- Chris Lightfoot
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For the former English footballer and manager, see Chris Lightfoot (footballer).
Chris Lightfoot (1978–2007) was a leading and prolific online civic campaigner, a polymath and a scientist, and the first developer with Tom Steinberg at e-democracy charity mySociety.[1]
Contents
Family and early life
He was born in Dulwich in 1978.[1] His mother Prue was a journalist and his father Robert was a patent agent.[1] His older sister Steph taught him how to program the family's BBC Micro.[1]He used this knowledge of programming to produce a crater investigation model in the physics department at Westminster which was of an extremely high standard. This was part of a physics project in which he was awarded a 15 Merit - an outstanding and very rare full mark.
He attended Westminster School, where he was part of the team representing the school in the British Informatics Olympiad.[1]He began his undergraduate studies at Clare College, Cambridge focusing on Physics while studying a Natural Science Tripos.[1] He graduated with a Master's degree in 2000.[1]
Chris was one of the founders of Mythic Beasts, an ISP.[1]
Death
He had suffered from depression throughout his adult life.[1] He committed suicide on 11 February 2007.[1][2]
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 [3]— "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.
- tpop3d — a pop3 server
- vmail-sql — vmail-sql, a virtual email hosting system backed by MySQL
- Political Survey and Political Survey 2005 — An attempt to generate a multi-axis political model based solely on principal components analysis of survey results, rather than preconceived axes. [4]
- WhatDoTheyKnow is dedicated to Chris, who thought up the idea of automatically republishing email responses [5]
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j TimesOnline obituary
- ^ Obituary on the blog of friend and colleague Francis Irving
- ^ Lassally, Romi. "Hassle Me: Nagging 2.0" Huffington Post
- ^ Connor, Alan. The new left and right? "BBC News"
- ^ http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/credits
External links
Categories:- British scientists
- British activists
- Alumni of Clare College, Cambridge
- 1978 births
- 2007 deaths
- Activists who committed suicide
- Programmers who committed suicide
- MySociety
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