There’s now some more space available for our birthday party in London tomorrow. Sign up here if you’re not already on a guest list.

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!

The next mySociety Manchester Meetup will be on Weds 20th August in the Briton’s Protection at 7:30 till 9ish.

Informally covering the range of remotely mySociety antics, and anything else we fancy 🙂

You don’t need to have done anything technical, a fresh approach is enough. If you can’t make it this month, just come along next time, dates and beer mat minutes will be posted to our mailing list.

Meet up with the some of the friends of mySociety in Manchester for a social evening in the pub in Manchester.

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The next mySociety Disruptive Tech Talk is a week today at 7.30pm at the London Knowledge Lab on Emerald St.

This time we have Steve Coast, founder of Open Street Map. When Open Street Map started a few years ago, I thought it would never take off. Earlier this year I accidentally went to their conference in Manchester, and was blown away. There’s a whole community of active people, collaboratively building a vector map of not just the whole country, but the whole world. And it is very usable now – for example, my home town of Cambridge is extremely high quality.

If you’re interested in mapping, or in how to organise communities that disrupt with technology, then come along. But please sign up as the last event was full to capacity! It’s free.

Last week we seemed to spend all week in London. Partly interviewing people, partly redesigning PledgeBank, partly plotting the overthrow of Parliament (joke), partly preparing for the election (thank god it didn’t happen – we’d be far too busy). We even did some general work, scurrying wifi out of the ICA and at one of our trustee’s offices.

As if that wasn’t enough, Stef gave the first of our disruptive technology talks, mainly about Farm Subsidy.org and UNDemocracy. It was interesting, engaging, fantastically attended, and turned into beer and sushi. Adam’s posted up a recording of the talk (scroll down in the comments). Make sure you come to the next one on 1st November.

mySociey will be holding another of our afternoons of chatting, hacking and drinking tea, this time in sunny Cambridge, on the 30th January.

We’ll be in CB2 from 1-7PM
http://www.cb2bistro.com/

And then after 7 at the Cambridge Blue pub
http://www.the-cambridgeblue.co.uk/

Come along. Bring your friends and your questions about the TheyWorkForYou API.

Please RSVP if you are coming, to help keep track of numbers. And feel free to forward this around friends who you think might be interested in mySociety, if only they could meet the lovely people 🙂

I seem to keep ending up in the North of England on work this Autumn, which is good as that’s where I’m from.

The Liverpool event on Friday went really well. Over the day, we probably had about 10 people altogether. It ended up more like a rolling seminar series – we all introduced and talked about what we were up to. Of course, Matthew on the TheyWorkForYou API, Tom on what mySociety doing these days. Also Julian (who does lots of the Parliament screen scraping that TheyWorkForYou depends on) talked about using Public Whip for collaborative research on Parliamentary votes. We spent a while talking about Fredom of Information with Steve Wood, who lives in Liverpool.

Ben (noii) told us about Tad Hirsch at MIT, who has done lots of interesting projects, which are inspiring for mySociety style project ideas. I’m sure we can do a lot with automatic routing of voice calls to volunteers, and with text message lists. Another Ben showed us an early version of some great work he is doing extracting information about newspapers and journalists. Thanks very much to Aidan from Blue Fountain who hosted us in the beautiful India building. We’ll be having two more events to promote the TheyWorkForYou API, and talk about other mySociety matters, later in the year. One in London, one somewhere else, suggestions welcome.

Earlier in September, all of us went to work together in the Lake District (as mentioned in my last post). It’s important to meet up for a solid chunk of time in the year when we spend most of it spread out across the Internet. Matthew took lots of photos, one of which is above (Tom, Louise, Matthew, Chris, Francis and Anna from left to right). It might look from the photo like we were brainstorming solutions to thorny problems, clearing back logs of customer support, writing code, and creating todo lists as long as your arm. But actually we just climbed mountains, hung out by tarns, drank beer and had a good time.

And next week I’m back off up North, to Betws-y-Coed in Wales this time. To give a talk to Bloc about TheyWorkForYou.

We cordially invite you to afternoon of mySociety related work, and then evening of mySociety related pubbing.

From 2-7PM on May 31st we’ll be at 123 Whitecross Street, London, in the UnLTD building. There’s tables and wifi, so bring a laptop.

From 7PM onwards we’ll be in the Masque Haunt, 168-172 Old Street.

OK, slightly more notice this time. (see here for description of last months event to know what this is all about)

Wednesday 26th

Rooms A and B, First Floor
UnLtd
123 Whitecross Street
Islington
London
EC1Y 8JJ

RSVP…