mySociety is a UK-based 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 open source, so that 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 Steinbergin 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 late 2014, mySociety established a research discipline, hiring Dr Rebecca Rumbul as head of research to look into the efficacy of civic technology across the world. Papers examining the impact of mySociety's own services, those of the global civic tech field, and wider issues pertaining to democracy and transparency in governments can be found at . Since 2015 mySociety has also run an annual conference, The Impacts of Civic Technology Conference, attracting speakers from around the world including Martha Lane Fox, Hollie Russon Gilman, Nanjala Nyabola and Alessandra Orofino. Since 2017, there have been 2 meetings each year, though the in-person March 2020 conference in Reykjavík was cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic and ran as an online conference instead. 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.
WhatDoTheyKnow is a site designed to help people in the United Kingdom 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 boundaries, before displaying elected representatives at all levels of UK government from local councillors to MEPs. Users can send messages to them from the site; responses are then sent directly to the user's email address. WriteToThem is built using the Poplus component WriteIt, built by Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente.
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 and be matched to the correct local authority or representative.
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 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.
Downing Street e-Petitions: mySociety developed the original solution for publishing petitions on the website of the Prime Minister's Office
EveryPolitician: Storing and sharing data on every politician in the world, in structured open data
Pledgebank: Allowed users to make pledges of the format: "I will do x if y number of people agree to do the same".
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. Correspondence was published online. The site ran from 2011 to 2015
ScenicOrNot: a gamification-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 and the beauty of one's surroundings
GroupsNearYou: a map-based application that enabled users to find local community groups in their local area.
