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MySociety
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 went on to simplify and internationalise its code and through the now dormant Poplus project, encouraged others to share open source code that would 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: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tom Steinberg
Tom Steinberg is a nonprofit leader and author, with a career history mainly in public interest technology, and in the profession of grantmaking. He is the co-author of the book 'Modern Grantmaking: A Guide for Funders Who Believe Better is Possible' and is a co-director and founding editor of Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age, an open access education project. He is the founder and a former director of mySociety, a British-based international NGO that develops civic tech tools including TheyWorkForYou, Alaveteli and FixMyStreet. Steinberg worked in the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit from 2001 to 2003. Biography Steinberg co-authored ''Open source methods and their future potential'' which argued that the principles of the open source model could have radical implications for governments, citizens and businesses. ''The Power of Information: An Independent Review'' by Ed Mayo and Tom Steinberg was published in 2007; as was the official government response to it. In Ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WhatDoTheyKnow
WhatDoTheyKnow is a site by mySociety 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. The site acts as a permanent public database archive of FOI requests made through it. Around 15% to 20% of requests to UK Central Government are made through WhatDoTheyKnow.com. Over 45,000 public bodies have been added to the site, mainly by volunteers. More than 800,000 requests have been made using the site and more than 4.5 million people visited it in 2014 WhatDoTheyKnow has been described by The Guardian as "an idiot's guide to making a freedom of information request." The Information Commissioner's Office has stated that it believes "the most up-to-date informal list of all public authorities is held on the website". Information released through the site has ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
EveryPolitician
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 went on to simplify and internationalise its code and through the now dormant Poplus project, encouraged others to share open source code that would 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: ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poplus
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 went on to simplify and internationalise its code and through the now dormant Poplus project, encouraged others to share open source code that would 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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
WriteToThem
WriteToThem is a website by mySociety 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. Unlike many mySociety sites, there is no public element to the correspondence. History The site launched in 2000 as FaxYourMP, allowing users to type a message into the website which would then be sent as a fax to their representative's office. In 2005, it rebranded as WriteToThem, sending messages by email or as faxes to those representatives who did not yet operate an email account. mySociety publish an annual table to show which MPs are the most and least responsive; this is based on th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
TheyWorkForYou
TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website operated by mySociety which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster, as well as the Scottish Parliament, the Senedd and the Northern Ireland Assembly. It also helps create accountability for UK politicians by publishing a complete archive of every word spoken in Parliament, along with a voting record and other details for each MP, past and present. TheyWorkForYou does not publish original content: it scrapes from the official sources, then presents debates and information about representatives in a more accessible version. For example, TheyWorkForYou's version of Hansard may be searched, and each section has its own permalink so that it can be shared easily. The site aggregates content from the Hansard records of the House of Commons, House of Lords, Scottish Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly, along with other publicly available data such as the MPs Register of Members ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
FixMyStreet
FixMyStreet is a free and open-source software framework by mySociety which enables anyone to run a website for aggregating and reporting street problems, similar to FixMyStreet.com. The United Kingdom FixMyStreet inspired similar sites in other countries: in order to prevent the need for people to write code from scratch, mySociety refined the FixMyStreet open source codebase, making it more generic, easier to install, and able to handle different maps, including OpenStreetMap OpenStreetMap (OSM) is a free, open geographic database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveys, trace from aerial imagery and also import from other freely licensed g .... This process was kickstarted when the NUUG funded the development of a Norwegian version FiksGataMi. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alaveteli
Alaveteli is free and open source software by mySociety to help citizens write Freedom of Information requests and automatically publish any responses. Alaveteli is described as "a project to create a free, standard, internationalised platform for making Freedom of Information (FOI) requests". Alaveteli is funded by the Open Society Institute and the Hivos Foundation. It started life as the software running WhatDoTheyKnow, a UK site that publishes responses to FOI requests. The original WhatDoTheyKnow code was written primarily by Francis Irving while working for mySociety. Alaveteli is named after Alaveteli in Finland where Anders Chydenius who was an early campaigner for Freedom of Information worked as a curate. Alaveteli is the name for the software rather than a public facing website or brand. People who run sites on the Alaveteli platform are also invited to become part of a community, with support and tips shared via a message board, and regular conferences Alternativ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
UK Citizens Online Democracy
UK Citizens Online Democracy (or UKCOD) is a registered charity in England and Wales, number 1076346. At present, UKCOD's main activity is running the mySociety project. mySociety builds websites which give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. It also aims to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives. History Early history UKCOD was founded in 1996. This initiative was not associated with any political party although politicians and citizens of all political persuasions were invited to participate, and this has remained true of all UKCOD's projects. UKCOD’s first project, commissioned by the EU office of the European Parliament, was to host and manage an online discussion on whether Britain should join the European Monetary Union. UKCOD was also heavily involved in research work contributing to the Freedom of Information Act 2000, including the H ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Accountability
Accountability, in terms of ethics and governance, is equated with answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and the expectation of account-giving. As in an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in the public sector, nonprofit and private ( corporate) and individual contexts. In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance, and implementation within the scope of the role or employment position and encompassing the obligation to report, explain and be answerable for resulting consequences. In governance, accountability has expanded beyond the basic definition of "being called to account for one's actions". It is frequently described as an account giving relationship between individuals, e.g. "A is accountable to B when A is obliged to inform B about A's (past or future) actions and decisions, to justify them, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
BBC News Online
BBC News Online is the website of BBC News, the division of the BBC responsible for newsgathering and production. It is one of the most popular news websites, with 1.2 billion website visits in April 2021, as well as being used by 60% of the UK's internet users for news. The website contains international news coverage, as well as British, entertainment, science, and political news. Many reports are accompanied by audio and video from the BBC's television and radio news services, while the latest TV and radio bulletins are also available to view or listen to on the site together with other current affairs programmes. BBC News Online is closely linked to its sister department website, that of BBC Sport. Both sites follow similar layout and content options and respective journalists work alongside each other. Location information provided by users is also shared with the website of BBC Weather to provide local content. From 1998 to 2001 the site was named best news website at t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Assembly For Wales
The Senedd (; ), officially known as the Welsh Parliament in English and () in Welsh, is the devolved, unicameral legislature of Wales. A democratically elected body, it makes laws for Wales, agrees certain taxes and scrutinises the Welsh Government. It is a bilingual institution, with both Welsh and English being the official languages of its business. From its creation in May 1999 until May 2020, the Senedd was known as the National Assembly for Wales ( cy, Cynulliad Cenedlaethol Cymru, lang, link=no). The Senedd comprises 60 members who are known as Members of the Senedd (), abbreviated as "MS" (). Since 2011, members are elected for a five-year term of office under an additional member system, in which 40 MSs represent smaller geographical divisions known as "constituencies" and are elected by first-past-the-post voting, and 20 MSs represent five "electoral regions" using the D'Hondt method of proportional representation. Typically, the largest party in the Senedd fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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