1. Wanted: Head of Research

    Image by Jason Samfield

    We are recruiting.

    As so often with positions at mySociety, it’s a job that’s a bit different from the norm. For the right person, it’s going to be a fantastic opportunity.

    If you know someone who fits the bill, please do forward them the link to this job description: http://mysocietyltd.theresumator.com/apply/KJmhA1/Head-Of-Research.html.

    They might also like to see our page on what it’s like working at mySociety.

    Applications close on June 30th, so time is of the essence.

     

    NO RECRUITERS OR AGENCIES PLEASE

    Image: Jason Samfield (CC)

     

  2. Seeking a Research Contractor with Transparency and Accountability Expertise

    Applications for this position have now closed.

    Are you interested in digital tools, but able to keep an intellectual detachment about their effectiveness? And are you free to do contract work in the next few months? If so, read on.

    mySociety is looking for a research specialist with experience in transparency and accountability issues. You may be a freelance researcher, or an agency providing research services.

    About mySociety and Alaveteli

    mySociety is a not-for-profit social enterprise. Our mission is to invent and popularise digital tools that enable citizens to exert power over institutions and decision makers. We are based in the UK, but support partners who deploy our technologies across the globe, in about 20 countries so far.

    Shaft of Sunlight by Jenny DowningOne of our most popular tools has been Alaveteli, a tool that enables people to set up powerful freedom of information websites in their own countries. Spun-off from our highly popular UK site WhatDoTheyKnow, Alaveteli enables partners to set up and maintain sites that make it much easier to ask governments questions under Freedom of Information or Right to Information Laws.

    What makes the service truly powerful is that it automatically publishes both requests and responses online for other people to see, making the site into a public resource of potentially wide interest – the UK site has about 400,000 visitors a month.

    Alaveteli has been widely used in many different jurisdictions. In Hungary, to name just one Alaveteli instance, there have been over 2,000 different FOI requests so far.

    Research context

    No single activity or approach is enough to bring about a culture of transparency and accountability in a country.

    Countries with effective cultures of transparency acquire them slowly, and through a multifaceted process which may include campaigning, coalition building, journalistic scandal discovery, alliance building, protesting, whistleblowing, legal action, political leadership, elections, legislation drafting and media coverage.

    Alaveteli is only one tool in the toolkit of modern-day transparency and accountability advocates. We believe it to be a potentially powerful tool, but it remains only one tool. Over the next few years, mySociety wants to do the best we can to help groups around the world to use Alaveteli as an effective aid to social change.

    The context for the research is to understand how to position Alaveteli within a wider context of transparency and accountability campaigning. It is a highly action-centric piece of research. Your findings will help us to make decisions about how to help our partners to bring about the changes they want to see in countries outside the UK.

    The research contract in more detail

    Whilst we will want the successful contractor/consultancy to determine key parts of the research process, there are already certain known constraints and activities.

    The contract is for 60-80 working days.
    The contractor/consultancy must be able to start work by May 1st 2014, and produce the primary deliverable by 31st August 2014.
    The work will consist of both a literature review and practitioner interviews to determine what is known about effective and ineffective transparency and accountability based campaigning across a range of countries.
    The primary deliverable for the project is a strategy document that is ready to be consumed and actioned by both mySociety and some of our key Alaveteli-using partners.

    After the primary deliverable is complete, we will ask you to help us work directly with at least one new partner, to help them make more effective use of Alaveteli.

    More details of the research scope will be made available to applicants.

    Minimum Skills and Experience

    The individuals engaged in the work will be either working on a PhD in a topic that relates to transparency and accountability, or will already possess such a qualification.

    How to apply

    Applications for this position have now closed, but thanks for your interest!

    Image credit: Jenny Downing
  3. New vacancies at mySociety

    Now Is A Good Time To Explore by Minivan Ninja

    What’s on your Christmas wishlist? If ‘a meaningful job’ is high on the list, then we’ve got important news for you. We’re looking for talented, passionate and diversely skilled people to join our team.

    In 2013, we’ll be pushing out internationally, improving our core UK sites and doing more commercial business. And we need some more lovely, dilligent people to help us.

    All the details are on our jobs page. There’s plenty of time to get your application in, so why not give it some thought over the mince pies?

    Not quite for you? Then please tell your nicest friends!

    Photo by Minivan Ninja (CC)

  4. New, simple MP vote analyses on TheyWorkForYou

    "12am time to vote" by European Parliament on Flickr. Used with thanks under the Creative Commons licence. Click through to see the photo on Flickr.

    If you’ve visited our parliamentary site TheyWorkForYou.com, you’ll have noticed that on each MP’s page there is a short summary of his or her voting record on various key issues.

