For an organisation whose members normally work from home, we’ve been pretty sociable recently, with meet-ups, conferences, and our annual retreat. We’re glad to discover that we haven’t actually lost the ability to communicate face to face…

If you’d like to come and sample our sharply honed social skills for yourselves, there are a number of opportunities still to come.

Every Wednesday: London meet-ups

[Above : mySociety designer Jed, chilling in front of the Mozilla Firefox]

If you’re in London, do feel free to drop by and say hello, any Wednesday from 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm. We meet at the Mozilla London space – and there are often other interesting things going on too.

Meet-ups are not just for coders – they’re for anyone who would like to talk more about mySociety projects or the wider eDemocracy field. On October 30th, we’re tying in with the Open Government Partnership event; you’re welcome to attend then or any other week.

Fancy coming along? Add your name to our Lanyrd pages here.

[Above: Our meet-ups are not always this busy! On this night, we happened to coincide with a Mozfest planning event.. speaking of which, see below]

25th – 27th October: Mozfest

Mozfest in Ravensbourne, London, is Mozilla’s annual innovative open web event for ‘technologists and creators’.

The event kicks off on the night of Friday 25th with a Science Fair. We’ll be there, showing our wares – in this case, we’ll be hoping to meet many of the internatonal attendeees and let them know about our open source software. But if you’re not an international attendee, you should totally swing by and say hello too.

30th October: Edinburgh

The next non-London mySociety meet-up will be in Edinburgh – watch this blog, our Twitter stream and Facebook page for details of precisely where (it’ll be a nice, central pub that serves food… suggestions are welcome).

That’s in advance of our attendance at the Channel Shift conference – but you don’t have to be a council employee to drop in. Come and share a pint and have a chat, whichever aspect of our work interests you.

20th November: Online Information conference

mySociety’s Director Tom will be giving the keynote presentation at the Online Information conference, the theme of which is “adapting to disruptive technologies and creating value with people, platforms and information”. Feel free to grab Tom afterwards for a chat!

4th December: Manchester

As with Edinburgh, we’re pitching up in Manchester for a Channel Shift conference, and will be taking the opportunity to mingle with lovely locals the night before. Again, pub suggestions are more than welcome.

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We hope to see you soon at one of these events. And, if you’re wondering what we look like, well, you’re in luck. At our recent retreat we took a photo of the entire team (plus a few guests). Here we are in all our glory – click to see a larger version, if you dare.

Come and say hello

We’re out and about at quite a few local government conferences over the next few months. Come and find us! We’d love to hear what questions you have about mySociety’s digital services.

At all the events below, Mike will be speaking, and both Mike and Myf will be available at our table if you’d like to chat.

The events

Channel Shift in the Public Sector London, September 26th

Digital Public Services Wales Cardiff, October 18th

Channel Shift in Scottish Public Services Edinburgh, October 31st

Channel Shift in the Public Sector Manchester, December 5th

Want to meet for drinks?

We’ll also be around for informal localgov digital chat and drinks, the night before the Cardiff, Edinburgh and Manchester events. Drop us a line if you’d be interested in joining us.

Photo of Cardiff by John Greenaway (CC)

In a break from tradition, I’m going to start this blog with an appeal.

We on the international team at mySociety are trying to improve the install process and documentation for all of our internationalised websites. Since we built the original sites, we’re not the best people to ask on what needs to be improved, as I’m sure you understand. If you’re interested in helping us out doing this I’ve created two surveys, you’ll find them at the end of this post! Or email me at hello@mysociety.org so I can ask you a few questions. On to other exciting things…

In site news we are working on Alaveteli sites for Uganda and Italy. Both of these should be finished and ready for launch soon, thanks to our developers and of course our partners for showing interest.

We’ve also been helping set up a FixMyStreet site in Cape Verde and a demo FixMyStreet site for Whypoll in India. While these two sites are being installed on mySociety’s servers, three people from Singapore and two people from South Africa are also working on FixMyStreet for their countries, as self installs.

And in Pombola news we are helping with websites in South Africa, Zimbabwe and are hoping to work with a team in Malawi.

But these are just the most recent sites! People are working on sites in Uruguay, Bosnia, Croatia, Italy and a number of other countries. Follow our twitter @mysocietyintl to find out more.

We’d love to help you set up your own site, or just give you advice on why sites like these can be useful. Send me an email at hello@mysociety.org to find out how!

Finally, we’re going to be attending a few conferences and we’d love to meet up with you to chat and get to know you. You can find us at:

15th to 19th September – OKCon, Geneva (Jen and Dave)

27th to 28th September – OverTheAir, Bletchley Park (Dave)

30th Sept to 3rd October – African Entrepreneurship Summit, Mauritius (Paul)

25th to 27th October – Mozfest, London (Dave)

30th October to 1st November – OGP London (Paul and Jen)

27th to 29th November – World Forum for Democracy, Strasbourg  (Jen)

Please do drop by and say hello!

By the way, if you are hosting a conference and want us to come along and speak (for free! We don’t charge, and a lot of the time we try to pay our own way!) please drop a note to hello@mysociety.org . We love to connect with new people and would be delighted to be involved!

As promised, here are the survey links. If you have ever installed or had us create one of our websites for you please take a look at them and fill them in.
FixMyStreet Survey
Alaveteli Survey

One more thing, as a p.s. Hopefully these “What we’ve been up to” updates will soon come to you in video format! Be kind to me if the first one is awkward!

Hand photo by Alban Gonzalez | Android photo by Tiago A Pereira | Bike photo by Raul Lieberwirth | Thank you for making your content creative commons distribution.