mySociety: Technical Tales

Matthew Somerville
Birmingham Linux User Group
21^st May 2009

mySociety

Founded in September 2003, with two missions:
- To be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives.
- To teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives.
A mixture of paid people and volunteers
As much code as possible released as Open Source; all servers and programming are Open Source

Posters
Translations
Dates
- 22nd June 2006
- september 30th
- 7/1/2006 (twice, once by an American, once by a Brit)
- 31 августа 2006
Successes

Open sourced code, mostly closed source data
Ordnance Survey
- BoundaryLine – constituency boundaries
- CodePoint – postcodes
- Actual maps themselves
Gaze, our public web gazeteer service, with a simple REST interface

Maps are complicated things. Take railway station locations, for example.

Map of Cheltenham, with an area to the left and up a bit from the station marked with a red circle

Map of Manchester, with an area to the left and up a bit from the station marked with a red circle

Map of Wolverhampton, with an area to the left and up a bit from the station marked with a red circle

It’s all open source, so help, bug reports and patches are very welcome. :-)