Grants:Project/mySociety/EveryPolitician/Profile

This project is funded by a Project Grant

Name

mySociety - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MySociety
mySociety is a UK-based charity that invents, and popularises, digital tools and services that enable citizens around the world to exert power over institutions and decision makers.
Founded in 2003, we are recognised as a global pioneer in the use of the internet to help citizens perform civic and democratic tasks - helping establish the Civic Technology sector in the process. We operate across four practice areas: Better Cities, Freedom of Information, Democracy, and Research to determine what creates impact and why.
Today we are one of the most active civic technology organisations in the world, supporting the work of partners in 44 countries, and operating services used by more than 10 million people every year.

Team

Tony Bowden - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Oravrattas
Tony has been with mySociety since 2009. He’s on the road a lot of the time, meeting with groups around the world on our behalf but for the last two years he’s been travelling a little less, because he’s busy leading the EveryPolitician project. EveryPolitician is Tony's brainchild coming from his deep understanding that it's impossible to create services to hold politicians to account if you're not starting with good quality, consistent data.
Before joining mySociety, Tony founded Blackstar, one of the UK's earliest online retailers; built an email search tool that the launch of Gmail made obsolete almost overnight; helped turn around Ireland’s oldest ISP in part by rewriting most of their systems to use Semantic MediaWiki; and worked on merging wikis with spreadsheets at Socialtext.

Chris Mytton - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Chrismytton
Chris joined mySociety as a developer in April 2013. He’s contributed to the Pombola and FixMyStreet projects, and is currently part of the EveryPolitician team.
Before joining mySociety, Chris worked as a freelancer and for various web development agencies.

Mark Longair - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Mhl20
Mark is a senior developer at mySociety, working on the Democracy team. He's worked on a wide variety of civic tech and parliamentary monitoring projects both as a volunteer and an employee of mySociety, including TheyWorkForYou, Pombola, YourNextRepresentative and Mapit. Prior working at mySociety, he was a researcher working on Drosophila neuroanatomy and developing image processing and annotation tools.

Zarino Zappia - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Zarino
Zarino has been a designer at mySociety since 2014. He contributes to all of the mySociety projects, including the partner projects like EveryPolitician. He’s based in Liverpool, UK.

Myf Nixon - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:SaffyMiso
Myf leads communications for the EveryPolitician/Wikidata project. Working for mySociety, she has a broad interest in Civic Technology and particularly in technologies that aid democracy, support Freedom of Information, and make government to citizen communication easier. She is based in Brighton, UK.

Mark Cridge - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Markcridge
Mark is Chief Executive of mySociety. He has enjoyed a diverse 20-year digital career including stints as COO at BERG, the technology and design consultancy, and as a senior advisor at Blue State Digital in London. He got his start in 1996 working for a small web design agency in Birmingham before setting up glue London, a digital advertising agency in 1999, going on to become global managing director of Isobar, following glue’s acquisition in 2005.

Past team members

Lucy Chambers - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Lucyfediachambers
Lucy has joined the EveryPolitician project as a Delivery Manager. She has a background in technology projects at NGOs. Her focus is on ways to break down overwhelming problems into actionable pieces and how to talk about technology so that it is both accessible and inviting. She worked for the Open Knowledge Foundation for many years on a variety of Open Data Projects, starting out as a community coordinator (working in many contexts closely with Wikimedians). She is currently freelance and writes about her learnings in the world of making tech projects accessible at TechtoHuman.com.

Luca Martinelli - https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Sannita_(mySociety)
Luca worked as Wikidata community manager for this project from Aug 1 to Sep 30, 2017. He's a Wikipedia user since Jan 15, 2006, and admin on Italian Wikipedia (since Jan 2007) and Wikidata (since Nov 2012). He was also involved in the Wikimedia Italia Board from Apr 2014 to Aug 2017, first as Secretary, and then as Project Coordinator.