‘Comfortable Research’ by Joel Bedford (Creative Commons)

I (Tom, mySociety’s director) am planning to write a book over the next 6-12 months, which I hope will set out a mySocietyish vision for practical steps to a better democracy in the UK.

As I’ve got a lot of day to day mySociety-running to do, there’s no way I can take the time needed to do all the primary research for such a project myself. So this post is a job advert for an internship to help me with this project.

An ideal intern would have roughly this skillset:

• Experience as a researcher, preferably in history or politics
• A pretty good understanding of the Internet
• Great telephone skills for wheedling information out of people who need sweet talking
• Good information organising skills, to keep everything found in a nice, easy to use way
• Able to put in at least 2 days a week for at least two months, starting ASAP.
• A willingness to work with other researcher(s)

I’m not snobbish about academic qualifications, or even about type of training or degree, but I do need proof a candidate knows how to get off their own arse to find out interesting things. I’m also easy about age and location. If you know a smart 50-something investment banker who’s just been laid off, I’d be happy to talk to them.

It is an internship, not a paid job, although as with all mySociety volunteering posts it comes with free food, a chance to sleep on Francis’ sofa, the likelihood of meeting lots of fascinating and well connected people, plus all sorts of other perks (TBD).

If you know anyone who might be interested, please send them the link to this post. And even if you don’t, suggestions for how to spread the word about this ad are very welcome.

Are you the best coder you’ve ever met, or perhaps even the best you’ve ever heard of? Better than that, even? If so, you might just be good enough for us lift our weary mouse fingers to check out your CV.

NB Applicants with a sense of proportion, realism and modesty also warmly welcome.

The charitable project that built TheyWorkForYou, FixMyStreet and the 10 Downing Street e-petitions site is seeking a world-class web developer.

This is a rare opportunity for an outstanding individual to join a small team of paid developers and volunteers that represents the greatest concentration of non-partisan democratic and civic coding talent found anywhere.

Technical skills

• World-class skills in one or more of PHP, Perl, Python or Ruby
• Substantial expertise in open source operating systems, databases, and version control
• Experience of working in a team with other programmers, contributing to project architecture
• Experience of accessible, standards-based web design
• Fanatical obsession with usability and making users happy

Personal qualities

• Laziness, Impatience, Hubris
• Fascination with understanding how complex systems work, and satisfaction at mastering them quickly
• Self-starter, with the ability to manage own work and to work both at home, with colleagues, and with clients.
• ‘Completer-finisher’ personality, with track record of delivering projects to deadline
• Team player with strong communication skills
• Personal enthusiasm for mySociety’s goals, preferably manifested through actual web projects – see our FAQ for more details

Benefits and Salary

• Salary £33k+
• Opportunity to contribute to high-profile sites delivering real democratic and community benefits to citizens
• Substantial role working with major partners
• Opportunities to travel to political and media events in the UK and abroad
• mySociety is a virtual organisation, so hours and location are highly flexible
• Minimum 12 month commitment after probationary period

Submissions extended to 15th July 2009 looking for candidates willing to commence work by 1st September. Please send your application or any questions to tom@mysociety.org including the word msjob in the subject line.

Whew. It’s exciting times.

As you know, we’ve been looking for a new developer for a little while, and I’m pleased to say we’ve found one. We’re very picky, as we have lots of really convulted, diverse software amazing award winning websites to keep going.

Just as important as finding someone technically skilled, it’s important that they are motivated and excited about what mySociety is doing. If you’re hiring any programmer you should be looking for that, especially so for a small, nimble charity like us. We had lots of good applicants, and were sorry we could only afford to choose one.

Please welcome Angie Ahl! She lives in Cumbria, so keeping with our policy of having staff scattered to the four winds. I can see mountain climbing in my future. Angie runs a web design company working mainly in the film and music industries. I’ll try and persuade her to post here about what she gets up to with us.

Other things – there’s another one of our Disruptive Technology talks in London next Thursday. It’s by Jason Kitcat, who not only is head of technology at netmums.com, but also co-ordinated the Open Rights Group’s electronic voting trials observations earlier in the year. Read the fascinating report – there’s a bit where overall control of the Scottish Parliament literally hung off the edge of the page of an Excel spreadsheet. Sign up now to come and see Jason speak next week.

Speaking of the Open Rights Group, it is astonishingly two years since a PledgeBank pledge got them started with 1000 supporters. Danny O’Brien has written a fun summary [removed broken link; cannot find replacement] of what they’ve been up to. If they can do this, then what could you do with PledgeBank?

I’m still busy beavering away at the Facebook / PledgeBank integration. It all works now, but will take a bit more polishing to get just right. Matthew is, I think adding surveys to PledgeBank. So it finds out later if people have or have not done their pledge. Or is he updating to a new version of BoundaryLine at the moment, so our postcode lookup on WriteToThem and everywhere else gets better? Hard to keep track when he does so much at once.

Keith is upgrading our internal documentation, so new people at mySociety can learn how to keep things going. Heather is stalking all of America, finding people to use and promote PledgeBank. Tom is on a much deserved holiday, after seemingly a zillion meetings per day for months.

