[open-government] DIY mySociety - helping international organisations build transparency websites

[Myfanwy Nixon]

Hi everyone,

Apologies in advance for cross-posting, if you see this message more than
once.

I work for mySociety.org - we build civic and democratic websites in the
UK, and, increasingly, internationally. Our sites range from
WhatDoTheyKnow.com (a site helping people to send Freedom of Information
requests) to TheyWorkForYou (our parliamentary monitoring site) and
FixMyStreet (helping people report problems like potholes in their local
area).

I thought members of this list would be interested in a number of new
resources we have recently launched under the banner DIY mySociety.

We’re often approached by people in other countries who want to set up
their own versions of mySociety’s websites - DIY mySociety is a way for us
to encourage this, and help as much as we can. At the same time, we want to
learn from other people’s experiences and improve our own ability to help
in countries which might have spectacularly different political landscapes
or civic frameworks to our own.

We’re approaching the DIY mySociety project in three, interconnected ways -
through Code, Documentation, and Community.

Code: This year, we’ve been putting real effort into modifying our
codebases. The aim is to make them simpler - by far - to install and run.
We’ve also included features that will help the international community,
like the ability to add translations.

In particular, we have been working on two complete web apps that let you
set up and run entire sites, based on two popular mySociety sites,
FixMyStreet and WhatDoTheyKnow. You can download everything you need to
make your own FixMyStreet website <http://code.fixmystreet.com/>, or you
can make your own Right-to-Know site with our Alaveteli
Platform<http://www.alaveteli.org/>
.

In addition, we’ve also started to develop components that can help people
with websites of all kinds. The most mature of these is MapIt, a system
which can greatly reduce the burden of coding geographical lookups for
political areas, councils, regions etc.

How-to Guides (for everyone): Naturally, a lot of questions arise when
people start to think about building an ambitious eDemocracy or civic
website. Sometimes, there are also questions which should be asked, but
don’t occur. We’ve started a process of creating simple guides to talk
people through all the considerations before they take the plunge. We’ve
tried as hard as we can to make them comprehensible for everyone, not just
people with a technological background.

If you’re interested, take a look at our guides to Getting Started with
Alaveteli <https://github.com/sebbacon/alaveteli/wiki/Getting-started>,
and Getting
Started with FixMyStreet
Platform<http://dl.dropbox.com/u/236762/The%20FixMyStreet%20Platform%20-%20DIY%20Guide%20v1.1.pdf>[PDF].

Community: We want people to be able to ask questions and tell us when they
hit problems. So, we’ve created a number of channels for conversation and
support.


   - The DIYmySociety blog <http://diy.mysociety.org/> We’ve set this up
   for international users of our code. It’s the place to get non-technical,
   non-jargony news about what software, guides and events we are planning.
   Regular posts with advice and news for people setting up their own sites -
   there are also several handy links in the sidebar.
   - DIYmySociety on Twitter <https://twitter.com/#%21/DIYmySociety> For
   quick updates, and conversation about any aspect of reusing our code.
   - The Alaveteli mailing
list<https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#%21forum/alaveteli-dev>Support
for anyone who wants to use our Alaveteli platform to create their
   own Right-to-Know website - or indeed is just thinking about the
   possibility.
   - The FixMyStreet Platform mailing
list<https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/fixmystreet>Useful
for anyone who’d like to build their own version of FixMyStreet.
   - The Components mailing
list<https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/components>The
place to go if you’re installing our Components, like MapIt - or just
   want to know more.


I hope that some of this will be of interest. Please do drop me a line
off-list if you’d like to know more. We’d also appreciate it if you spread
the word amongst your own communities, if this is something that would be
of use to them. Thanks for reading!

-- 
All the best,

Myf Nixon
Marketing and Communications Manager
mySociety
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