MySociety
UK-based civic technology charity
mySociety is a UK-based registered charity, previously named UK Citizens Online Democracy. It began as a UK-focused organisation with the aim of making online democracy tools for UK citizens. However, those tools were open source, so that the code could be (and soon was) redeployed in other countries.
History
mySociety was founded by Tom Steinberg in September 2003, and started activity after receiving a £250,000 grant in September 2004. Steinberg says that it was inspired by a collaboration with his then-flatmate James Crabtree which spawned Crabtree's article "Civic hacking: a new agenda for e-democracy".
mySociety went on to simplify and internationalise its code and through the now dormant Poplus project, encouraged others to share open source code that would minimise the amount of duplication in civic tech coding.
Like many non-profits, mySociety sustains itself with a mixture of grant funding and commercial work, providing software and development services to local government and other organisations.
In March 2015, Steinberg announced his decision to stand down as executive director of mySociety. In July of that year, Mark Cridge became the organisation's new CEO.
Projects
TheyWorkForYou is a parliamentary monitoring website which aims to make it easier for UK citizens to understand what is going on in Westminster as well as Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly. It also helps create accountability for UK politicians by publishing a complete archive of every word spoken in Parliament, along with a voting record and other details for each MP, past and present.
The public source identifies “MySociety” as uK-based civic technology charity. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around MySociety, UK-based and civic.
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Stable identifiers, scientific names and standards terminology offer the best bridge between this overview and specialist evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q10851773. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2004 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “MySociety” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.