[open-government] mySociety's new $3.6M investment from Omidyar Network, seeks to grow Poplus civic tech collaboration

Wed Jan 21 17:36:27 UTC 2015

This is very exciting news for the civic technology and open
government movement.

You'll note that Tom Steinberg references Poplus in his post below.
Poplus website: http://bit.ly/poplus

In my view, Poplus represents the next generation of collaborative and
shared civic tech development. Think code "components" or Lego
building blocks you can use to adapt code across borders and different
political systems.

If you want to tap into mySociety's very global momentum _combined_
with other orgs like FCI in Chile, g0v in Taiwan, Sinar in Malaysia,
SimSim in Morocco, etc. and forward thinking
coders/companies/governments/etc., I strongly encourage you to join
the Poplus Google Group:
     http://bit.ly/poplusgroup
And join in our fresh round of introductions: http://bit.ly/poplusintros

E-Democracy is excited to further announce we've been commissioned by
mySociety to lead an effort to boost global Poplus participation via
online engagement. So join in!

Congrats mySociety! Thank you Omidyar Network.

Steven Clift
Poplus.org and E-Democracy.org

P.S. We just had a Poplus Meetup teleconference today with updates
spanning the global. See the raw notes and listen to the recording:
http://bit.ly/poplusmeetup  The next virtual Meetup is on Feb. 18:
http://bit.ly/poplusFeb2015calRSVP  (this will be geared toward people
*new* to Poplus, definitely join the online group for details:
http://bit.ly/poplusgroup )

See:
http://bit.ly/mysocomidyar

Omidyar Network backs mySociety

Posted by Tom Steinberg 21st January 2015

Much of mySociety’s work is only possible thanks to generous funding
from a number of philanthropic foundations.

Today, we are delighted to announce that we have been awarded a major
strategic investment from Omidyar Network totalling up to $3.6m over
three years.

This is the third time we’ve been supported by Omidyar Network, and
this represents the biggest investment we’ve ever had. Alongside
organisations like the Open Society Foundation, Google.org and the
Indigo Trust, Omidyar has been central in our transformation from a
tiny UK-focused non-profit, to a global social enterprise of nearly 30
staff.

Being supported by Omidyar Network means more than just vital
financial support. It means access to their amazing networks of other
investees, and advice and guidance from a range of sources. And, also
crucial for an organisation that seeks technical excellence, it means
the stamp of support from an organisation that ultimately traces its
DNA back to the giant internet successes that are eBay and Paypal.

What is the money for?

mySociety’s main ambition, over the next three years, is to help a
couple of dozen other organisations, spread around the world, to grow
popular citizen empowerment tools that are big enough to really matter
to the citizens of a wide range of countries. This means building and
growing tools that help people to check up on politicians, demand
information and answers, or report and track problems, in hugely
varying contexts.

In addition to this, we will continue to maintain and grow the network
of users of our technology and support the growing Poplus -
http://bit.ly/poplus - federation.

It’s a tough goal, and one that will require even more from the
organisations we partner with, than from our own colleagues. But the
very fact that we can even try to help groups at this scale, is
because Omidyar Network enables us to imagine it.

Steven Clift  -  Executive Director, E-Democracy