mySociety, a nonprofit organization based in the UK that runs most of the best-known democracy and transparency websites in the UK, celebrates five years of working, building, and developing for the common good this month!

Who's mySociety?

A community of volunteers and (paid) open source coders with two missions:

The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to use the internet most efficiently to improve lives.

You may know them for projects including:

• TheyWorkForYou 
• WriteToThem 
• No 10 Downing Street Petitions Website
• FixMyStreet
• PledgeBank
• HearFromYourMP
• FreeOurBills

Most all of mySociety's projects are open source and you can find them in their repository.  You can learn more about mySociety's projects on the website here.

How did mySociety get started?

Five years ago, Tom Steinberg put into action some thoughts from James Crabtree and the rest started falling together.  In their words,

mySociety represents the crystallisation of a lot of widely shared thoughts and concerns about the problems facing democracy, government and technology in the UK at the moment. James Crabtree first gave the idea formal shape in an OpenDemocracy article, suggesting that the UK government should set up a civic hacking fund to do things like mySociety does now. Then Tom took the idea, gave it a polish, and set up mySociety outside of government (with a little help from about 50 people). Many of the core people in mySociety were hacking on projects that fitted into the vision (some long before there was a mySociety) and so we’re really a rich mix of influences.

But, what is you aren't in London?  Are you wondering if mySociety's information matters to you?  Here's what they think about it:

Yes! Whilst our home country is the UK, we do not see ourselves as limited to it in any way. We gladly speak to and work with people from outside the UK. People around the world can use and adopt our open source tools and services for use in their own countries. PledgeBank, for example, is a truly international project. We will consider developing projects based in other countries, if appropriate funding can be found.

You can learn more, get involved and contact mySociety to dig deeper into their work.

If you like open source, public information, mashups, online engagement, or edemocracy, or even just people-powered technology, join me in wishing mySociety a happy 5th birthday!