What is DIY mySociety?

We Can Help You Get There - original image by Mark Hillary

We asked mySociety’s Director, Tom Steinberg, a few questions. His answers help to explain DIY mySociety: what it is, why we created it, and who it’s for.

Can you briefly explain DIY mySociety?

DIY mySociety is the over-arching name for mySociety’s goal of making it really easy to set up versions of the websites we run, in countries, cities and regions around the world.

DIY mySociety consists of writings, software and face-to-face meetings that are all about helping people to get websites like WhatDoTheyKnow.com, FixMyStreet.com and TheyWorkForYou.com running wherever they are wanted, and customised to do the widely varying jobs that are required.

mySociety is a British institution and your sites deal with British politics. What is the motivation for this initiative?

mySociety started as a British NGO, a small group of staff and volunteers who built websites to help people in Britain become more powerful.

Over the last eight years we built a range of sites that worked in Britain, and that people around the world saw and wanted to copy. For a long time mySociety didn’t take many active steps to help other people, but in the last three years we’ve started working seriously to help people around the world.

Now we at mySociety think of ourselves as more of a global organisation, and we have friends with mySociety-inspired projects on every continent. But we’ve still not really done all we can to help people successfully run sites like those which we pioneered, and DIY mySociety is all about showing our intention to get really good at helping other people.

But there are already lots of mySociety-type sites in the world – do people really need your help?

Whilst there has been a huge explosion of digital democracy and transparency tools, there are still a huge number of countries, almost certainly a majority, where no such tools exist at all.

Even more serious than this is that we have seen people build copies of our tools without an understanding of the cultural or technical complexities that lie behind their surfaces. These sites normally struggle and frequently die as a consequence.

We believe that despite the massive variance between countries, almost everywhere probably has problems and needs that can be supported by some kinds of good quality democratic or transparency related web tools.

We want to help people to understand what they need to do to have the best shot to make something that will work where they are.

Surely, different countries have such different political systems that you can’t possibly offer ‘one size fits all’ codebases?

If you look at all the different websites out there that are like TheyWorkForYou.com (our parliamentary monitoring site) you will find that they are almost all built on different codebases – barely two projects share any code at all.

This is, in my view, an appalling waste of time, money and knowledge about what works.

Of course countries vary, and Parliaments most definitely do. But think how widely the companies vary that use Microsoft Office to carry out their work: almost every business in the rich world uses them, no matter what they do.

Good enough tools for monitoring parliaments will be customisable for widely varying parliaments, and they will save everyone involved precious time and money that can be spend on pushing for changes that matter.

What exactly can DIY mySociety offer?

We offer four kinds of service which we hope will be of use to people around the world.

  • General knowledge – via this blog,  Twitter and our project homepages
  • Someone to ask questions to –  in general, or on one of the specific projects
  • Guides to read – currently on Alaveteli, FixMyStreet Platform and TheyWorkForYou
  • Code to install and reuse

Who is it for?

We want to help anyone, anywhere who thinks that mySociety-style democracy or transparency websites (and apps) might make a positive difference where they are.

We’re setting things up so that we can be just as much help to a completely non-technical amateur as we are to a seasoned technical professional.

What should I do first if I’m interested in setting up a site like one of yours?

If you already know which project is right for you, join the appropriate mailing list and say hello [see links to the right of this page].

If you don’t know which project might be most appropriate for you, drop us an email and we can talk it through with you.

How can I help spread the word?

The most valuable thing you can do is tell us what you want to know, or what you think other people want to know. That way we can work more effectively to help people understand how we can help.

 

Image by Mark Hillary, used with thanks.