Disruptive Proactivity

Someone asked on the mySociety developers’ list about a way to show “how small groups of motivated people can often put the efforts of large (and probably well-meaning) organisations to shame”.

One answer to that is “how many people do you think it takes?” The core of PublicWhip was 2 people, TWFY was a core of 4, FYMP was about 5 people (if that many), mySociety is still only 5 people at the core. UNDemocracy is a core of just Julian. Directionlessgov was… erm… never mind, but is now looked after by just me. theWhitehouseSays.com was 1 person. Planning Alerts was one person.

Without necessarily resorting to Margaret Mead, how would you show it?

The 2006 WriteToThem.com (WTT) statistics are up (here) including a small look at who is using WTT based on the deprivation of where they live. It set out to answer one very specific question – “do deprived areas use WriteToThem less than average?”. It doesn’t answer, and doesn’t seek to answer, other questions. It doesn’t tell you much about who they are, and tells you nothing about the topics on which they write.

Contrary to naive expectations, users of WTT are not “rich people who have access to the internet” – they’re pretty much representative of everyone.