mySociety blog » Events

Image taken from Prince Arthur's website

What is a mySociety pubmeet? Just an informal evening when we guarantee that a few of us will be in a pub, happy to chat about anything at all.

If you have questions about any of our projects, ideas for new ones, or want to find out more about volunteering, then you’ll be very welcome.

Where? This month, we’ll be in the Prince Arthur, near Euston Station. Google map here.

When? Wednesday, 22nd February. Feel free to drop by, any time from 7.30 pm to 10.30 pm. Maybe let us know that you’re coming, by email or tweet, so that if numbers start looking large, we can book a space.

We’re easy to spot – at least one of us will be wearing a mySociety hooded top, complete with luminous green logo, as seen at the top of this page.

Tell your friends The more the merrier! If you like your social media, you can use the #mySocial hashtag.

But I don’t live in London… We are planning on having pubmeets in other UK cities soon. Watch this space!

December 23rd

Santa's Chocolate Coin Mint by Johnathan_W

If you haven’t got a penny,

A ha’penny will do,

If you haven’t got a ha’penny,

Then God bless you.

We wish you all a merry and prosperous Christmas – and for those of you who are already feeling quite prosperous enough, may we point you in the direction of our charitable donations page?

mySociety’s work is made possible by donations of all sizes and from all sorts of people. Those donations help fund all the online projects we create; projects that give easy access to your civic and democratic rights. If that’s important to you, show your appreciation, and we promise we’ll make the best use of every penny.

Thank you for sticking with us through this month-long post. We hope you’ve found it interesting and we wish you the very merriest of Christmases.

We hope you’ll continue to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ – see our Contacts page to find individual projects’ social media links.

December 22nd

Santa Watching by LadyDragonflyCC

What’s behind the door? A letter to Santa.

Dear Santa,

We think we’ve been pretty good this year. We’ve tried to keep our local neighbourhood clean, help with problems, and aid those in need, so we’re hoping there are a few presents coming our way.

If you can fit them down the chimney, here’s what we’re dreaming of:

More publicly available data Of course, we were delighted to hear in Mr Osborne’s autumn statement that all sorts of previously-inaccessible data will be opened up.

We’re wondering whether this new era will also answer any of our FixMyStreet geodata wishes. Santa, if you could allocate an elf to this one, we’d be ever so pleased.

Globalisation …in the nicest possible way, of course. This year has seen us work in places previously untouched by the hand of mySociety, including Kenya and the Philippines. And we continue to give help to those who wish to replicate our projects in their own countries, from FixMyStreet in Norway to WhatDoTheyKnow in Germany.

Santa, please could you fix it for us to continue working with dedicated and motivated people all around the world?

A mySociety Masters degree We’re lucky enough to have a team of talented and knowledgeable developers, and we hope we will be recruiting more in the coming year. It’s not always an easy task to find the kind of people we need – after all, mySociety is not your average workplace – so we’ve come to the conclusion that it’s probably easiest to make our own.

Back in February, Tom started thinking about a Masters in Public Technology. It’s still something we’re very much hoping for. Santa, is it true you have friends in academic circles?

FixMyTransport buy-in - from everyone! Regular users of FixMyTransport will have noticed that there are different kinds of response from the transport operators: lovely, fulsome, helpful ones, and formulaic ones. Or, worse still, complete refusal to engage.

Santa, if you get the chance, please could you tell the operators a little secret? Just tell them what those savvier ones already know – that FixMyTransport represents a chance to show off some fantastic customer service. And with 25,000 visitors to the site every week, that message is soon spread far and wide.

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Our monthly pub meets are proving to be a great place for friendly discussions and meeting new folk. The next one is on Tuesday the 20th, again at the Counting House pub. You are invited!

We’re generally to be found in one of the back rooms upstairs and at least one of us will be wearing a mySociety hoodie. We’ll try and tweet on the @mySociety Twitter account to say exactly where we are – it’s a big pub and it can be crowded early on in the evenings.

If you’d like to tweet about the night, or put photos on Instagram or Flickr, you can use the hashtag #mysocial.

7.30, Tuesday 20th September at the Counting House
50 Cornhill
London
EC3V 3PD

Map here. The nearest Underground stations are Monument and Bank.

Thanks everyone who’s turned up so far for a drink and a chat at our monthly pub meets. The next one is on Wednesday the 17th, again at the Counting House pub. You are invited!

If you’d like to tweet about the night, or put photos on Instagram or Flickr, you can use the hashtag #mysocial.

7.30, Wednesday 17th August at the Counting House
50 Cornhill
London
EC3V 3PD

Map here. The nearest Underground stations are Monument and Bank.

Image by Tim Dobson

Don’t forget the mySociety pub meet this Thursday. Hope to see you there! If you need to identify us, we’ll be the ones wearing very attractive, high-fashion mySociety hoodies.

