mySociety is a UK-based

registered charity A charitable organization or charity is an organization whose primary objectives are philanthropy and social well-being (e.g. educational, Religion, religious or other activities serving the public interest or common good). The legal definitio ...

, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were

open source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

, so that the code could be (and soon was) redeployed in other countries.

History

mySociety was founded by Tom Steinberg in September 2003, and started activity after receiving a £250,000 grant in September 2004. Steinberg says that it was inspired by a collaboration with his then-flatmate James Crabtree which spawned Crabtree's article "Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracy". mySociety went on to simplify and internationalise its code and through the now dormant

Poplus mySociety is a UK-based Charitable organisation, registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were ...

project, encouraged others to share open source code that would minimise the amount of duplication in civic tech coding. Like many non-profits, mySociety sustains itself with a mixture of grant funding and commercial work, providing software and development services to local government and other organisations. In March 2015, Steinberg announced his decision to stand down as executive director of mySociety. In July of that year, Mark Cridge became the organisation's new CEO.

Projects

TheyWorkForYou TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assem ...

is a parliamentary monitoring website which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in

Westminster Westminster is the main settlement of the City of Westminster in Central London, Central London, England. It extends from the River Thames to Oxford Street and has many famous landmarks, including the Palace of Westminster, Buckingham Palace, ...

as well as

Scottish Parliament The Scottish Parliament ( ; ) is the Devolution in the United Kingdom, devolved, unicameral legislature of Scotland. It is located in the Holyrood, Edinburgh, Holyrood area of Edinburgh, and is frequently referred to by the metonym 'Holyrood'. ...

, the

Welsh Assembly The Senedd ( ; ), officially known as the Welsh Parliament in English and () in Welsh, is the devolved, unicameral legislature of Wales. A democratically elected body, Its role is to scrutinise the Welsh Government and legislate on devolve ...

and the

Northern Ireland Assembly The Northern Ireland Assembly (; ), often referred to by the metonym ''Stormont'', is the devolved unicameral legislature of Northern Ireland. It has power to legislate in a wide range of areas that are not explicitly reserved to the Parliam ...

. It also helps create accountability for UK politicians by publishing a complete archive of every word spoken in

Parliament In modern politics and history, a parliament is a legislative body of government. Generally, a modern parliament has three functions: Representation (politics), representing the Election#Suffrage, electorate, making laws, and overseeing ...

, along with a voting record and other details for each MP, past and present. * FixMyStreet platform is

free and open source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software available under a Software license, license that grants users the right to use, modify, and distribute the software modified or not to everyone free of charge. FOSS is an inclusive umbrella term ...

which enables anyone to run a map based website and app that helps people inform their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as potholes, broken

streetlamp A street light, light pole, lamp pole, lamppost, streetlamp, light standard, or lamp standard is a raised source of light on the edge of a road or path. Similar lights may be found on a railway platform. When urban electric power distribution b ...

s, etc. The UK version is FixMyStreet.com. mySociety also provide FixMyStreet as a report making system for several local and transport authorities in the UK, including TfL. * WhatDoTheyKnow is a site designed to help people in the

United Kingdom The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Northwestern Europe, off the coast of European mainland, the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotlan ...

make Freedom of Information requests. It publishes both the requests and the authorities’ responses online, with the aim of making information available to all, and of removing the need for multiple people to make the same requests. By 2011, a significant proportion of requests, around 15%, to UK central government were being made through the site; more recently, that's still the case, with a little over 15% of requests to audited bodies and around 20% of those to ministerial departments being sent through the service. * Alaveteli is free and open source software to help citizens write Freedom of Information requests and automatically publish any responses. The UK version is WhatDoTheyKnow. * WriteToThem is a website which allows UK citizens to contact their elected representatives. Users do not need to know their representatives’ names: instead, using the mySociety software MapIt, the site matches their postcode to its various

constituency An electoral (congressional, legislative, etc.) district, sometimes called a constituency, riding, or ward, is a geographical portion of a political unit, such as a country, state or province, city, or administrative region, created to provi ...

boundaries, before displaying elected representatives at all levels of UK government from local councillors to

MEPs A member of the European Parliament (MEP) is a person who has been elected to serve as a popular representative in the European Parliament. When the European Parliament (then known as the Common Assembly of the European Coal and Steel Comm ...

. Users can send messages to them from the site; responses are then sent directly to the user's

email address An email address identifies an email box to which messages are delivered. While early messaging systems used a variety of formats for addressing, today, email addresses follow a set of specific rules originally standardized by the Internet Enginee ...

