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Sharing technology to help civic and democratic projects… everywhere
Organisations all over the world are holding governments to account, challenging corruption, and demanding the right to transparency, and they are using digital technologies to do so.
Why should every organisation have to write their software from scratch? By sharing code, we can make things quicker and easier, freeing up time for the important things.
Poplus Components are useful, interactive bits of technology that you can slot right into your website or app.
Poplus is an open federation with members all over the world. Your code and skills can really help make a difference.
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Poplus Components are open source and free for anyone to use.
See what's available
Write and send messages to public figures
Map geographic points to administrative boundaries
Record, search and track bills as they change
Search, browse and share your transcripts
Match your users with location-based information
A lovely, easy-to-set-up transactional email server
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Poplus was a global network of organisations working in Civic Tech. Its aim was that members would make and share code which could empower citizens anywhere in the world.
In 2014, the UK organisation mySociety and the Chilean Fundación Ciudadano Intelligente conceived of Poplus, a global federation for Civic Tech. Members came together in a landmark conference in Santiago, and pledged to create code components that would be free and simple to use, for people anywhere in the world.
These components would help activists and organisations when building online tools that empower citizens. They’d take the hard work out of creating systems to track or contact politicians; to represent constituency boundaries, or to create transcripts of public meetings, to reference but a few of the components that went on to be created under the Poplus banner.
The concept behind Poplus has evolved.
Poplus was founded on the belief that wasted effort was going into the building of Civic Tech tools that were, essentially, being coded from scratch, in different countries, time and again. We wanted to prevent people from having to reinvent the wheel, so that they could get on with the important business of running their own sites.
While we still stand by this principle, we found that in reality, creating components to fit any and every type of legislature was more of a challenge than we’d anticipated. And we discovered another way that we could provide help to those organisations, activists and campaigners: by providing reliable political data.
mySociety is now contributing to the Democratic Commons, largely through the EveryPolitician project, which in turn is aiding the global repository of politician data on Wikidata.
By providing a reliable source of accurate data, we can remove one of the key challenges for Civic Tech projects. Find out more about mySociety’s projects here.