    These issues have always been carefully chosen to give a simple but neutral top-line view of each MP’s voting activity. Judging by Twitter, they’re a fairly popular part of the site, too.

    There’s way, way more tedious complexity behind producing these little summaries than you might think, and due to a lack of appropriately skilled people in our team over the last year we had let our vote analyses get a bit behind the times. If you’re really interested you can read about why authoring these things in such a scrupulously balanced way is so time consuming here.

    We’re posting today to tell you that we have recruited a pair of excellent new part-time voting analysts, David and Ambreen, and they have recently produced the first of a new generation of voting summaries.

    The first shows how each MP has voted on increasing the rate of VAT, and second on the recent changes to university tuition fees. We have also increased the number of votes which feed into the EU integration policy to bring it more up to date.

    To see this new data, just pop along to TheyWorkForYou’s home page, stick in your postcode, and check out your own MPs’ page. Then, if you want to be made aware as soon as we’ve published the next analyses, please follow our new TheyWorkForYou Twitter account.

    Lastly, I just want to say thank you to the vote analysts Ambreen and David, to senior developer Matthew and to uber-volunteer Richard Taylor for kicking this vital part of TheyWorkForYou back into top gear.

    Image by European Parliament.

  5. Job Advert: mySociety Africa Project Lead

    Are you a keen follower of political developments in Kenya or Nigeria? Are you also passionate about transparency, and interested in the possible role of digital technologies in enhancing it in these countries?  If so, you might be just the person to run mySociety’s Africa Project.

    mySociety is a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites within the UK, including TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com.

    We have recently received funding from the Omidyar Network to mentor transparency organisations in Kenya and Nigeria about how mySociety assesses value in technology, and how it goes about delivering projects.  We’re looking to recruit an Africa Project Lead who will be responsible for shaping and running the project.

    The role will be for 12 months in the first instance, with possibility of extension.  The salary is competitive, and reflects the skills and experience we are seeking. Reasonable travel expenses will be fully paid, however no relocation expenses are available.

    Organisational Context

    mySociety has ten full time staff, and a wider community of energetic and creative volunteers, all but one currently based in the UK. We are a very techy organisation, made up of people who care passionately about using technology to make services that are not just popular, but which offer their users some sort of tangible, offline benefit.

    Running the Africa Project successfully will involve using the expertise of mySociety to enable Kenyan and Nigerian transparency organisations to become more effective. Whilst doing this, the Africa Lead will also be scoping for future opportunities where Omidyar Network and mySociety would be able to make meaningful contributions to the transparency and accountability sector in Africa.

    Whilst we have good, knowledgeable friends who have helped us scope this project, mySociety’s current staff and volunteers have only limited knowledge of Kenya and Nigeria, and of the technical or political circumstances within them. The Africa Project Lead will enable the rest of the organisation in learning what is needed to deliver projects that are of value.

    Key Responsibilities and Deliverables

     

    1. Build relationships with two partner organisations in Kenya and Nigeria and, with them, deliver specific digital services (or measurable improvements to existing digital services) which are appropriate to their national settings, utilising expertise from the mySociety team.
    2. Develop an in-depth understanding of the role of transparency in a number of key African countries, which can be shared with the mySociety core team and the wider mySociety network.
    3. Demonstrate through presentations how mySociety has built successful services in the UK and develop relationships with organisations and individuals with which we or Omidyar Network may work in the future.
    4. Towards the end of the first year of the Africa Project, the Africa Project Lead will run an ideas generation process to identify further organisations worth partnering with, and specific projects worth building.
    5. Help our Internationalisation Developer to understand how to successfully deliver technological contributions in conjunction with our partners.

    Person Specification

    Must have:

    • At least 12 months prior knowledge of the role of transparency and accountability organisations in at least one African country, preferably working directly with such groups, in country.
    • Strong mentoring skills
    • At least 12 months working either professionally or voluntarily with developers of internet technologies.
    • Graduate level spoken and written English
    • A willingness to travel on a regular basis
    • Prior experience of working independently with limited or no direct supervision, required because in this position your line management will be light touch and physically remote

    Desirable:

    • Prior familiarity with digital transparency projects
    • A high level of technical literacy
    • A preexisting social network in either the local web technology community, or the transparency and accountability community

    Location

    We are looking for a candidate to be based in or near Nairobi’s iHub . However, this job will entail considerable travel, including several weeks a month working with one of our partners in Abuja. The successful candidate must be able to travel between Kenya and Nigeria without undue restriction.

    How to apply

    To apply please send an email to hello@mysociety.org with the tag msjob9 in the subject line. Your application must consist of a covering letter, a CV and a 250-300 word written piece on “The similarities and differences between classic transparency projects and digital transparency projects”.

