Chris Lightfoot

Chris Lightfoot (4 August 1978 – 11 February 2007) was an English scientist and political activist. He was the first developer, with Tom Steinberg, at e-democracy charity mySociety.

Death He had suffered from depression throughout his adult life.

Contributions to Internet He played an important role in the development of:

PledgeBank, which addresses the prisoner's dilemma for all sorts of social-good projects; YourHistoryHere.com — a site where people can annotate a map with their knowledge of the history of that place. Placeopedia — an online gazetteer that is a mashup of Google Maps and the English Wikipedia. TheyWorkForYou — tracks speeches and activities of Members of Parliament, including presenting an accessible version of Hansard WriteToThem.com — facilitates contacting elected representatives at all levels of UK government. HearFromYourMP.com — a site encouraging MPs to email their constituents. hassleme.co.uk — "Because your mother can't remind you of everything." DowningStreetSays.com — searchable text of the Prime Minister's Spokesman's briefings. Downing Street e-Petitions — a petitions website for 10 Downing Street. FixMyStreet — another map-based application facilitating citizens informing their local authority of problems needing their attention, such as broken streetlamps etc. vmail-sql — vmail-sql, a virtual email hosting system backed by MySQL Political Survey and — An attempt to generate a multi-axis political model based solely on principal components analysis of survey results, rather than preconceived axes. WhatDoTheyKnow is dedicated to Chris, who thought up the idea of automatically republishing email responses Mythic beasts (ISP), co-founder of the Cambridge based hosting ISP. He also did additional coding on the video game LittleBigPlanet, which was released a year after his death. The game was dedicated to his memory.