mySociety will be 5 years old in October. We’re holding a party in London to celebrate, but numbers are limited. Sign up here if you want to come.

Update: It’s full, sorry!

Just a week after doing the proper press launch Neighbourhood Fix-It has passed its 1000th confirmed problem report.

The next two features to add, in response to demands from users and councils are:

1. The integration of the Ordnance Survey’s Address-Point dataset, so we can give councils a nearest street address, not just a map.
2. A facility so that councils can enter and update different contact email addresses for different sorts of problem, if the central email address we use at the moment isn’t what they want. We’ll base the categories on the government standards for these things.

Matthew is doing these, so they’ll probably be finished before I finish this post 🙂

98 MPs have now sent at least one message via HearFromYourMP. Who will be 100th? Should we tell them? Should we give them a prize? Will there be an auction style-frenzy at the end? Should I be thinking about more important things? Only one of these questions can be answered with any certainty.

Today is the first anniversary of the launch of HearFromYourMP.com. Whilst a bit lower profile than some of our other sites, being driven mainly by email, HearFromYourMP has had a very pleasing first year. Not only have over 25,000 people signed up across the UK, but perhaps more remarkably 84 MPs have used the service to talk with (not to) their constituents. That’s about one in five MPs asked making use within the first year, which we guess must be amongst the fastest adoptions of a new communications tool ever by parliamentarians.

The most important thing to remember about HearFromYourMP, though, is that it is designed to be there for the long haul, gently engaging with that 44% of WriteToThem users who have never written to a politician before and coaxing them into a slow but personal relationship with their representatives. And as a final thought, I note that the Liberal Democrats had 72,721 members in 2004: I wonder how long it will take this little birthday site to get there?

It’s two years today that the first code was committed to mySociety’s CVS repository. In the interests of incremental delivery, it was a complete fully working version of FaxYourRepresentative (the working title for WriteToThem) which I wrote in about one minute. It did pretty well everything WriteToThem does, just much less user friendly, and looked like this. Of course, inevitably, Chris fixed a typo within 15 minutes.

Last week PledgeBank had its first birthday. The basic figures, for those of you interested are:

1863 Pledges, of which

1272 Pledges have failed, and

295 Pledges have been successful.

There are 296 pledges open for signatures right now (and could succeed or fail), and there have been a total of 44585 signatures by 37775 signers.

The other thing we know is that we’ve seen new organisations founded, substantial protests and boycotts organised, and even hair dyed blonde. But it isn’t up to us to say how successful the project has really been: for that we need external evaluation. If you’re interested in producing an independent review of PledgeBank’s effectiveness and value for money, or if you know someone who might be, let us know.

WriteToThem.com is now one year old – actually the birthday was on Valentine’s day last week. We’re having a few belated celebrations.

• We’ve made the WriteToThem 2005 zeitgeist of statistics about the last year, including a table of MP performance at responding to their constituents’ letters.
• We’ve added the Northern Ireland Assembly. Enter a postcode in Northern Ireland to contact your MLA. Even though the assembly is suspended, MLAs can still do things for their constituents. Thanks to two volunteers Louise and Amias for getting this working.
• We’ve taken off the Beta sign!

Yesterday we passed our 10,000th subscriber to HearFromYourMP.com and a few weeks back we passed our 200th successful pledge on PledgeBank.com. Well done all!