We’re starting the year with some really wonderful news: Google.org is granting us a fantastic $1.6m, to be spent over two years.

Clearly, this is a significant sum of money, which will really turbo-charge our efforts to build technologies to help groups like mySociety in countries around the world. 

We will be using the money to provide developers with open source technologies to help them to more easily and quickly launch new civic apps and services. We will also be working with lots of other groups to promote greater knowledge and technology sharing amongst civil society groups of all kinds, especially in the accountability sector.

What’s the problem being tackled?

Currently, it can take a great deal of work to launch even relatively simple sites or apps with civic purposes, because the sector is not rich with mature, sector-specific tools and technologies. This high barrier to getting started has a bad effect on the range and strength of popular, impactful civic sites and apps online, globally.

Working with international partners we plan to develop some common, open source components that will reduce the effort required to launch new services in a broad range of areas: including accountability, legal, environmental, political, and more.

mySociety will work with local partners in various targeted regions to help those partners make the greatest possible benefit from using these new, common, collaboratively-developed open source components. And we’ll be working to help them contribute back, both in terms of shared code and shared knowledge.

The project will also develop new approaches to bringing together the global civic-technology community, so that it can collaborate more easily on new projects.

We’re really excited to see where this project will take us next – and we are very grateful to Google.org for the increased opportunities their funding brings us.

Photo by KayVee INC (CC)