mySociety / Tony Bowden
Dom Omladine / 27.04 / 15:30
Tony is an international agitator for mysociety.org. His role is to stimulate groups and individuals to start similar transparency projects in their own countries. He’s been working as a mentor on technology and democracy projects, especially across Central and Eastern Europe. He’s been building websites since before Netscape existed, and founded several of Northern Ireland’s leading internet companies before relocating to Estonia in 2006.
Mysociety.org is a non-profit organisation founded in September 2003, and it took its founders a year to raise enough money to create and launch some of the best-known websites in the UK whose main focus is on spreading democracy and transparency of information online. Some of them are: WriteToThem, PledgeBank, HearFromYourMP, FixMyStreet, TheyWorkForYou, WhatDoTheyKnow. The basic idea of all of these projects is to give people power and a chance to change the world that surrounds them.
How is that possible?
After the Freedom of Information Act was passed in 2005, the founders at mysociety.org came up with an idea to create an online tool that would bring citizens closer to the public bodies and encourage them to be inquisitive and, therefore, become aware of what the UK government is doing. In 2008, they launched WhatDoTheyKnow, a website where everyone can ask a question about anything concerning the British laws, and actually get an answer from the public bodies. It functions as a public archive where all the requests and responses are being kept, which is one of the aims of this project.
