mySociety is a charitable project, based in the UK but working internationally where appropriate, which aims to build websites to give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives whilst also, through demonstration, teaching the public and voluntary sectors the most efficient ways to use the internet to improve people’s lives. mySociety represents the crystallization of a lot of widely shared thoughts and concerns about the problems facing democracy, government and technology in the UK at the start of the 21st century.

In 2004, we launched TheyWorkForYou.com, which provides a searchable, annotatable version of what is said in the British parliament, as well as useful pages providing clear, non-biased information on a range of different measures of activities by MPs. February 2005 saw us relaunch FaxYourMP.com (made by some of the directors of mySociety some years earlier) as WriteToThem.com to support all representatives elected by the British people, from local authorities to members of the European Parliament. We then launched NotApathetic.com to allow people to explain why they weren’t going to vote in the May 2005 general election. June 2005 saw Pledge Bank, which aims to solve the “prisoner's dilemma”, allowing people to promise “I will do something, if a certain number of people will help me do it”. In November 2005, we launched HearFromYourMP.com, which allows MPs easily to e-mail interested constituents, with messages archived and commentable online. More recently, November 2006 saw us build an e-petitions engine for 10 Downing Street and March 2007 saw us launch Neighbourhood Fix-It, a mapsbased site for people to notify their council of problems such as potholes and faulty streetlights.

mySociety (UK). The core team consists of Tom Steinberg, the executive director, and developers Chris Lightfoot, who recently passed away, Francis Irving and Matthew Somerville, who have more recently been joined by Louise Crow and Keith Garrett, a system administrator.We are also helped out by a team of volunteers, notably including Tim Morley, Etienne Pollard and Sam Smith. Our board of directors includes Tom ex officio, as well as four others (Owen Blacker, Mike Bracken, James Cronin and Amandeep Rehlon).