Duncan Parkes is our new Core Developer

We are very happy to announce that Duncan Parkes has joined mySociety, bringing our team of full time core developers up to four.

Duncan is the incredibly prolific author of screen scrapers for the lovely PlanningAlerts.com which he runs with Richard Pope.

He also has a PhD in Mathematics, which I expect you’ll want to read all of here, and is an editor of Open Source programming books with APress. During the vetting process he listed one of the passions of his life as being ‘Unit Testing‘, which, combined with his love of postbox crowdsourcing, made picking him more or less a no brainer.

In the short run we’ve let him loose, under the tutelage of Francis Irving, on the scaling challenges presented by Mapumental – I can’t wait to see what comes out of it.

1 Comment

  1. Is there a chance that his postbox project could be generalised and become an official project?

    There’s a bunch of location data that councils (etc.) have that has accidentally fallen into the clutches of the Ordnance Survey and so can’t be publicly released.

    Recycling centres, accessible toilets, allotments and what have you. If your legal advisors could agree on what level of vagueness (Street, Postcode?) would evade copyright then you could crowdsource the precise location on OpenStreetMap.

    You could call it “Where Do They Know?”