Tom Steinberg

Steinberg founded the charity mySociety in 2003 with a simple test: would an ordinary person with no expertise find this useful? Building on volunteer projects, it launched TheyWorkForYou, which turned Hansard into searchable pages for every MP with their speeches and voting records, and later WhatDoTheyKnow, which lets anyone send a freedom of information request and publishes the request and reply for everyone else to read. Hundreds of thousands of requests have been made through it. The model, credited to a whole team of volunteers and staff, has been copied by civic groups in dozens of countries.