Volunteering for mySociety

A key belief at mySociety is that we can, working together, make things better. 

Many of our websites began when people worked together in their spare time to make a vision into a reality. 

That spirit is part of what makes mySociety the organisation it is. We continue to work with passionate volunteers who bring a range of skills, to achieve common goals. 

For you, that means playing a part in an always-interesting, purposeful organisation, giving as much — or little — time as you wish. You’ll pick up new skills, tussle with interesting questions, and learn new insights.

For many years, volunteers have been a vital part of what helps WhatDoTheyKnow run as well as it does. More recently, work on the Council Climate Scorecards, and WhatDoTheyKnow Projects, has helped us explore how to combine technology and people power to make change happen. 

Now we want to open up similar opportunities for people to get involved across all our different areas of work.  

If you are interested in being a part of that, please sign up to our volunteering mailing list. 

Contributing code

Almost all of mySociety’s sites are open source, meaning that anyone can help out if they know how to code.

However, our capacity to work with you to review pull requests is limited; and we are better able to accept help on projects with a larger team. These projects are:

FixMyStreet (GitHub / project website) – Perl, Catalyst

Alaveteli (GitHub / project website) – Ruby, Rails

We are reviewing how we can make it easier to contribute to a wider range of our projects and work. 

How to get started

Each of the projects above has an active mailing list, and a community of coders who have experience with the codebase. See the project websites for details.

  • Join the mailing list and introduce yourself.
  • If there’s a particular issue you’d like to work on, let us know.
  • It’s good to start by picking an easy bug or feature request from the GitHub issue tracker.
  • (But please do let us know you’d like to tackle it, so that we don’t duplicate your efforts ourselves.)