mySociety is built on volunteers.

Some of them are super powered, like Tim who works on PledgeBank. Tim is obsessed with translation, he coordinates an international team of volunteers who keep the site running in a dozen languages. Speak another language? Help him out.

Other volunteers are less elite. Take Sally. She has matched up one piece of Parliamentary video on TheyWorkForYou to one piece of debate text, and never came back. It took her about a minute. But there are dozens of Sally’s, and together they change the world. You can be one too (shhh!
don’t let yourself get addicted).

So, I want to volunteer, but it just seems too dratted hard and intimidating!

There are some straightforward things that you can just do. For example put up a FixMyStreet poster on your local noticeboard or at your place of work.

But you’re right, for more involved things it is hard. We want to make it easier, and we need your help. If you can, please be persistent, and self motivated - start doing things, and pester us lots. We’d like creative ideas for how we can help volunteers more.

Use the following resources and contact methods to get going.

• Join our low traffic email list for people who are involved in mySociety. It’s well worth asking questions there, so lots of people can help answer them.
• Contact us, and arrange a phone call, or to meet up (we have staff and volutneers scattered all over the UK, and indeed the world!).
• If you’re a computer programmer, you might like to know that all our source code is open source. You can browse or download it here. We’re not going to pretend it is easy to set up - just have a go, and ask lots of questions on the mailing list to get it working on your own machine.

Give me more ideas about how I could get involved in mySociety!

Duncan cares about people being able to find out about local planning applications. He’s also a computer programmer, and has added new local authorities to our site PlanningAlerts. If you can weave code, you can write a screen scraper for somewhere near you.

James and Amandeep volunteer as trustees (we’re a charity). They fill in VAT returns, and register corporate structures. That’s true dedication. They, along with other trustees and board members, provide invaluable advice, direction and contacts. If you’re a businessy person, you can read more about the charity and finances behind mySociety.

Alex, John, Tony and Adam seem to me to live and breathe Freedom of Information. They handle all the administration of our contact us.

More more! What else could I do?

For more ideas about things you could do, you could contact us, chat to us, get involved in the mailing list, on IRC, meet up with us

But better, find things that you can fix that annoy you. Whether it is something bad about our websites, a marketing opportunity we haven’t ceased, or something about how mySociety works or is run. We’re an open organisation, and if you have a goal and you push, you can make it happen.