mySociety blog » archive for 2004

mySociety is looking for third and final core developer. We’re looking for a usability obsessed PHP developer - does this sound like anyone you know? Here’s the spec.

PledgeBank is mySociety’s second project. The purpose of PledgeBank is to get people past a barrier which strikes down endless good plans before they can are carried out - the fear of acting alone. It allows anyone to say “I’ll do X if other people also do X”, for example “I’ll write to my councillor if 5 other people on my street do the same”. However, there is no scale to big or too small, it could equally be used to say “I’ll start recycling if 10,000 other people in Britain also start”.

Pledgebank developement will start soon, and we are now looking for partner organisations, large and small, who would like to use Pledgebank when it launches. If you run a charity or other organisations, or if you know anyone who does, please do email us.

We’ve just launched a testing version of FaxYourRepresentative. This is not a working site and not even a beta - because you cannot email representatives at the moment. What you can do, though, is practice sending messages - they’ll just be routed back to your own inbox so you can see that they’ve gone through.

We want people to try postcodes, give us feedback, and volunteer to help with the further development. FaxYourMP remains online and will do for some considerable time yet.

After many months of languishing un-updated, on the most 1996 of software platforms, mySociety.org has been given a healthy boost by the tireless Francis Irving. He’s installed the open source blogging/CMS system WordPress, converted lots of the pre-existing data, and most important, given me a login. From now on mySociety.org should be a living breathing page again, full of tasty nuggets about mySociety and its Launch Projects.

FaxYourRepresentative is on the cusp of being ready to throw open to the development community - the basic site is all there and working, but we have to work on some security stuff before we can open it up for the addition of bells, whistles and user-interface wizardry.

We’ve just got our first proper server all to ourselves, and Chris Lightfoot and Francis Irving are moving existing stuff over to it. The main news, though, it that you’re invited to our…

We’re hosting a three way event with Public Whip and TheyWorkForYou. We’re buying the drinks, so come to our October Event

mySociety is delighted to announce that we are being awarded £250,000 by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM), in response to a bid we made partnership with West Sussex County Council just before Christmas. The funding is part of something called the e-innovations fund, a pot of government cash set aside to stimulate useful and innovative new online projects - in otherwords exactly the type of thing mySociety was set up to build.

Thanks to the enthusiasm and talent surrounding the project, plus the quality of ideas you have all supplied, they’ve decided to include us in their list of supported projects.

We don’t have the an enormous amount of detail about the funding yet, but the bottom line appears to be that it will enable us to build our launch projects, as submitted and vetted by you all before Christmas.

As I said, we don’t have a huge amount more info about this important development, but if you have questions, please either email them or leave them on this page of our wiki. We’ll then do our best to answer them as best we can, on that same page.

More news when we get it…

Mysociety is proud to announce the launch of DowningStreetSays.com, a site where you can leave and read comments on Number 10’s press briefings.

This isn’t a full mySociety project, and was thrown together by some amazing volunteers over the last few days. We hope that in a small way it helps to improve the quality of debate at the heart of government, by letting the public at government without first passing through the lens of the mass media.

Let us know what you think!