mySociety is a UK-based charity that was founded in the early 2000s. It aims to give citizens the power to get things changed, with easy-to-use online tools.

And it has always had a secondary mission too: to show governments how best to adopt the new digital technologies that other sectors are embracing so readily.

In this, mySociety has been successful: many of our ideas have been adopted by local and national governments.

Several of the people who were active in mySociety’s early years have gone on to take jobs at Government Digital Services — and we’ve also worked together with the UK government: we created the first petitions site for No 10, and in 2013 we were contracted to write a strategic review of how Parliament does digital.

Here in the UK, we run:

– TheyWorkForYou The easy way to see what’s happening in Parliament

– WriteToThem Allowing constituents to contact their elected representatives, even if they don’t know who they are

– WhatDoTheyKnow Making it quick and simple to submit a Freedom of Information request

– FixMyStreet Sending citizens’ street fault reports to the councils that are responsible for getting them fixed.

We also work with other groups all around the world to help them set up and run similar tools for their own countries.