Session

Democracy: A Hacker's Guide
Tom Steinberg, Director, mySociety

Track: Open Society
Date: Wednesday, 20 September 2006
Time: 10:00 - 10:40
Location: Upper Foyer

mySociety has built and run a series of non-partisan democractic web sites that help people do things like discover who their politicians are, persuade them to engage in conversations, and so on. These have had some expected and some entirely unexpected impacts on our users and directly on UK politicians.

In the process, we've built some great open source tools that have all sorts of wider applications. This talk will cover what we did, why, what sort of changes it is having in our political system, and how you can make it happen in your own country.