    Closing date for applications – 7pm on the 11th April 2011 and interviews will be taking place in Nairobi April 12th, 13th 14th and in the UK on April 16th, 17th.

  6. Seeking help seeking female coders

    As you might know, we’ve currently got an open-call for new developers, we’re hiring quite a bit in the next six months.

    Thus far our list of people interested in the job contains no women’s names at all – zip, zero, zilch – despite us having taken soundings on how to get a more diverse sample of applicants.

    I’m really, really not OK with this. I understand the gender imbalance in tech as well as anyone, but I interpret this as ‘mySociety hasn’t reached out well enough’, not ‘blame the women for not applying’.

    So my question to you, the world at large, is this: what can we do right now, or this week anyway, to get some women’s names on this list before we start to vet the CVs?

    Applications are still very definitely open, so anyone – male, female or other – who’d like to apply should see the original blog post for how to go about it.

  7. Job advert: Communications Manager

    Updated 4th March 2011. Recruiting has been extended, and a slightly edited version of this description (including new instructions on how to apply) is available at the Guardian Jobs website.

    mySociety Communications Manager

    Do you enjoy communicating through all the channels that the modern internet has to offer? Do you enjoy helping users as well as pitching to journalists and companies? Are you looking for a communications job with a greater sense of purpose? If so, mySociety’s new Communications Manager role could be for you.

    an old-fashioned communications dude

    Is this you?

    mySociety is a project of registered charity UK Citizens Online Democracy, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com. Our services had over 5 million unique visitors in 2010, but we believe that there are a lot more people who would benefit from what we do, if only we were better at communicating. The job of the new Communications Manager will be to help mySociety reach out to these potential beneficiaries, as well as to prospective commercial clients.

    The Communications Manager will be a new post at mySociety, funded by the Omidyar Network, with a 12 month contract in the first instance.  This is a home working position and the successful candidate can be located anywhere in the UK. Occasional UK travel will be required to meetings and events. Salary: £28-31k.

    Organisational Context

    mySociety has ten full time staff, and a wider community of energetic and creative volunteers. This is a newly created, full-time role as an employee of mySociety Ltd, reporting to the Head of Operations and Finance but working with everyone, including the volunteers.

    mySociety operates a number of not-for-profit websites, and carries out high quality software development on a commercial basis to support the charity. The key objectives of this role are:

    1. To drive public awareness and usage of our not-for-profit websites.
    2. To work with users of our not-for-profit websites to help them achieve their goals, whether on our sites or elsewhere.
    3. To drive awareness of our commercial sites and services, respectively building their traffic and generating commercial sales prospects.

    It is important to communicate that the position is a combination of a classic PR role with a more modern digital community management role: the successful candidate will need to feel as comfortable over quiet lunches with journalists as they are with Facebook’s ever-changing featureset.

    The focus of activities would be primarily within the UK, but will involve supporting our team’s international partnerships and projects. We have no fixed offices, and have team members working from home spread across the country who work and communicate primarily via the net. There are face-to-face meetups every week or two.

    Key Responsibilities and Deliverables

    1. Helping mySociety to make the most effective possible use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media, through a combination of authorial skills and analytics.
    2. Sourcing the materials for a monthly email newsletter, writing and delivering it, and processing click-through data to improve the next iteration.
    3. Working directly with users of our sites, especially FixMyStreet and FixMyTransport, to help them work together to achieve their goals.
    4. Blogging on mySociety’s site, and encouraging the rest of the organisation to blog and communicate more.
    5. Building relationships with journalists, and gaining media coverage of new launches and noteworthy events in the mySociety universe.
    6. Co-organising occasional events with mySociety’s Office Manager.
    7. Producing copy and coordinating design for commercial briefing documents, such as sales brochures.
    8. Managing our Google Adwords account.

    Person Specification

    Must have:

    • At least 2 years experience in a role that involved regular authoring of press releases and blog posts
    • At least 12 months involvement with some kind of predominantly online community
    • Graduate level spoken and written communications skills

    Desirable qualities:

    • Experience as a journalist
    • Experience of fighting campaigns, especially at a local level
    • Experience of monitoring performance of Google Adwords, Facebook adverts, email mailshots, postal mailshots or other kinds of marketing which can be improved through quantitative testing and iteration
    • Experience of both charitable and commercial PR
    • Pre-existing relationships with journalists and bloggers in a variety of sectors
    • Trusted reputation within at least one online social service that is issue specific (e.g. Mumsnet, Rightsnet, Ravelry)


  8. Job Advert: Developers

    This vacancy is now filled.

