Francis Irving is a British computer programmer, activist for freedom of information and former CEO of ScraperWiki. Francis Irving developed TortoiseCVS. He co-founded

Public Whip The Public Whip is a parliamentary informatics project that analyses and publishes the voting history of MPs in the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was developed by Francis Irving and Julian Todd following the 18 March 2003 Parliamentary Ap ...

with

Julian Todd Julian Todd is a British computer programmer and activist for freedom of information who works in Liverpool. He was inventor and co-founder of Public Whip with Francis Irving, and also the affiliated TheyWorkForYou website, a project that pars ...

and became a developer of the affiliated

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 Assembl ...

website, a project which parses raw

Hansard ''Hansard'' is the traditional name of the transcripts of parliamentary debates in Britain and many Commonwealth countries. It is named after Thomas Curson Hansard (1776–1833), a London printer and publisher, who was the first official prin ...

data to track how members vote in the UK Parliament. Initially risking prosecution for re-using the raw data which was under Crown copyright, the developers of Public Whip were later successful in getting permission to use it. In 2004, Public Whip was recognised in the New Media awards. In 2008, ''

The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a national British daily broadsheet newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed across the United Kingdom and internationally. It was f ...

'' rated TheyWorkforYou 41st in a list of the 101 most useful websites. Irving together with Matthew Somerville wrote the code for

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 ...

. Irving was also a senior developer of PledgeBank. He collaborated again with

to create 'The Straight Choice', a website (later renamed 'Election Leaflets') that archives election leaflets. He was the Campaign Director of the Save Parliament campaign which opposed the Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill. He was one of two people to suggest the winning idea of a site through which Freedom of Information Act requests could be made in a

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 ...

competition for ideas for public interest websites to build. He was later to become the main developer of the site which was called

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 ...

. Francis has won seven New Statesman awards for websites he has worked on.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Irving, Francis British computer programmers Living people MySociety Year of birth missing (living people)