PledgeBank
mySociety logo
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| Motto | We make websites that empower citizens worldwide |
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| Founded | 2003 |
| Founder | Tom Steinberg |
| Focus | Government transparency, civic technologies, Freedom of Information, citizen empowerment, open source |
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| Products | TheyWorkForYou, WriteToThem, WhatDoTheyKnow, FixMyStreet, Pombola, Alaveteli, EveryPolitician, SayIt, Mapumental & more |
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CEO
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Mark Cridge |
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Employees
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25 |
| Website | www |
mySociety is an e-democracy project of the UK-based registered charity named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, as those tools were open source, the code could be and soon was redeployed in other countries.
mySociety’s more recent mission has been to simplify and internationalise its code to make it easier for people all over the world to run citizen-empowering websites. Additionally, through the Poplus project, it hopes to encourage others to share open source code that will 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.
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".
In March 2015, Steinberg announced his decision to stand down as the director of mySociety. In July of that year, Mark Cridge became the organisation’s new CEO.
Poplus is an international federation of organisations who benefit through the sharing of civic code and online technologies. It was set up in April 2014 by mySociety in collaboration with Chilean e-democracy organisation Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente.
Poplus encourages the development of free, open source civic 'blocks' of software, which it terms 'Components'. These are intended to save time for anyone making one of the classic civic tech tools for parliamentary monitoring, accountability, transparency, et cetera.
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Wikipedia