Chris Lightfoot

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For the former English footballer and manager, see Chris Lightfoot (footballer).

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.[1]

Family and early life[]

He was born in Dulwich, England, 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] Lightfoot 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 — 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]
  • , 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.

References[]

  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c d e f g h i j The Times obituary (subscription required)
  2. ^ Obituary on the blog of friend and colleague Francis Irving
  3. ^ Lassally, Romi. "Hassle Me: Nagging 2.0" Huffington Post
  4. ^ Connor, Alan. The new left and right? "BBC News"
  5. ^ http://www.whatdotheyknow.com/help/credits

External links[]

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