Marquess of Anglesey, image from www.themarquess.co.uk

Questions to ask us? Fantastic ideas for what we should be doing next? Thinking about joining our team of volunteers? Or perhaps you just like a drink in the company of exceptionally nice people.

We’re reviving the monthly mySociety London pub meet (hoorah!) and if you can make it, we’d very much like to see you there.

When? Thursday the 16th of June from 7.30 onwards

Where? Marquess of Anglesey, 39 Bow Street, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7AU Google map

And if you’re in or around Oxford the night before, Wednesday the 15th, you might be interested to know that our developer Louise Crow will be speaking about FixMyTransport at the Oxford Geek Night. As the project nears completion, this should be an interesting look at where the idea came from, what we hope it will do, and the challenges of building it.

On Wednesday this week, mySociety’s Tom and Paul were in Southampton, competing in the Geovation finals.

Geovation is an initiative coordinated by Ordnance Survey which gives out funding to projects that help “communities address their unmet needs through the application of geographic data, skills and expertise”. When we discovered that the theme this time was “How can we improve transport in Britain?” we knew we had to enter.

As many of you will know, mySociety has been working for some time on FixMyTransport, a project for reporting problems with public transport. Taking much of what we’ve learned from FixMyStreet, we are, in the trademark mySociety way, building a website that will make the process easy, whilst hiding all the complexities out of sight.

FixMyTransport is well under way, and we’re hoping to launch shortly. But with Geovation funding, we hoped to be able to roll out an accompanying mobile application.

This is incredibly important because, after all, the best time to make a transport report is immediately you experience the problem.

mySociety has, of course, always been into maps and geodata – we use them in what we hope are fun and innovative ways across many of our sites, including (obviously) Mapumental, and (less obviously) TheyWorkForYou and WriteToThem. We’re also rather fond of public transport.

We also really enjoyed meeting the other contestants, particularly Cyclestreets whose project looks like it will be one to watch.

At the end of the day, we were delighted to learn that we had been awarded £27,000 to develop a simple, intuitive, cross-platform mobile application for FixMyTransport. We can’t wait to get started. We really believe it’s going to be of real benefit to public transport users across the UK (and possibly further, given the open-source nature of all our work).

If you’d like to stay up to date with FixMyTransport as we build and launch it, you might want to be one of the very first to “like” our Facebook page or follow us on Twitter.

Like mySociety? Like pubs? Why not come to our pre-Christmas pub meet, this coming monday?

The Banker

2 Cousin Lane, London, EC4R 3TE

21st December from 6.30pm onwards.

Leave a comment on this post if you’re coming. New faces and old hands equally welcome.

Come to the pub with us!

12th October 2009, from about 6.30, at the Banker just under Cannon Street station.

We won’t bite. Probably.

It is with overwhelming sadness that I write to tell our community that Angie Martin, mySociety’s fourth core developer, has died. She was taken from us by the cancer that she had been fighting since soon after we hired her less than two years ago.

Possessed of an almost unbelievably upbeat personality, Angie brought not only her formidable Perl skills, but her blazing warmth of character to our team. In remission during our yearly retreat in January this year, she combined laughter with a typically tough line of questioning on ideas she thought insufficiently robust. With typical disgregard for cool, her CV noted that she was “known to enjoy wrangling regular expressions on a Sunday Morning”. She didn’t see any contradiction between being a successful woman and a geek, throwing herself wholeheartedly into the Mac-toting, perlmonger ethos. She even brought her husband Tommy with her, who became a significant volunteer.

Given her habit of plain speaking, it is pointless to pretend that Angie was able to make the contribution to mySociety’s users or codebase that she wanted to. What she achieved in terms of difficult coding during recovery from chemotherapy was incredible, breathtaking – but she wanted to change the world. It now falls to the rest of us, and our supporters, to live up to the expectations she embodied, to continue to push every day, using skills like those that she had to help people with everyday problems. We now have to ask ‘What would Angie do?’, as well as ‘What would Chris do?’. It is a lot to live up to.

She was a mySociety core developer: I hope that meant as much to her as it meant for me to have her as one of my coders.  Remember and Respect.

Updated: Angie changed her surname upon getting married, a couple of months ago. I have just read she wanted to be remembered as Angie Martin, and so I have made that change. Read this tribute on the Lasso list.

Updated 21 7 2009: Tommy has just told me that those wishing to may memorial donations should send them to Hospice at Home.

Is there something part of the government is doing that you’d like to investigate? Find out everything from MPs’ expenses, to the length of allotment waiting lists, to whether your council’s Guy Fawkes bonfire is properly checked for hedgehogs.

mySociety are running a practical workshop on Freedom of Information at OpenTech on 4th July.

The workshop will help you make your first Freedom of Information request, including working out what to request, where to request it from and what exactly to write.

