel on public transport to a given destination, expanded in 2007.
• WhatDoTheyKnow — a site designed to help people find out (through Freedom of Information requests) what the British government and public services are doing. The site receives over 30,000 unique visitors a week.
• WriteToThem.com — provides contact details for elected representatives at all levels of UK government, and users can send messages to them directly from the site (formerly FaxYourMP).

In response to the EU Directive on Reuse of Public Sector Information 2005, the UK government created an Office of Public Sector Information to promote public sector information reuse. OPSI now runs a government data unlocking service to help people find and reuse government data with licensing or format restrictions.

In March 2006 The Guardian started a "Free our Data" campaign, which got INSPIRE a proposal for free open geodata, passed into EU law.

In April 2007, Cabinet Office Minister Hilary Armstrong commissioned Ed Mayo and mySociety director Tom Steinberg to draft a "Power of Information Review" on how the government could serve the public's information needs better. The resulting report led Cabinet Minister Tom Watson, MP to create a Power of Information Task Force. They launched the ShowUsABetterWay competition to award £20,000 to the best application reusing public government data.

See also

• Infrastructure for Spatial Information in the European Community
• Chris Lightfoot
• Public Whip

External links

• mySociety website
• UK Citizens' Online Democracy, the charity that owns mySociety
• UK Citizens Online Democracy, Registered Charity no. 1076346 at the Charity Commission