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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. History 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: a new agenda for e-democracy". 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 l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poplus
mySociety is a UK-based Charitable organisation, 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. History 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: a new agenda for e-democracy". 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 technology, civic tech coding. Like many nonprofit organization, non-profits, mySociety sustains itself with a mixture of grant funding and comm ... [...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 in the United Kingdom, 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 websit ... [...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 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 May 2010, it was announced that Steinberg would be part of the UK Government's new Transparency Board, which was to be established to promote "greater transparency across Government". He resigned in the second quarter of 2012. S ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Civic Technology
Civic technology, or civic tech, is the idea of using technology to enhance the relationship between people and government with software for communications, decision-making, service delivery, and political process. It includes information and communications technology supporting government with software built by community-led teams of volunteers, nonprofits, consultants, and private companies as well as embedded tech teams working within government. Definition Civic technology refers to the use of technology to enhance the relationship between citizens and their government. There are four different types of e-government services, and civic technology falls within the category of government-to-citizen (G2C). The other categories include government-to-business (G2B), government-to-government (G2G), and government-to-employees (G2E). A 2013 report from the Knight Foundation, an American non-profit, attempts to map different focuses within the civic technology space. It broadly categor ... [...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 Altern ... [...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 (abbreviated OSM) is a free, Open Database License, open geographic database, map database updated and maintained by a community of volunteers via open collaboration. Contributors collect data from surveying, surveys, trace from Ae .... This process was kickstarted when the NUUG funded the development of a Norwegian version FiksGataMi. [...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 MySociety#poplus components, MapIt, the site matches their postcode to its various Electoral district, constituency boundaries, before displaying elected representatives at all levels of UK government from Councillor, local councillors to Member of the European Parliament, 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 pub ... [...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 Hav ... [...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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parliament Of Northern Ireland
The Parliament of Northern Ireland was the home rule legislature of Northern Ireland, created under the Government of Ireland Act 1920, which sat from 7 June 1921 to 30 March 1972, when it was suspended because of its inability to restore order during the Troubles, resulting in the introduction of Direct rule over Northern Ireland, direct rule. It was abolished under the Northern Ireland Constitution Act 1973. The Parliament of Northern Ireland was bicameral, consisting of a House of Commons of Northern Ireland, House of Commons with 52 seats, and an indirectly elected Senate of Northern Ireland, Senate with 26 seats. The British monarch, Sovereign was represented by the Governor of Northern Ireland, Governor (initially by the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Lieutenant), who granted royal assent to Acts of Parliament in Northern Ireland, but executive power rested with the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Prime Minister, the leader of the largest party in the House of Comm ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