    How would you like to be a coder in an organisation that is as determined to make a difference in the world as it is to be a truly high quality, engineer-led software team?

    mySociety is that organisation. We’re a project of a registered charity, currently running award-winning civic and democratic websites like TheyWorkForYou.com and FixMyStreet.com, and we’re looking to grow our already-celebrated development team by several new members over the next six months.

    We’re looking for people with at least two years experience (professional or keen amateur) in at least one of Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, C++, Javascript or Adobe Flex, and who have ambitions to learn more languages in the future.

    We’re looking for developers willing to commit to full or mostly-full time positions (no freelancers, sorry) and who are up for a career change that will see them stay with us for a little while. You’ll get to work with volunteers, mix commercial and charitable projects, and travel far and wide. Plus, you can work from wherever you live (in the UK), and we pay salaries from £28k to £50k depending on skills.

    Most of all, we’re looking for coders who look at the services we have built so far and think “I wish I’d been on that project”. Projects you’ll likely be working on over the next few months include (but are not limited to):

    • A/B testing and conversion tracking of our charitable sites
    • Commercial spinoffs from FixMyStreet
    • Mapumental
    • Enhancements to TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow
    • Commercial development for clients

    And if you’ve any questions, please post them in the comments below so we can share the answers.

  9. Looking for Freelancers to Write and Update TheyWorkForYou Vote Analysis

    One of the most popular features on TheyWorkForYou is the plain English, non-judgemental vote analyses on MP pages that say things like “voted strongly against introducing a smoking ban“.  We call these ‘policies’, and they are authored by skilled people using the volunteer run PublicWhip website.

    Making each one of these policies is a painstaking task, requiring good knowledge of how the Parliamentary voting system works, good writing skills, patience, and the strength of character not to let your own views about the issues cloud the analysis. It is of utmost importance to both mySociety and our users that these policies are fair and trustworthy.

    Earlier this year we started to update the process by which we made new policies to make it even more rigorous, which we wrote about here. Marcus Fergusson and Stephen Young came onboard and did sterling work, but they have now moved on to greater things, and so we’re looking to recruit two to three new people to do this job. Uber volunteer Richard Taylor has been helping out recently, but this is really a job for two or more people.

    You might very well ask ‘why two people, given the work is part time?’. The answer is that we really want every new policy to be cross-checked by two different people every time it is added or amended. This is to help eliminate possible mistakes, and prevent any unconscious biases.

    We pay for this work on a piece work basis – £160 a time for a combination of one new policy authored, and one other policy double-checked. This money comes mainly from people making small donations, which I think helps keep everyone focussed on how important it is to get these right. We hope to add about two new policies a month, once the new team is up to speed.

    If you’d like to be considered, please email hello@mysociety.org with ‘mspolicies’ in the subject line. Applications close 22nd November 2010.

  10. Job Advert: Commercial Product Manager for Mapumental

    mySociety is looking for someone who loves building relationships, and who enjoys thinking about travel, property and what makes for a great day out.

    We are a non-profit group of staff and volunteers that builds websites that help people do things like find out how their politicians vote, or get broken street lights and potholes fixed in their road. We make most of our charitable money through commercial means, and to that end we’re setting up a spin-off called Mapumental Ltd that is building web mapping tools the likes of which have never been seen before. Watch this video to learn more.

    Mapumental’s underlying technology is now complete, and ready for user-facing products to be built on top. What we need is someone who can do the market research to work out what products we should build, and who can go out and sell them to clients of all shapes and sizes – from holidaymakers to property firms.

    Skills

    • Market analysis – to research what products we should and shouldn’t be building with Mapumental
    • Sales and marketing – to tell people authentic, convincing stories about how our products can help them, and sell the finished products
    • Good copywriting skills – and ability to work with designers to create marketing materials

    Experience

    • At least 12 months experience selling products or services, ideally to corporate clients.
    • Ideally, more than two years’ experience in product management, market research, or marketing
    • First degree in any subject
    • You’ll be able to tell us how you made tricky but successful marketing decisions

    Personal Qualities

    • Most important – you’ll need to be able to meet and collaborate with a diverse range of people, both colleagues and customers, in an amiable, confidence-inspiring manner
    • Preferably – an interest in maps and the internet.
    • You’ll have to be a self-starter who can work independently, and often in a location of your choosing
    • Enthusiasm for new things, new ideas, new businesses

    Location, Hours and Salary

    We can be flexible between a minimum of 3.5 days per week, up to full time. You can live and work anywhere in the UK, but your life will be easier if it is within a couple of hours of both London and Birmingham.

    We offer a salary of £33k+, and we are also offering a decent bonus tied to success at sales.

    Applications should be sent to hello@mysociety.org by noon of 13th September, with the tag msjob5  in the subject line. This is a re-advertisement of a previously advertised position, and previous applicants need not apply.