mySociety blog » Events

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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Very sorry, but this week’s tech talk on Thursday has been cancelled due to a sudden urgent engagement which requires the speakers’s attendance. Please, do still come to the next one.

Whew. It’s exciting times.

As you know, we’ve been looking for a new developer for a little while, and I’m pleased to say we’ve found one. We’re very picky, as we have lots of really convulted, diverse software amazing award winning websites to keep going.

Just as important as finding someone technically skilled, it’s important that they are motivated and excited about what mySociety is doing. If you’re hiring any programmer you should be looking for that, especially so for a small, nimble charity like us. We had lots of good applicants, and were sorry we could only afford to choose one.

Please welcome Angie Ahl! She lives in Cumbria, so keeping with our policy of having staff scattered to the four winds. I can see mountain climbing in my future. Angie runs a web design company working mainly in the film and music industries. I’ll try and persuade her to post here about what she gets up to with us.

Other things - there’s another one of our Disruptive Technology talks in London next Thursday. It’s by Jason Kitcat, who not only is head of technology at netmums.com, but also co-ordinated the Open Rights Group’s electronic voting trials observations earlier in the year. Read the fascinating report - there’s a bit where overall control of the Scottish Parliament literally hung off the edge of the page of an Excel spreadsheet. Sign up now to come and see Jason speak next week.

Speaking of the Open Rights Group, it is astonishingly two years since a PledgeBank pledge got them started with 1000 supporters. Danny O’Brien has written a fun summary of what they’ve been up to. If they can do this, then what could you do with PledgeBank?

You might fancy this anarchic conference. BarcampUKGovweb “is about creating a shared vision for UK government web activity, and establishing the UK government digital network - bringing together the community of webbies within central government and the wider public sector.”.

The next mySociety Disruptive Tech Talk is a week today at 7.30pm at the London Knowledge Lab on Emerald St.

This time we have Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map. When Open Street Map started a few years ago, I thought it would never take off. Earlier this year I accidentally went to their conference in Manchester, and was blown away. There’s a whole community of active people, collaboratively building a vector map of not just the whole country, but the whole world. And it is very usable now - for example, my home town of Cambridge is extremely high quality.

If you’re interested in mapping, or in how to organise communities that disrupt with technology, then come along. But please sign up as the last event was full to capacity! It’s free.

Last week we seemed to spend all week in London. Partly interviewing people, partly redesigning PledgeBank, partly plotting the overthrow of Parliament (joke), partly preparing for the election (thank god it didn’t happen - we’d be far too busy). We even did some general work, scurrying wifi out of the ICA and at one of our trustee’s offices.

As if that wasn’t enough, Stef gave the first of our disruptive technology talks, mainly about Farm Subsidy and UNDemocracy. It was interesting, engaging, fantastically attended, and turned into beer and Sushi. Adam’s posted up a recording of the talk (scroll down in the comments). Make sure you come to the next one on 1st November.