1 nomination from readers

• The people behind mySociety have worked hard over the past decade to create websites that provide day-to-day benefits to citizens in their interactions with government. In the past we have created sites such as WriteToThem.com, TheyWorkForYou.com and the Petitions site for 10 Downing Street. Our latest site is WhatDoTheyKnow.com, which provides an easy interface to send Freedom of Information requests to public authorities — a searchable, readable, Google-able, user-created archive of FOI requests and their responses.

  In addition, the site makes it possible for interested third parties to follow the progress of FOI requests — either by email or by RSS. Individuals may also subscribe to updates on search terms (so one might receive an email whenever a new request or response mentions "Parliament Square", for example), public authorities or individual requesters (who can sign up to site pseudonymously), in order to help users find others who are researching the same area of government so they can form groups to investigate or campaign together; users may email each other through a simple webform.

  One rather innovative aspect of the creation of the site is particularly worthy of note. Populating contact details for the FOI teams at so many public authorities was a massive, time consuming task. Rather than delay the launch of the public site beta whilst our small team did all the research to gather these details, on February 22, Tom Steinberg, mySociety's Chief Executive, emailed our supporters list with a link to a shared Google Spreadsheets document with a row for each public authority. Through the assistance of over 100 collaborators, 80% of these details were populated within the space of a weekend, later rising to 95%.

  A single interface to provide access to over 800 public authorities — so far; we have several keen volunteers helping widen our coverage — has proved relatively popular already, despite little publicity thusfar. In the first two months of public beta, 232 requests have been made, with most still awaiting a response and 41 requests have been wholly or partially successful. In April 2008, nearly 6000 unique visitors came to the site 1.5 times each, accessing an average of 15 pages each.

  Whilst the site is still very much in its infancy, we believe it has the potential to be an especially useful tool for helping to shine a light on British democracy in all its agencies. We pay taxes for government to provide all sorts of services, from healthcare through to national defence; some it does badly, some it does well. The more we find out about how government works, the better able we are to make suggestions to improve the things that are done badly, and to celebrate the things that are done well.

  Nominated by Owen Blacker, 18 May 2008