MySociety.org Launched to promote Socially-minded Software

MySociety.org is a charitable incubator for those who want to develop software to make society better, and for those who want to pay the bills for doing so. The person leading the new initiative is Tom Steinberg. Describing his motivation, he says: 'mySociety.org was founded in response to several pressures. The first was a feeling that there was some kind of systematic blockage to the creation of more cheap, highly effective projects like FaxYourMP. The second was the feeling that shouting at government wasn't going to change anything - we needed to demonstrate what can be achieved. And the last was a personal desire to be involved with building good projects instead of just talking about them.'

He points out that though Britain is a world leader in civic software with sites such as UpMyStreet, FaxYourMP.com, and TimeBank.org.uk, it is in a remarkably uncrowded field.

Companies don't produce these tools because there is no commercial benefit, while other sectors do not seem able to take advantage of what the internet is best at - applications that are cheap to produce, that do something people need and cost roughly the same no matter how many people are using them.

MySociety.org intends to bring together project ideas, enthusiastic developers and funders to produce cheap services with a demonstrable impact. Steinberg says that projects are only limited by the need to have clearly positive social outcomes, and to have costs that barely increase when more people use them. He hopes that all projects will be released under open source licences, to allow their code to be modified and improved by anyone willing to help.

Associated Link: Further details

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