Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of mySociety, a non-profit, open source organisation that runs many of the best-known democracy websites in the UK. These include the Parliamentary transparency website TheyWorkForYou, Freedom of Information hub WhatDoTheyKnow, and the self-explanatory FixMyStreet.
Tom is currently spending most of his time trying to put mySociety onto a self-sustaining basis through development of commercial services, helping people outside the UK benefit from mySociety’s work, and showing how much he values mySociety’s unparalleled team of staff and volunteers.
By trade Tom was a hybrid policy analyst and sysadmin who mainly cut his teeth at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit from 2001 to 2003. He grew up in Oxford, and now lives in Staffordshire.
Tom has also advised governments and parties across a spectrum of countries, and a range of ideological positions. He believes that good digital government services, usable community tools and powerful transparency sites are not the preserve of any one pre-internet political ideology.
In 2007 he co-authored the The Power of Information Review with Ed Mayo and the Strategy Unit, and is now a member of the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. He’s also proud to be an advisor to Code For America.
Tom blogs on behalf of mySociety at our blog, and occasionally in a private capacity on his own blog.
Tom looks a bit like this (click on the image for a big version for printing):
Things Tom Doesn’t Like (periodically updated):
- A world in which the likelihood of an issue being acted on depends on how well it flukes a position in the news cycle.
- The current notion of ‘a public debate’, and suspects it is largely synonymous with “an issue on which at least one columnist from each national newspaper has vented their prejudices”.
- Gerrymandering, earmarks and un-capped electoral spending.
- The ratio of resources put into studying edemocracy, versus doing it