2016 in figures
26 human beings and one bot, crunching hundreds of thousands of lines of code and working with scores of organisations around the world.
It’s not all about the numbers, but they do give a good overview.
26 mySociety team members
Two fresh new developers, a sparkling sysadmin, and a splendid research associate joined the team in 2016.
6 new board members
Phew! Thanks to some expansion at the top, we can call on the expertise of 3 new trustees, and 3 new non-executive directors to help plot mySociety’s course.
44,705 code commits
Every time we press the button marked ‘commit’, we’re making changes and additions to our code. This figure’s wildly up on last year’s (15,723) because of the diligent little EveryPolitician Bot. About which, more later.
2,393 tickets closed
If you report a problem or suggest a feature, we open a ticket. Then we fix things. ‘Tickets closed’ is one highly satisfying measure of improvement.
58
Applications from prospective partners around the world.
10
New partner sites. From Liberia to Costa Rica, and plenty of countries between.
We wish we could work with every single one of the organisations who applied for our development help. Sadly, there are only so many hours in the day. Until that changes, our vibrant online communities and message groups are there to give you support.
11 research papers
With our research program, we’re building the evidence base for what works and why, and feeding that back into our own work and that of the Civic Tech sector.
Focus groups, Facebook ads, data investigations and on-the-ground visits help us ensure we’re actually making a difference.
This year, we evaluated citizen engagement and investigated civic initiatives in New Zealand and Australia.
But we also conducted targeted research in FOI, Democracy, and Better Cities – more details in those sections.
136 people attended TICTeC 2016
¡Viva la tecnologia cívica! Our annual conference on the Impacts of Civic Technology was held in Barcelona this year. Churros and civic tech are a great mix.
5 UK councils partnered with
Our FixMyStreet for Councils product is better by magnitudes, thanks to the councils who generously gave us their insights and experience.
![What do you like best about working at mySociety? Martin (Designer): No peer pressure to manage my snack intake! And what do you like least about working at mySociety? Martin: No peer pressure to manage my snack intake [sad face]](/assets/img/quote-snacks.png)
17 team member towns
There are 806.56 miles between us but we don’t let that stop us when it comes to working together.
20¼ pets owned by staff
Explosive growth on the pet front this year, and that’s not even counting Chris’ sourdough starters.
Tapirs this year’s in-joke
It’s still tapirs, can you believe it? This one will run and run.
Fun tapir fact: In Japan, the tapir shares its name with the folkloric Baku, a nightmare-devouring creature, made from parts left over after all the other animals had been created.