There’s lots of ongoing maintenance for all our sites. We’re lucky that large chunks of our customer support email are done by volunteers (thanks Anna, Louise, Tim and Tomski/James) and by Debbi (yay Debbi!). Much of this is routine – changing pledge text, updating council email addresses, giving MPs posting links for HearFromYourMP, putting new MP photos up on TheyWorkForYou etc. A lot of it is unique – handling new translations, answering questions from MPs and Lords about their voting record. I’ll let the others give some more examples of the kind of thing we answer.

Speaking of which, do you know any good web developers who would like to work for mySociety? If so, put them in touch.

Last weekend was an away weekend for the paid and voluntary group of hardworking souls that makes up mySociety.

One of the many, many things that came out of it was the need for a couple of extra paid people, at least on an experimental basis.

1. A world class open source web developer who can hold his own with the Irvings and Somervilles of this world. Design skills a big bonus.

2. Someone who can help mySociety generate cash for its charitable works through helping us sell spinoffs of our sites to companies or organisations who can benefit from them.

This is just an informal ask, not a recruiting round, so if either of these things interests you at all, or might interest people you know, please drop an email to me at tom@mysociety.org.

Lots has happened since I last posted, which was months ago, before Chris died.

Luckily for us, in the last few months Chris had only been working one day a week for us, so it hasn’t been as difficult in practical terms as it could have been. There were various mySociety things running in his flat, such as the WriteToThem fax server, which had to be set up quickly elsewhere.

We miss Chris’s expertise most days (only yesterday I was swearing at gnuplot). Matthew is twice as much for me to handle; he works so quickly, he has hard questions to ask at a ferocious rate that I can’t keep up with. I think before Chris used to handle most of them, so it was much easier for me.

I highly recommend Chris Lightfoot’s obituary by Martin Keegan. Also, Chris’s obituary on Last Word, which was on Radio 4 on 23rd March, is well worth listening to.

We have a few new members of staff.

Keith Garrett is working for us now, mainly tending our servers, but he’s also been working on the E Petitions site. He’s trying to bully us into documenting all our internal processes so it’s easier for new people.

Heather Cronk has started working for us in the US, evangelising PledgeBank. This is funded by the Omidyar Foundation. As well as getting the word out about PledgeBank in the states, this is extra good for us, as she’s forcing us to give PledgeBank the TLC that it deserves.

Deborah Kerr is now doing customer support for us part time. She’s been busy with Neighbourhood Fix-it which has had lots of traffic and attention the last few weeks.

OK, back to the present.

Last week Ben Campbell and I gave a seminar at Technology for a Small Nation in Llandudno. We split into two groups, I got people to add Google maps to an HTML page on their website, and Ben got people to call the TheyWorkForYou API from PHP. It went down well, very satisfying to do practical exercises, and answer all the niggling questions (how to install a testing webserver on Windows, how to use FTP) which are the real things that stop people doing what they want to do.

And Thursday? Just a reminder, unless you’re not apathetic, that there’s an election today.

The man responsible for the mySociety sites’ distinctive and ultra-usable look has just dumped his day job to become a full time member of the mySociety core development team. He’s going to be doing lots of good things to TheyWorkForYou, which has just come under the mySociety wing, as well as helping our swelling volunteer ranks to achieve the things they want to achieve. Come and help us and some of his usability mojo might just rub off 😉

We’re looking for someone to intern with us for what’s left of this grim grey summer. I’ve just sent this job description to the Interns network, but I thought I’d paste it here to see if it pops up in anyone’s RSS feeds. Come and work with us – you know you want to!

———–

mySociety is a charitable organisation which has built some of the best known political web tools in the country, such as ww.WriteToThem.com , an award winning service that lets anyone in the
UK write to any of their elected representatives easily and for free. We build politically neutral tools that give people simple but tangible benefits to the political and civic sides of their lives.

We are a virtual organisation which combines some paid developers with volunteer developers, moderators and designers, spread across the UK. We are seeking an intern to do non-technical publicity and partnership building work over this summer, mainly on two projects. The first is
the recently launched PledgeBank.com, and the second a service aiming to change the way in which people hear from their MPs (www.mySociety.org/ycml).

As a virtual organisation we have no fixed offices, and mostly work from our own homes. As such, being an intern with us would be a bit different – instead of a daily commute, we’d meet occasionally, often in London and sometimes in Cambridge. You need to have your own internet access and decent day-to-day computer skills, as we work and communicate almost exclusively over the Internet. There may also be opportunities to do work with our sister project TheyWorkForYou.com, the hugely popular annotated Hansard project.

We’re a flexible, easygoing organisation that doesn’t get out of bed very early. If you want to be involved with a different and increasingly important part of politics and the Westminster village, please get in touch.

CVs and covering emails to Tom Steinberg at interns@mysociety.org

mySociety is pleased to announce that it has contracted accessibility wunderkind Matthew Somerville on a part time basis. Matthew’s most famous for his accessible versions of the National Rail Enquiries and Odeon websites. He’s also been heavily involved behind the scenes with TheyWorkForYou. Matthew’s first task has been to start working on PledgeBank. We’ll have a sneak preview for you all soon

mySociety is looking for third and final core developer. We’re looking for a usability obsessed PHP developer – does this sound like anyone you know?