About Mr. Tom Steinberg

Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of mySociety, a non-profit, open source organisation that runs many of the best-known democracy websites in the UK. These include the Parliamentary transparency website TheyWorkForYou and the somewhat self-explanatory FixMyStreet. mySociety's missions are to build websites which give people simple, tangible benefits in the democratic and community aspects of their lives, and which teach the public and voluntary sector how they can use technology better to help citizens.

By trade Tom was a policy analyst and general wonk who mainly cut his teeth at the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit from 2001 to 2003. He grew up in Oxford, and lives in Whitechapel, East London.

Tom's most recent publication is The Power of Information Review, co-authored with Ed Mayo and the Strategy Unit, launched in 2007. The Power of Information Review aimed to help the UK government understand the value it has locked in datasets, and the help that can be done for citizens by simply being willing to go into and answer questions in places like Netmums and MoneySavingExpert. Following the publicaton of economic analysis commisioned by the review, Tom is convinced of the urgent need for substantial reform in the provision of public sector information from organisations like the Ordnance Survey.