MySociety

I think, after some initial reserve about their first projects, it would be difficult for me to find fault in the work that MySociety have done recently.

Tom Coates on MySociety

WTF? Perhaps, just perhaps, if Coates had mentioned what were his initial reservations with MySociety’s earlier projects such as TheyWorkForYou or DowningStreetSays; or if he explained why his difficulty in finding fault in recent projects should interest us, then this comment of his might be less irritating. But no, all we have from Coates is a mention of his various mental states as if they were fascinating enough in themselves for the blogosphere to swoon.

I met MySociety’s Tom Steinberg up Scafell Pike once, just after I’d setup a site copying DowningStreetSays to cover the Welsh Assembly, needed because the Assembly’s website, especially back then, was so bloody awful. Some might call it synchronicity, I call it coincidence.

MySociety’s early efforts to make the content of political debate easily accessible, using web technology and blog-like features to encourage conversations, were well-intentioned, innovative, widely-admired, sometimes copied, and interesting. I still receive emails whenever my MP, Patrick Cormack speaks in Parliament. It’s interesting to me that he seems a traditional shires Tory and it might be very interesting, personally, to Coates that Cormack seems to have a quite strong bias against equal rights for gays.

So what would Coates’s reservations have been? No idea, he just had them, much as I might have flatulence.