If you’re an old hand, you can get and give tips on how to take requests further.

We’ve got a fantastic team of Freedom of Information (FOI) experts to kick things off and answer hard questions.

• Heather Brooke used FOI to cause the frurore over MPs’ expenses.
• Francis Davey is a lawyer with a specialist knowledge in FOI.
• Elena Egawhary is a freelance journalist, currently working and using FOI for Panorama.
• John Cross, Alex Skene and Richard Taylor are volunteers who run and improve WhatDoTheyKnow, and all use it for their own activism.

Bring a laptop if you have one. Internet will be provided for the workshop only, so we can scour Government websites, and make requests on mySociety’s WhatDoTheyKnow.com website.

As usual, the rest of OpenTech is brimming with great talks, and will be full of interesting geeky wonks and wonky geeks. Book your place here so you can go to them and to the workshop. Hurry, it’s nearly sold out.

Update: WE WON! [the following is now for historical interest]

Uh oh.  Ministers are about to conceal MPs’ expenses, even though the public has just paid £1m to get them all ready for publication, and even though the tax man expects citizens to do what MPs don’t have to. They buried the news on the day of the Heathrow runway announcement. This is heading in the diametric wrong direction from government openness.

You can help in the following three ways:

1. Please write to your MP about this www.WriteToThem.com – ask them to lobby against this concealment, and tell them that TheyWorkForYou will be permanently and prominently noting those MPs who took the opportunity to fight against this regressive move. The millions of constituents who will check this site before the next election will doutbtless be interested.

2. Join this facebook group and invite all your least political friends (plus your most political too). Send them personal mails, phone or text them. Encourage them to write to their politicians too.

3. Write to your local paper to tell them you’re angry, and ask them to ask their readers to do the above. mySociety’s never-finished site http://news.mysociety.org might be able to help you here.

NB. mySociety is strictly non-partisan, by mission and by ethics. However, when it looks like Parliament is about to take a huge step in the wrong direction on transparency, we’ve no problem at all with stepping up when changes happen that threaten both the public interest and the ongoing value of sites like  TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow.

Update: Every page on TheyWorkForYou, our biggest site, is now strongly encouraging people to join the protest.

Update: We’ve sailed past 1000 members to our Facebook group. Onward and upward!

Update: And now past 3000 members! Also, some MPs are claiming that they need to vote for this Order to protect their addresses, even though they already changed to law to do this. Doh!

Update: Now we’re past 6500, and our supporters have mailed their constituency MPs in over 90% of the constituencies in the UK. And rather helpfully, President Obama has just given us a concise explanation for MPs why this is a much bigger issue than some bits of paper and some minor embarrassment:

“And those of us who manage the public’s dollars will be held to account – to spend wisely, reform bad  habits, and do our business in the light of day – because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government.”

mySociety is auctioning two places on our yearly retreat.

This is only the third such retreat in five years, and it is a super-rare occasion when all the various people who make mySociety tick get together. On these retreats we meet to set our agenda for the next year and try to reassess what we’ve done and what we’re about. It’s a fantastic opportunity to meet many of the most talented developers and thinkers in the field of the internet and democracy, people you’d otherwise rarely be able to catch. And it’s a great moment to catch them, pausing for a moment to discuss what we’re about and where we could go next.

I am fully concious that the tickets are not cheap – we are doing this it is to help us cover our costs as a charity.

The door is not closed to the rest of you – most people on this retreat will be volunteers, and you can be too!

We did it! Give us your thoughts on what we’ve done and where we should go next…

There’s now some more space available for our birthday party in London tomorrow. Sign up here if you’re not already on a guest list.

mySociety friend Harry Metcalfe is organising a spillover event for those who couldn’t get a place at this coming weekend’s Barcamp. Let him know if you want to come.

mySociety will be 5 years old in October. We’re holding a party in London to celebrate, but numbers are limited. Sign up here if you want to come.

Update: It’s full, sorry!

The next mySociety Manchester Meetup will be on Weds 20th August in the Briton’s Protection at 7:30 till 9ish.

Informally covering the range of remotely mySociety antics, and anything else we fancy :)

You don’t need to have done anything technical, a fresh approach is enough. If you can’t make it this month, just come along next time, dates and beer mat minutes will be posted to our mailing list.

For more, see this page.

Meet up with the some of the friends of mySociety in Manchester for a social evening in the pub in Manchester.

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OpenTech on 5th July is an informal one-day conference about technology, society and low-carbon living, featuring Open Source ways of working and technologies that anyone can have a go at.

mySociety related sessions:

• mySociety session – more on time travel maps, and the launch of WhatDoTheyKnow.com, and a few other surprise announcements
• No2ID and Open Rights Group: State of the Nation
• Here’s the UK EFF
• Power to the People – One year one from the Power of Information Report
• …and much more

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