The Civic Hacking Fund

[Steiny]

As some of you may know, whilst I am a fanatical Desert Combat player by night, by day I'm a kind of Westminster policy nerd.

At the moment I'm 'between jobs', and have started to focus on an idea I've had for a while. At the moment the idea is called the Civic Hacking Fund, and it is basically the idea of setting up a fund to encourage and nurture socially focussed net projects in the UK.

Now, when I say 'socially focussed', that probably conjurs up images of the Oxfam website. This isn't what I mean, though. What I'm thinking of is highly and cheaply scaleable services such as www.faxyourmp.com , www.consume.net and www.upmystreet.com which have made a demonstrable positive impact, whilst remaining fundamentally just a bunch of scripts on a server.

Now, I'm posting this here because the project is at an early stage, and I'm looking for a few things.

1) People who know about getting money from charitible trusts, grant giving bodies, the government, or private sector companies.
2) Anyone who can suggest ways in which the idea could be improved to make it better, more effective, or more attractive.
3) Anyone who might have any contacts within organisations who might be able to help us, whether with money, funding, hosting, tech support, web design etc.
4) Highly skilled programmers who might be interested in competing for funding if we can get the fund off the ground. People who've already got a burning idea for a good project are especially welcome!

I know this isn't normal Barrysworld fodder, but I also know that you're a varied bunch. If you're interested, either respond here, or email me steiny@barrysworld.com

all the best,

Steiny/Tom

 

[Tom]

hey that faxurmp is pretty cool

 

[Bazerka]

First thing you need to do is change the title of the project - not many charities/businesses etc. are going to want to have much to do with anything that contains "hacking" in the title - especially if it's IT based

 

[Steiny]

Updated

Done! It's now the Civic Software Innovation Fund.

Any more thoughts?

 

[Will]

Steiny gets a mention on BBC News?

 

[Testin da Cable]

Called MySociety, it is the brainchild of Tom Steinberg, a friend of mine, but it is such an excellent idea that I had to write about it

ooh go for it Steiny!

 

[echo]

Woah, superstar! Nice one

 

[xane]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/33693.html

 

[Will]

I'm impressed. Journalist friends seem to be very useful.

 

[Testin da Cable]

good game Mr Steiny. seriously impressed to be honest.

 

[Summo]

Good stuff! Good luck, Mister Steinberg.

 

[Damini]

And some more BBC pimpage...