. * SayIt: software for publishing transcripts of debates (e.g. from parliaments, court proceedings and meetings). * MapIt: software for matching a geographical point with its legislative boundaries. MapIt underlies several mySociety websites such as FixMyStreet and WriteToThem, where it allows for a user to input a

postcode A postal code (also known locally in various English-speaking countries throughout the world as a postcode, post code, PIN or ZIP Code) is a series of letters or numerical digit, digits or both, sometimes including spaces or punctuation, inclu ...

and be matched to the correct

local authority Local government is a generic term for the lowest tiers of governance or public administration within a particular sovereign state. Local governments typically constitute a subdivision of a higher-level political or administrative unit, such a ...

or representative. * Gaze: a

gazetteer A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or wikt:directory, directory used in conjunction with a map or atlas.Aurousseau, 61. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup, social statistics and physical features of a co ...

web service A web service (WS) is either: * a service offered by an electronic device to another electronic device, communicating with each other via the Internet, or * a server running on a computer device, listening for requests at a particular port over a n ...

Discontinued or passed to new owners

* Poplus was an international federation of organisations who benefitted through the sharing of civic code and online technologies. It was set up in April 2014 by mySociety in collaboration with Chilean

e-democracy E-democracy (a blend of the terms Electronic publishing, electronic and democracy), also known as digital democracy or Internet democracy, uses information and communication technology (ICT) in politics, political and governance processes. The ...

organisation Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente and encouraged the development of free, open source civic 'blocks' of software, which it termed 'Components', intended to make it easier for people to build civic tech tools. In 2014 Nominet awarded Poplus a place in the Nominet Trust 100. Poplus ceased being maintained in 2016. * Mapumental was free and open source software for displaying journeys in terms of how long they take, rather than by distance, a technique also known as isochrone or

geospatial Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also call ...

mapping. It was withdrawn in 2020. * Pombola was free open source software for running a parliamentary monitoring website inspired by TheyWorkForYou. While it is still available, it is no longer being actively maintained. * Downing Street e-Petitions: mySociety developed the original solution for publishing

petition A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer called supplication. In the colloquial sense, a petition is a document addressed to an officia ...

s on the website of the

Prime Minister A prime minister or chief of cabinet is the head of the cabinet and the leader of the ministers in the executive branch of government, often in a parliamentary or semi-presidential system. A prime minister is not the head of state, but r ...

's Office. In 2011 the system was replaced with the government's own development. * EveryPolitician: a project that ran from 2015 to 2019, with the aim of storing and sharing data on every politician in the world, in structured

open data Open data are data that are openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shareable by anyone for any purpose. Open data are generally licensed under an open license. The goals of the open data movement are similar to those of other "open(-so ...

* Pledgebank: Allowed users to make pledges of the format: "I will do x if y number of people agree to do the same". Now dormant, with archives still browsable. * HassleMe: a website that sends reminders sporadically, now run independently of mySociety * HearFromYourMP: a site encouraging MPs to email their constituents, closed May 2015 * FixMyTransport: a site in the model of FixMyStreet for contacting any transport operator in Britain about problems with

public transport Public transport (also known as public transit, mass transit, or simply transit) are forms of transport available to the general public. It typically uses a fixed schedule, route and charges a fixed fare. There is no rigid definition of whic ...

. Correspondence was published online. The site ran from 2011 to 2015 and has now been frozen, though archives are still browsable. * PopIt: Storage of

politicians A politician is a person who participates in policy-making processes, usually holding an elective position in government. Politicians represent the people, make decisions, and influence the formulation of public policy. The roles or duties tha ...

* ScenicOrNot: a

gamification Gamification is the process of enhancing systems, services, organisations and activities through the integration of game design elements and principles in non-game contexts. The goal is to increase user engagement, motivation, competition and ...

-powered site which invites users to rate photographs according to their ‘scenicness’. The results fed into Mapumental. In 2015 ScenicOrNot was passed over to the Warwick Business School where it is being used to track the correlation between

health Health has a variety of definitions, which have been used for different purposes over time. In general, it refers to physical and emotional well-being, especially that associated with normal functioning of the human body, absent of disease, p ...

and the beauty of one's surroundings. * GroupsNearYou: a map-based application that enabled users to find local community groups in their local area. * NotApathetic: a site where people who planned not to vote in the

2005 United Kingdom general election The 2005 United Kingdom general election was held on Thursday 5 May 2005, to elect List of MPs elected in the 2005 United Kingdom general election, 646 members to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, House of Commons. The governing Labo ...

could explain why. * Placeopedia: an online

consisting of a mashup of

Google Maps Google Maps is a web mapping platform and consumer application offered by Google. It offers satellite imagery, aerial photography, street maps, 360° interactive panorama, interactive panoramic views of streets (Google Street View, Street View ...

and the

English Wikipedia The English Wikipedia is the primary English-language edition of Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. It was created by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger on 15 January 2001, as Wikipedia's first edition. English Wikipedia is hosted alongside o ...

. * Democracy Club: an election information project, now a separate company.My Society: Democracy Club
/ref>

References

External links

* * {{EW charity, 1076346, mySociety
Freedom of Information: Going beyond the scoop
Journalism.co.uk Companies based in the London Borough of Ealing Online companies of the United Kingdom Charities based in London Non-profit technology Politics and technology Crowdsourcing E-democracy Freedom of information activists Social networking services Open government

History

Projects

Discontinued or passed to new owners

See also

References

External links