Speaking at today’s Activate conference in London, Stephen King from the Omidyar Network just announced a grant of extraordinary importance to mySociety.

Over the next three years, the Omidyar Network is granting mySociety an amazing $2.9m.

This unprecedented donation is tied to clear targets which, when translated relate to the following goals:

1. Internationalising our current British websites, and helping people around the world to build sites and apps that will drive greater transparency and accountability.
2. Growing an ever-stronger commercial team, to help cover our costs which remain unfunded (still substantial).
3. Continuing to grow the impact of our UK sites.

If you’re someone who’s ever given us £5 or £10 to support our work, or who’s given your time volunteering on any of our projects, we have a special message for you: we would never have been able to get to the sort of scale of support that today’s grant represents if people like you didn’t believe in us all along. Thank you, and thank you for your continued support – our  growing ambitions to make ever greater positive impacts on the world means we need more friends than ever, not fewer.

We’re Open for Business, Partnerships and Conversations

The overall impact of this grant, plus continued support from groups like the Open Society Foundation, Hivos, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, Indigo Trust – and many smaller donations – is a huge increase in our overall capacity. We can build more software, help more partners, work with more clients, give more advice.

So if you’ve thought about working with mySociety, or using our open source tech for your own goals, there’s never been a better moment. Get in touch or talk to us on Twitter.