It was with immense sadness that the mySociety team learned of the death of our much loved ex-colleague Mark Longair.

Mark first came to mySociety as a volunteer, contributing his time and coding knowledge to build scrapers and parsers that brought Scottish Parliament data into TheyWorkForYou. Knowing a good developer when we saw one, we subsequently offered him a more official position, and he was a member of our permanent staff from 2012 to 2018.

During those years, he worked on a variety of our projects, helping to build brand new codebases from scratch, and contributing to existing ones, with his commits running through Mzalendo, Pombola, PopIt, EveryPolitician and TheyWorkForYou. One way in which his legacy lives on is in the elegant code he wrote for those projects, some of which continue to make transparency more accessible in the UK and in sub-saharan Africa.

He was also a dedicated volunteer with our friends at Democracy Club, making immense contributions — both in terms of hours dedicated and care taken — to their candidates crowdsourcing platform. This is a crucial piece of infrastructure for the digital democracy sector, and one we still benefit from ourselves, most recently when integrating election candidate data to the Local Intelligence Hub. And to many, Mark is best known as the originator of the UK’s only open geographical dataset of postcode boundaries, which also continues to find its way into mySociety’s mapping projects, even to this day.

He brought a remarkable level of care both to every aspect of his work, and to the connections he forged while working here. Words which are cropping up repeatedly as colleagues recall Mark include kind, humble, intelligent, remarkable, and generous. 

This generosity extended to the ways in which he shared knowledge: his clear and considerate explanations were a hallmark of any piece of work he contributed to; these often persist as a learning opportunity for anyone who returns to the code in later years. Mark was a naturally gifted teacher, both as a peer and mentor. 

He was a deep thinker about all aspects of life, reading widely and sharing what he discovered with colleagues; and he strove, especially, to improve the joy of working life for us all, with ideas and systems to make mySociety’s remote set-up more functional, agreeable and humane.

But he was by no means always serious — or perhaps one could say, he was equally serious about having fun. Contributions to the culture of mySociety include a karaoke habit that still persists; a lasting recognition of the importance of lunchtime naps; and his impassioned recommendations of Pixar films. Mark also introduced at least one colleague to the joy of cryptic crosswords, something he was serious enough about that he was a regular contributor to the blog Fifteen Squared.

After mySociety, Mark joined mySociety alumnus Robin Houston at Flourish, turning his considerable talents towards making data into compelling visualisations that brought out the underlying stories for all to see. 

The world is poorer for his not being in it; but richer for his long-lasting contributions to coding, and to all of us who were lucky to work with him or call him a friend. Contemporaneous colleague Steve Day and Democracy Club’s Sym Roe have also written tributes.

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Photo: Struan Donald

Back in February 2012, we announced the launch of a new site for Mzalendo, a parliamentary monitoring website for Kenya.

This year, we handed the hosting, development and maintenance of the site over to the Mzalendo team on the ground. We’re delighted that they are in the position to no longer require our help.

Supported by the Indigo Foundation, this was one of mySociety’s first formal partnerships in which we developed a website for an existing organisation — in this case, building on the work of two activists Ory Okolloh and Conrad Akunga, who had been filling a gap in Kenya’s public provision of parliamentary information by blogging and publishing MPs’ data since 2005.

If it wasn’t for their work, Kenya would be a whole lot less informed about its own parliament: the official government website, for example, only had information about 50% of the nation’s MPs at the time, and the country’s Hansard could only be accessed by request to the Government’s Printer’s Office.

We were able to draw upon our experience with our UK parliamentary site TheyWorkForYou to avoid the common pitfalls in building such projects, and provide useful features such as an online searchable Hansard, responsive design, MP ‘scorecards’ and an easily-updated database for representatives’ details.

During the years of our partnership, Mzalendo kept the site maintained with data and news, while we worked on the development of new features they requested, fixing any bugs that arose, for example when the Kenyan parliament changed their data outputs, and hosting.

But there are plenty of willing and able developers in Kenya, and it became increasingly obvious that funding could be more effectively — and efficiently — routed directly to them rather than to us in the UK.

Like most mySociety code, the Pombola codebase on which Mzalendo was built is open source, so anyone is free to inspect, reuse or just take inspiration from it. The handover should, therefore, be reasonably painless for the new developers.

We wish Mzalendo all the best in their ongoing efforts to keep Kenya informed and politically engaged.

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Image by Valentina Storti: a tawny eagle flying over Laikipia District, central Kenya (CC by/2.0)