Get Involved

mySociety is built on volunteers.

Some of them are super-powered, like Tim who works on PledgeBank. Tim is obsessed with translation - he coordinates an international team of volunteers who keep the site running in over a dozen languages. Speak another language? Help him (and us) out.

Other volunteers are less hardcore. Take Sally. She matched up one piece of Parliamentary video on TheyWorkForYou to one piece of debate text, and that’s it. It took her about a minute. But both Tim and Sally together make contributions that helps mySociety try to improve our democracy, and help hordes of people using the sites they helped with, most of whom they’ll never meet.

So, I want to volunteer, but it just seems too dratted hard and intimidating!

There are some straightforward things that you can just do. For example put up a FixMyStreet poster on your local noticeboard or at your place of work (please let us know - post a pic of it online, for example).

But you’re right, doing more deeply involved things is trickier; even for great programmers, hacking on the core of something like TheyWorkForYou is a tall order. So we suggest that you talk to us about standalone tasks that help us without you having to learn lots before getting started. A modest project achieved and delivered is a lot more satisfying for everyone than a big one abandoned.

With that caveat aside, please use the following resources and contact methods to get going:

• Join our low-traffic email discussion list for people who are involved in mySociety. It’s well worth asking questions there, so lots of people can help answer them. There are over 150 people, and it’s where the mySociety community hangs out.
• Contact us, and arrange a phone call, or to meet up - we have staff and volunteers scattered all over the UK, and indeed the world!
• If you’re a computer programmer, you might like to know that all our source code is open source. You can browse or download it here. We’re not going to pretend it is easy to set up - just have a go, and ask lots of questions on the mailing list to get it working on your own machine.

Give me more ideas about how I could get involved in mySociety!

Duncan cares about people being able to find out about local planning applications. He’s also a computer programmer, and has added new local authorities to our site PlanningAlerts. If you can weave code, you can write a screen scraper for somewhere near you.

James and Amandeep volunteer as trustees (we’re a charity). They fill in VAT returns, and register corporate structures. That’s true dedication. They, along with other trustees and board members, provide invaluable advice, direction and contacts. If you’re a businessy person, you can read more about the charity and finances behind mySociety and help us to manage our time and money better.

Alex, John, Tony and Adam seem to me to live and breathe Freedom of Information and they lovingly tend WhatDoTheyKnow. They handle all the administration of this site, without ever having to code a line (that’s all left to Francis).

More more! What else could I do?

For more ideas about things you could do, you could contact us, chat to us, get involved in the mailing list, on IRC, meet up with us.

But better, find things that you can fix that annoy you, whether it is something bad about our websites, a marketing opportunity we haven’t seized, or something about how mySociety works or is run. We’re an open organisation, and if you have a goal and you push, you can make it happen.